 My name is Rebecca Papple. I work with the Elizabeth Sackler at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation. And we are here to present additional support to the already fantastic Sackler Center staff. And I'm thrilled that all of you are here today to be here for this panel discussion, the Fashioning Persona Collage, Gender and Feminism. I'm going to be quite recent, we have a lot of people today, but I just want to say a couple things. For the past six years, the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art has continued to fulfill its commitment to the past, present, and future of feminist art. Using its award-winning exhibition space and education spaces, the Sackler Center strives to raise awareness of feminism's cultural contributions, dialogue and debate about feminist art, theory and activism take place here in the Sackler Center Forum, and groundbreaking exhibitions are held in its feminist art and her story galleries. Currently in the galleries is Wengechi Mutu, a fantastic journey, and it really is an apt title. It's really fantastic. It's powerful and beautiful, and I hope every one of you, if you haven't seen it already, has a chance to view it afterwards. And given Wengechi's use of collage in her work, I'm particularly pleased the show is up for today's conversation. Elizabeth Sackler cannot be here today, unfortunately, but she asked me to express how delighted she is that the International Collage Center has put together this important conversation and that you were able to use this forum space so well. Before we begin, there are many thank yous that I just want to mention quickly. It's been a pleasure to work with the International Collage Center, and I'd like to thank Pavel Zubak, the founder and its artistic director, and Rachel Law, the director. Thank you also to the amazing artists on our panel today that have come here to speak. Genesis Breyer, Peoridge, Collette, and Kate Hardy, and of course, today's moderator, scholar, Judith Rotismbeck. And of course, again, a big thank you to Chesville Cuck at the Sackler Center for coordinating and curling us all. So that's all from me, and now I'd like to welcome Rachel Law. Absolutely fantastic. I'm the ICC founder of Pevel Zubak. I'd like to welcome you here today. The ICC is a nonprofit dedicated to exploring the art and culture of collage, producing exhibitions, programs, and events, alongside developing a lending and research collection and archive dedicated to collage. We're delighted to present this panel as part of our constructive conversation series, lectures and panels on collage and related topics, in partnership with other cultural institutions. We're thrilled to have the inaugural event with the Elizabeth Sackler Center for Feminist Arts, and we'd like to thank Dr. Elizabeth Sackler, Rebecca Taffel, and Jess Wilcox for their enthusiastic support in developing and hosting this event. The panel was developed to celebrate collage's power for feminist history and its continued use as a tool by contemporary artists who use collage strategies for creative self-fashioning and artists' use of the constructed form of this collage to question the fixity, not just of the image, but of identity. We're honored to have three incredible and trailblazing artists with us today to discuss this topic, Lett, Genesis Brea Priart, and Kate Hardy. We're also delighted to have our historian and critic, Judith Rodenbeck, as moderator. Judith was crucial in developing the panel, our historian, critic, and scholar at Sarah Lawrence College. She has special interests in technology and feminist theory, and the author of Radical Prototypes, Alan Caprao, and the invention of happenings, and co-author of Experiments in the Everyday, Alan Caprao, and Robert Watts Events, Objects and Documents. She's a contributor to Castlevox for the Guggenheim Museum, the American Society, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and serial publications such as Art Forum, Grey Room, and October, amongst others. She is editor-in-chief of the Art Journal from 2006 to 2009, and recipient of the 2009 Creative Capital Warbubble Foundation Arts Writers Grant. So, I'd like to hand you over to Judith now, who will introduce the rest of our panelists. And again, thank you all for coming. I hope you enjoy the discussions. I'd like to start also with thanks to the Sackler Center, especially to Jess Wilcox and to Katherine Morris for helping us pull this together. Obviously, to the International Center for Collage, Pavel Zabuck, and Rachel Law, and especially to the Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation for making the event possible. And thank you, Rebecca, for that introduction. So, the way things are going to proceed is the following. I'm going to be relatively casual about this, and I will try to get out of the way, because these three people are far more interesting than I am. What I'm going to do is give a very brief kind of framing set of remarks about collage and then some very short introductions sketches, really, of each of these artists. And then Janice, Colette, and Kate will each present for about 15 minutes an overview of aspects of their projects, let's say. Including, I think we have a couple of video clips, and hopefully they will work. So, cross your fingers. And then I may ask a few framing questions for a conversation, but basically this is for you three to have a chance to talk to one another and to talk to the audience. All right. So, I'll start by noting that collage has been called by some critics the single most revolutionary formal innovation in artistic representation in the 20th century. And I want to just suggest some of the ways in which we might think about it. Collage is disruptive. It is formally disruptive of the clean and unified surface. It's materially disruptive of that unified surface. In as much as it is disruptive, it is also a disruption of hierarchy. And as I'm sort of tossing out these ideas, one might also think in what senses and respects are these notions, these formal properties, and then eventually these political properties connected to what we might call a feminist project. Collage relies upon a shock effect. That is the disruption of that unified surface produces a shock effect in certain critics. Writing is that shock effect has been discussed as the effect of a kind of bullet through culture. So, we want to think about that too. Collage produces a narrative introduction in the steady flow of traditional representational schemes. Now, these are formal aspects of collage, but I'll put it to you that these all have political resonance. In fact, they are political gestures. That is collage disrupts the seamless flow of a straightforward ideology, however you take that ideology to frame itself. Collage is the bringing of the outside and the inside, the inside into the outside, the undomesticating of the domestic, perhaps the redomesticating of the undomesticated. I want to lay out a very short, radically schematic, embarrassingly schematic sequence of precedents or at least cognates that can help one think about how these principles operate. From the early Dada work of Hanahok through some of the work visible in the galleries next door by Wangichi Muktu that make use of these disruptive techniques, these each have certain kinds of strategies to the public interventions of an artist like Martha Rosler. Those all exist on the relatively flat plane thinking about collage as an essentially wall-based object or in the case of Rosler, a print distributed object. In terms of performance, collage in the West has a history that at least goes back to something like Four Saints and Three Acts by Gertrude Stein, a collage text that allows for that performance to produce history in a sense, to produce a kind of long expanse and a very particular kind of community. It's a play that revolves around the recuperation of the figure of Susan B. Anthony, casting her as a kind of saint. To the collage techniques of a performance group like, for example, the Worcester Group, more closely related to theater. Finally, I want to think about collage in relation to the very notion of constructing a self, which is part of what our panel is addressing today. And in particular, what comes to mind for me is the data artist Tristan Zara's instructions for making a self-portrait. That is, to make a self-portrait, says Tristan Zara, you take a piece of newspaper, cut it up, shake those little parts and pull them out at random and the resulting column is a portrait of you. Collage demands anti-patriarchy as a kind of form. That is, it's a kind of anti-form. It demands a kind of radical theatricality. It disrupts the regulatory guise of the quotidian for something new in that shock effect. In so doing, radicalized collage allows not only profound imagery but profound behaviors and in that finding of behaviors, the indication of the restrictive qualities of those behaviors. Collage has a deliberate liminality to transition mode from one place to another place. So I want to think in the context of this panel, and I hope you'll get there about issues that have to do with things like individual versus collective practices, collaborative practices, what it is to build a community or communities, what those might be, what it is to disrupt a community, how we understand identity. We might toss out the word authenticity, but we might just say that now and not deal with it further down the road. I'll just let it sit and fester a little bit. Identities and or persona, how persona operate in the world. What is the sightedness of collage as a performed practice and as a lived practice? What is collage's relation to the nomadic? And finally, the relation, particularly in the context of the practice of these three artists, between what I think is often simplistically termed a sort of art life practice and issues of autobiography, issues of narration and self-narration, and finally issues of mortality. What I'm suggesting is that collage produces unconventional notions of community. And I'm going to stop my remarks there, introduce our three panelists very briefly and then I'll turn it over to you. So those are just some framing thoughts for how we'll proceed with our conversation. Today we have with us Genesis Breyer-Pioreg, who is a... I'm glad for everybody. Brunier. And Kate Hardy. This is kind of an amazing confat, really. Just if you don't know. So I'll start with a very quick rapid sketch of their careers and then we'll look at what you have. So Genesis should need no introduction, however. Here we go. It's just completed the first major solo, I guess we could call it, quasi-solo, showed the Warhol Museum this September. Genesis' career was quasi-launched in 1969 with the co-founding of a, I would call it a sort of radical performance poetry group, Kuhn Transmissions in the UK. In the early 1970s, Genesis met William Burroughs and Brian Geisen and began exploring the cut-up technique among other kinds of explorations that I'm sure we're going to hear about. She was a co-founder in the early 1970s of the band Slash Performance Group, Throbbing Bristle and a pioneer in industrial music, sliding from there in 1981 to co-founding band Slash Performance Group Psychic TV. In the early 1990s, Genesis began a long-term collaboration with Lady J. Breyer in which the cut-up technique was taken to apply to the very notion of discrete identities. And in that exploration, as I think we're going to hear, the two of them together developed a concept of the pandrogen. And that concept takes up what we might call painterly approach to the body and to identity. Colette Lumière began her career in the early 1970s and we're going to see some amazing images of early street art, which very rapidly expanded into elaborate environmentally-scaled collage performance, including sleeping works, sleeping works inside constructed environments. It's called the dream... You'll tell us. That also expanded into the space of what we might call public interventions that took place at such downtown venues as Dancerteria, but uptown venues like the Whitney, the Guggenheim, and eventually the Venice Biennale. She has inhabited a variety of personae ranging from Mata Hari to the Countess Rickenbach. She's also staged her own funeral, which we're also going to talk about. But she lived through it. In a new persona. Kate Hardy is a denizen of today's downtown performance, I would say, seen. And has been exploring since the 1980s the performative nature of identity, which she takes up to be her material. Coming out of Emilio shaped by post-punk, by riot girls, and by a certain thinking through of the fluidity of identity, her practice also has spread out not only from performance to spoken word projects, to the production of zines, print culture, sort of para-tactical fashion shows. That word. That's good, right? I've got to break that down. Yeah. That's what it was. That's part of what you've been doing. Para-tactical. Para-tactical fashion. So we're very, very lucky to have all three here at the same time in the same room. And I will, without further ado, turn the mics over to Genesis. Just before we began, we should say, the only reason we started doing colleges was because we got beaten up at school all the time. And the only way to escape lunchtime to get beaten up was to become one of the school librarians. And it was during that time in the 60s putting books away that we found the Dadaists and the Surrealists, and particularly were inspired by Max Ernst. So thank you, bullies. You've given me a lifetime's work. Oh, they're not their first ones. Thanks, Ben. We've been really sick this week, so we've got our galleries to put together the list based on what we want. The ones that we were going to show you first aren't there, but what they were was old engravings. And then we got interested in the stations of the cross and the way that it was so important in churches and worship and organized religion. And so we decided to deconstruct that by photographing a model in a leather jockstrap, a female model, biologically female, with a packed jockstrap. So it was a hermaphroditic image. And then we had her do all the different positions of Jesus minus the cross. And then we took the illustrations to Heaven and Hell and created collages from that in black and white. So we began basically emulating to a degree the origins of collage. We immediately wanted to break down the story or to create a story, to not just create a world, but to also have a story in it as well. We even experimented with yoga holding the different positions of Christ for as long as physically possible to see if we had any interesting out-of-body experiences or spiritual revelations, but we didn't. But we tried it. And from there we went on very privately for 30 years to collage without telling anyone or showing anyone. And as they developed, they, we found out, well, first as we were told, we met boroughs and guys in who both introduced me to cut-ups. And that was how industrial music began, cutting up music to create something new regardless of skill. So nobody could play. We didn't have a drummer because there were always a drummer. And then we just experimented, built our own equipment and discovered a sound that now is a global phenomenon ever since. So cutting things up and reassembling them can, as we say, create cultural engineering. You can literally affect global culture with a very few people who are dedicated and passionate. That's very important. The other thing that's important in this context for me is that we've always worked in communities and networks. During the 80s, we set up a quasi-magical anti-cult, the temple of psychic youth, and eventually had 10,000 people involved, worldwide, who would all do a sexual, magical ritual on the 23rd of the month, 2323 minutes. Which is an amazing experiment. Sometimes we would all have the same desire to make something happen, sometimes personal ones. But the idea of 10,000 orgasms coordinated through time zones at the same time is quite a phenomena. That was how we ended up being thrown out of England. They took it very seriously and decided it must be satanic because they didn't understand. And so, while we were away in Kathmandu doing soup kitchens for the Tibetans, my house was raided by a Scotland yard, and all my work, all my photos, all my videos filled with burrows that had not been seen were all destroyed by Scotland yard. And we weren't allowed back to Britain for seven years. So it has impact. These are actually, in a way, going backwards in time. But as was mentioned, we met Lady J in 93 in New York. And the first day we met, there was this instant, you are my ultimate being, total love, unconditional love. And then the very first gesture that J made that night was to dress me in her clothes and decorate what we had down the dreadlocks. And we thought, that's interesting. And she said, you aren't really a boy or a girl. And I don't feel like a boy or a girl. In fact, the human body is really uncomfortable to me because it has so many cultural connections, so many ways of suppressing individuality, suppressing people's innate creativity and destroying their hope, ultimately. So that's when we began to really think about that. These pictures are photographic collages, as you can tell, and they're called snowflakes. These were later images, and they're actually about 12 by 8 feet on plexi. And we used to take each other's pictures and thousands of polaroids and do little films. And so, for some reason, that's... And then we worked through the idea of the Divine Hermaphrodite. If we didn't want to be told by society what we were, who we were, what gender we were, who we were supposed to be, who we were supposed to become, then where would that lead us? One night we came back from Europe, went to the back garden, and there were all these worms on the top of the soil and they were all making love to themselves. And that's what those worms are there. And the rose actually fell off a tree, it wasn't a place. And then we started thinking about mouths as vaginas that speak, and it's a vagina dentator. So these images are collages of that, those sorts of photographs. During the 80s we discovered somebody called Austin Osmond Spear who used to create automatic drawings, do incredible paintings, but also charge them. And ultimately that meant spilling his semen onto them. And as he did that, he had something in mind. He would write in his own alphabet the ultimate desire that he needed to have happened at that time. And then create the work as a magical act to make something happen. And that really resonated too because it went back right to the beginning, the shaman, the days when prehistoric humanity didn't know the sun would come up again, didn't know there would be another winter, didn't even have a concept of linear time. And linear time was discovered, of course, by women. So there's a tradition with the shaman of doing drawings, sand paintings by the Native Americans, and in Tibet too, and then destroying them. But to make things happen, to change the world, hopefully for the better. And so we started to incorporate that into our colleges all through the 80s. And these are some of those. They would only be made or affected or added to on the 23rd of the month. So some took months, years to be complete. And every time we worked on them we did rituals and kept on focusing on what was supposed to happen with the sigil, as it's called. And these are all from that series. This one is interesting to mention because in the top right-hand corner is an old postcard of Brighton, the south of England. And in the left is the palatial brothel of one of the kings and princes of England, also in Brighton. And most of the photographs, as you can see, were actually, and usually are taken by us whenever possible. We wanted to leave London because we had two children and we wanted to move to Brighton. We didn't have any money, so we did this sigil. And then a friend said, I want to move to Brighton. Would you like to move with me? And we said yes. And when we found the house, we wanted it looked exactly like that in the right-hand side, exactly like that. It was quite incredible. But by then we had to say, of course, the off-course factor, there are amazing things going on all the time that we don't realize because we've been numbed by the way that culture works. This one was for Derek Jarman specifically. He's down in the left corner and he was going blind from HIV-AIDS. And he said to me, would you do me one of your magical sigils, Jen, to help me finish this film before I go blind? So we said yes, of course. And there's Derek. Obviously there was a bloodletting, a healing. There's a tattoo of my back with the completion tattoo of the tarot cards from the Thoth Deck. Filled with pins to make me really aware of completion. And God bless him. Derek finished the film. And it was beautiful. And we'd known Derek since the 60s. So cars doesn't just have to be imagery, although we always see it as something that allows you to create worlds that would otherwise not exist, concepts that could not exist any other way. Burroughs used to say to me, let's cut it up and see what it really says. And he was right. So these are some of the different magical, intentional pieces. Pandrogyny. As we developed our relationship because we stayed together from that day, myself and Jay started thinking about something as it said to me. He said, where does control lie? How can it be short-circuited? And both of us had grown up resentful of having a specific gender and having bodies that didn't always do what we wanted. So we were thinking about this and we thought maybe it's DNA. DNA is a recording going back to when we were all slime mold. So from that point to when you're gestated and then born into this so-called world, we've already got the history of humanity inside you. And that's reinforced by the way the fetus grows. It goes from being single-celled, double-celled slime mold to being a little tiny amphibian and then a lizard and eventually a monkey and then one of us. So we thought, how do you break that? How do we break this prison of DNA? How do we deny its power so that we can say, this is who we are. This is what we want to be. We don't care about what's expected, not even genetically. And so we began to wear the same clothes, to wear the same makeup, the same hair and then to start getting surgeries, the first one being a vasectomy to say, that's it, DNA. You are no longer part of my life. And as we cut ourselves up and mimicked our behaviors, we got more and more obsessed with not being either or the either or universe. The male, female, black, white, positive, negative, that didn't seem in any way constructive. There should be what we used to call the genius factor in everyone. Everybody is capable of amazing things, but there's not that much encouragement around us. We grow up, we're born and we're told from the beginning through the people around us, parents, relatives, their expectations of what we'll be. We hear it when we're in the womb and it carries on around you, peer groups, education, society. And we said no. That short circuit there. And we finally decided that one way we could make a visible statement to the world that we were seriously committed to trying to find out the absolute fluidity of identity by trying to look as two halves of one. In other words, being each other's half, that's why we say we. Lady J dropped her body, as she used to call it, a few years ago, in October 2007. And she now represents us in a material dimension, but she still represents the pandrachine there. And we still represent the pandrachine here and both of us are that pandrachine. So we now exist in two worlds. One that seems to be physical and one that seems to be invisible. But we've had some interesting experiences with that. We'll just show you some more collages. This is just... One thing we should say is, all we ever use are scissors and stick glue. It's a matter of pride. To always find ways to create these collages just by precision and focus. Some of these are simple collages from sketchbooks. We kind of look at those as ways to keep remembering the world is fluid, is mutable, can be changed any time you want. As Jay says, why wake up and be the same person you were yesterday? Why not be someone else? We're going to go through that one before. That was a money wish. We were in the middle of a court case suing Rick Rubin and the Fireman's Fund, Insurance Fund, after we'd been in intensive care after a fire. And so we did this sigil and we borrowed $4,000 and stacked them up and took Polaroids and wished for money and a positive result from the court case. It went to the Supreme Civil Court of California in a two-week trial by jury and we won. We won $1.6 million. So don't take these things lightly. But do remember who gets there. The lawyers. We actually only received about $500,000, which is still fantastic. And with that we thought, there's two things we could do buy a house, get a car, flounce around the world, or we can do whatever we want for at least ten years and never have to work or think of any restrictions. So that's what we chose. And one of the first things we did after the sec to me was to start changing our faces to be more like each other. Sorry. Lady J got her nose done to be like mine. Underneath her eyes changed to be like mine. A chin in plant, cheek in plants. We just had cheek in plants to look like her. Got tattoos of her beauty marks on my face. Under my eyebrows, her eyebrows tattooed. And then we thought, this isn't enough. This is just like a mirror image. That's great because we are one. But let's go further. So on Valentine's Day, 2003, we got match and breast implants. And it was so liberating for her. We woke up in the post op room from the anesthetics holding hands and looked down and the first words we spoke were these are our angelic bodies but angels don't have belly buttons. Now we asked the doctors, can you get rid of the belly buttons? And they said, not yet. We're still waiting for that breakthrough. But what happened was that people at first thought it was about changing gender but it wasn't about changing gender. For us, it was creating a third being, not even a gender, a chosen identity. One made from two, a unifying instead of a disrupting, separating, polarizing effect. And we stood as a flag in a sense daring the world to tell us we were wrong. And more revelations come when these things happen, when you push yourself like that and you start to be perceived as both genders. You're liberated to think about what else? Jay started saying, well, why do we need to have skin? Why can't we have fur? Once you realize the human body is just a cheap, mortal suitcase that, as Timothy Leary said, is there to carry around the brain. It gives the brain mobility. It gives you the opportunity to see amazing things. And who is the you you talk to in your mind when you're discussing things in your head? It's your thoughts, it's your brain patterns, it's your conditionings, it's your rebellions. It's not the body. The body isn't you. The body is just a container. And as soon as people learn it's not sacred and it's not specific and doesn't have to be. And we start thinking of inclusiveness then we can start looking at culturally engineering the species, changing the species. We personally would think it would be wonderful to have a human species that'd divine hermaphrodites but also just of strange creatures. And is it working the film? Did anyone find out if it worked? We've been having problems with the film. Who do you think is going to do it? Even if it's out of sync, leave it here. We wanted Lady J to speak to you tonight, today. And we made this video about eight years ago just before she died. And it reappeared on a friend's computer last week. Is the final war a jigsaw? A war to repossess yourself? Yeah, we've done a lot of anti-queen ones. That one's called the mad hat and these are where we started doing that. But this is the last one. She was lying down asleep in this little white dress and didn't know that it had ridden up and was wearing these bright red panties. And we had that lying around with just the word perfect written underneath. And then we rushed to put something into an exhibition called Valentine's Day. And out of nowhere, click. We just flipped it around four ways. And this is called My Funny Valentine. So it just shows you, you never know where you can go. The more you chop things up and reassemble them and keep doing it year after year. We once asked burros, this is the last one, once asked burros, do you still do cut-ups all the time? We do books and he said, really, because my brain's mutated, it just doesn't matter. And that's something that we found has happened with images. They assemble themselves just from nowhere, from the deep brain. They're just milling around and all of a sudden they'll tell me, this is what we're meant to be. So they change themselves. It's a very fascinating world. There's so much material to cover. I'm not going to do this to you. So I think we're going to play a short documentary, like actually a trailer of a documentary that was done in 1992, when I already had a long career. And then I'll fill in some slides of missing and then I can always answer questions, because there's a lot of material. I'm not the kind of artist that wakes up at 8 and leaves my studio in paints and leaves the studio at 5 and goes on to normal life. That's never been my way of working. I live and then I make my art and I'm a bit of a to lose the track. I need to absorb a lot out of life. I go out at night, I love to dress up and I also love to just work and just look like a bag lady doing the day sometimes and just get myself all full of paint and sort of making a fantasy at night and during the day. Well, in the day it's a fantasy too, but it's reality, that's the point. It's not a fantasy. That's the thing I like to bring out in my work, because it is about, in a way, it's about miracles and magic and it's very, I hope it's spiritual, but it's real. And I'm always trying to make people see that magical things are real. Colette is a visionary artist. Her work is intensely personal, yet very public at the same time. For over 20 years, she has baffled critics in the art world with her wide variety of art objects and innovative use of location and space. Perhaps best known for her environments, she creates haunting, lyrical spaces which hide, reflect and showcase her all at once. Colette uses soft, delicate fabrics, found objects and paint and transforms every detail of her environment into an otherworldly layer. Her street works, window display tableaus and performances have given her a notoriety few artists enjoy. At home in new wave clubs, as well as major museums, Colette builds work based upon several major themes. Seduction, dreaming, sleeping, death, identity, and the female form and persona. Colette transforms herself into other personas like Justine. These personas consist of complex ideas given form by various characters. Justine and others challenge our assumptions about art as well as the role of women both in art and society. Well, she intersects two traditions. The creation of the artist persona be it Joseph Boris or Andy Warhol or the creation of that persona becomes fully inseparable from the artwork. A more recent example would be McDermott and McGuff, Jeff Koons. Also in that the fact that she functions anachronistically drawing things from various times in history from various periods and seems to have taken apart an idea of a sequential narrative history of effective progress. That is one of the sort of fundamental sort of postmodern tenets. And also the other thing is the separation of art and life. She's really a source in a way. She used photography and ripped up photographs before other people did. She used herself as a feminist, used herself, her persona, her body. Long time before Cindy Sherman for instance and many other artists. So art historically, she's very much of a source in the 70s for what happened in the 80s. I'm trying to think how I can contribute to the theme which is collage, feminism and I guess to my work and I can say that I started as a painter but almost simultaneously wanted to take art out of the canvas and I started creating these inner sculptures where I became part of it. Oh, I better show you some pictures. Well the first one, how do I go back, do you know? The arrows. Yeah, that's the right arrow. That just shows you one of the many street works I did in the 70s and I always performed them as rituals usually in the early morning hours because I thought those hours were magical plus I would avoid the police. Hopefully, hopefully. Not always. Soon after that, actually almost at the same time the slides are out of order a little bit I'll explain and maybe a few are missing so I'll fill in. This is moving forward. The image that was used to advertise this panel was of myself in my living environment which was an artwork that kept transforming itself and I transformed myself with it. It was like a second skin and one could say that my whole life and my space was a huge collage and within that collage I produced artworks whether they were frescoes almost what would be frescoes in a monument where I would save fragments. I would make photo works I would work with the photographs and I think Peter sells in the documentary I wish they elaborated more on what it said because he said a lot of more important things that pertain particularly to the values collage. But anyway, back to this image here it's 1975, it was in a place called the Ideal Warehouse next to the class tower and there was a very innovative space alternative space, the London Heights ran and it was an installation where I slept with Musac I incorporated sound in a lot of my rooms and here projections and it was called If It Takes Forever I Will Wait For You and the funny thing is after the opening there were hardly any audience there and I was there every day and I think I had one person who had a loft next door who was a filmmaker and he would come and watch me and that made, it didn't matter I had to do what I had to do and anyway, so it's one of many of the 70's works back to the environment because well, okay, we'll do it in disorder this one is the Paris Biennale, 77 the title Let Them Eat Take I had already been quite well known for pieces I had done that were similar I would create a landscape and became part of it a big inspiration was the chameleon landing in an environment 1973, this is going back my early career and this is the room of a gallery where the gallerist actually allowed me to totally destroy his office so I could create an environment and it was called a transformation of the sleeping gypsy without the lion usually, well in this picture I'm not sleeping for the photograph but I would be sleeping when people came in and one of the very important aspects of these rooms which were often misunderstood at the beginning as my work was actually mostly a lot like a feminist which is ironic, I will explain that later is there was a very, you know people saw the sensual aspect of it and was often criticized because of it but for me the main thing was the transformative aspect of it entering these rooms would put you in a different state and I can't explain that by showing you the image but I can tell you and hopefully I can make a room soon and you could experience that I'm getting hydrated I knew it would rain and I don't think I'm still a club in your story I hope you don't want me to have a sex change you have a needle anyway become a lizard no, no basically pull up oh, I see, no, no there has to be better way okay so now we move forward in the 70s I created these rooms and they were pretty well known for creating them often I would be naked in the room which again got the wrong attention from people and opened me to criticism but it was the idea of returning to the room in a way and just well I consider myself a visionary so right there I'm not very good with words I like art to talk through symbols the symbols of art and my search was like trying to understand the invisible through making art but by 78 I was pretty well known and I was really continuing to create this installation I already had a show at the Whitney I showed works at the Whitney before that at the Museum of Modern Art I did Camille while I slept in an installation and actually the fragments of the piece from the Paris Biennale the exterior was actually very hard materials usually I'm known for soft material but it was almost like the skin of an animal was shown at the Museum of Modern Art and ironically as I'm speaking to you they are right down here in the basement somewhere which installation so we must let the purators know anyway also my environment which I will show you which has been used to advertise is also in storage but I'm taking care of it Leo Castelli tried to put it in a museum and we came very close to it in 81 and due to circumstances beyond our control the museum was taking it and things fell through so it's still in storage and I hope before I go I'm able to reconstruct it in a museum or in a space that's permanent so oh 78 so 78 being wildly imitated by the commercial world I started painting the streets anonymously it's not that I didn't want to be famous I wanted to be a great artist and at the time I also thought maybe making a film would be interesting like you I was interested in magic in a very different way I expressed that but in a way we have the same search to know discover the unknown and I was trying to do a film without any financing as you will understand on a woman who fell to earth and was trying to communicate with her peers and there came the ideas of painting the streets which had elements of graffiti because I would be doing this illegally and it was a pirate element in my work that still is very present but I was doing it actually to communicate with the unknown anyway where was that? Shustin so by the time Shustin came I was doing these environments my personal look was very public I was in a lot of magazines like artists in the 70s this generation in the 70s if you were a woman artist you were not supposed to wear lipstick already you were not serious and dressing up was totally out of the question so I think my strength as a feminist actually was that I really didn't understand what a feminist was to me there were these women that hated men and had to do weird things they didn't like me very much and they looked like men doing men's work and they really did not like me and I didn't understand because I was a woman well this maybe came from my childhood and I'm not going to go into the whole thing when I was little I went to Catholic school and I didn't go to the class because I was not a Catholic and then the little children went you killed Jesus so who knows maybe that has nothing to do with anything I said no I just want to be an artist you know I'm a visionary you know I come from the school of Oredon you know Kauravi artists you haven't heard of like John Graham I hope you have Cornel the La Francesca Picabia I was just going to do my own thing and that was actually the most feminist I could do because my work actually celebrated femininity which was like a dirty word like using soft materials dressing up fashion I incorporated fashion in my work so anyway by the 70's people were still trying to figure out is she serious or not I was performing I was having exhibitions I had exhibitions in museums but I still was having big trouble financing my life you know what I mean I'm not your Kauravi nothing against her I'm not putting anybody down by the way but just to make something clear here survival is a very difficult thing for an artist month to month if you like yeah so I saw that everywhere I went I brought by the way the idea of the street art to to the windows in the street this where I could create environments my work is very private at the same time it's as the documentary says in their own words not all mine I always wanted to reach a bigger public you know it's almost like an innate drive for me so I found different ways to reach people on different levels in other words the art audience well which was not totally supporting me anyway was only one aspect I love the idea of reaching out without people knowing like so when people walk by these windows I would create for shop windows or wherever they would let me or support me I create a very intimate world magical world that people pacifize would go by and just look and sometimes they would stop and sometimes they would look into it further or not but somehow I felt like I added some magic to their lives and for me that was very important and I think that's why art is so important and I think that's why art remains okay so bottom line the commercial world kept copying me I kept struggling to make art and make myself heard as a serious artist and continue working and pay the rent and still continue to you know make these light boxes and photo works or whatever and I invented Justine I died at the Whitney Museum in a piece called Out of My House which is the reconstruction of my living environment and as a performance instead of dying like sleeping beauty by the needle I died by the staple gun I use fairy tales to me a mess too you know as references for my work and inspiration so Justine became my first living persona that is my real name like the writer I dropped the last name so Justine stood for justice I saw real contradictions in our culture why the artist was supposed to be someone elevated and looked upon is so degrading they treated so badly so often during his lifetime you know like Van Gogh he had a brother but he died mad you know and monk with a scream and Frida Kahlo every pop star wanted to be Frida Kahlo in the movie and refers to her as their heroine and role model well Frida did not have such a pleasant ending as we know so I don't know I guess I knew what I was getting myself into but I wanted to be an artist but I wanted to make a statement that would remain an art statement about this situation I found myself in Justine became the creator of the Coletti's Dead Company she created products inspired by Coletti's image which the commercial world was copying but the art world was looking upon me as not quite serious you know that's why I relate to drag queens you know so it just didn't make any sense to me I made art out of it and I did it very well I started a band I'm not really a musician by any means but I had a band which was called Justine and the Victorian Punks and the street works continued I posted what do you call it post what do they call it now what the confiliatus do images of this band all over town and at the beginning there was a band that performed but did not play and then soon after that I began playing and there were a series of actions besides making the products but by 1978 Fiorucci knew about my work of course and he was generous enough to invite me to do a window in his store you know and he treated me very well was very generous and there were posters and I slept in the window during the direction of the show and he let me be Justine all the way to destroy the whole store doing the opening performance and he didn't seem to mind which I thought was great you know but at the beginning I wasn't doing window I just did them anywhere and Justine was also the head of the Collette estate you know because as we know a lot of people take great pride in being in the art world that do not support contemporary artists but make their reputation out of that artist and are very very decant understanding my English is not very good towards living artists and I was fond of that to be a contradiction so this going sculpture I called it a parody on the dilemma of an innovative contemporary artist continued from 78 to 82 I don't know what oh this is Justine herself in a living environment a detail of it so showed you how it became one with the environment I don't know if I mentioned this for the chameleon you must have known because it was the idea of adjusting to one's environment for protection the womb as protection but all of these are things that I rather you speak very well I always refrain from talking I was not good at it I was frustrating in the 70s too which makes things more complicated because I didn't want to answer questions in an interview I just felt like I was stronger with my images and talking about them would kind of belittle them you know so anyway Justine also at the beginning had this Victorian punk look and then wait, the picture before yeah this was the Victorian punk look and actually this is at PS1 where I created my own tomb the tomb for Colette and this is a big light box in the middle that moved up and down and what in the center of the body it was the eighth hole for miniature golf because you know I was dealing with function and art real function actually this is very important I don't want to talk too much because this whole thing is I proved that artists are not mad artists are driven mad maybe but they're not mad and I wanted to prove that I could very well be a commercial artist but I chose none to all I wanted to prove is put my vision out there and just kind of question question the role of the artist in our society and anyway so this piece was a tomb I pointed to this because right after that I started creating these beautiful dreamer uniforms that were second skins that were inspired by the walls of the environment the walls themselves were like paintings with fabrics if you looked at one of them from far away and I would embed a picture very often of a performance sometimes I would use light light was a very consistent element the uniforms themselves became a work and I was working with them was an experiment in working architecture this is me as Justine so I created a product again a beautiful dreamer uniform and also you can go on and on about the symbols of what a uniform means and that we all wear one and I leave that to you 78 this is before the uniform so right in no it's in the process of the uniforms because I remember I had them in there a window in a Victorian craft shop I know you like craft shops too and we can't live without them anyway a Victorian craft shop a very beautiful shop and I wore a lot of bloomers then and I wore undergarments over my clothes anyway I did this piece called Paranoia It's High in Awareness and in this picture I pose as Joan of Arc because a big story came out on me in arts magazine and ironically when I was going to meet my friends the Victorian pumps to pose for the picture there was a cover of Anne's Joan of Arc so I've kind of appropriated the image of Anne's picture into my own version which I would do with many historical themes or themes whether they would be mythology or history or literature like Camille for example alright so inside the store I would have a fashion performance as you see other fashion performance an artist doing the past oh no that's not serious but a week later the Mud Club would do the kind of imitated the whole show by a fashion designer and I even participated in one of them and offered the Deadly Feminine in line which was my trademark for the Colitis Death Company and I posed almost naked with this veil as a dress you could see right through it and this dress was taken seriously in the newspapers with all the other designers and it was for sale for $37,000 so it reminds me a bit of Robert Orman you know the movie Ready to Wear but that's what we're dealing with I was not interested in entering the commercial world and I think I did it so well though I had an album with my band which actually was re-released two years ago the Beautiful Dreamer album which was my theme song Beautiful Dreamer put to a disco beat and it was re-released by DFA because they thought the whole thing was so ahead of its time I worked with Peter Gordon a wonderful musician and they wanted to re-release it as an old album and the cover well I don't want to say this you discovered yourself was sepia color and I was laying there with a cross sleeping on a bed in one of my goudoir window installations where I would project the music on the street so Justine one of the reasons a lot of my pictures are about Justine because I find her so prophetic like artist prophetic and I think we already experienced I've done so many artworks where I look back later and I don't have the images here my god how did I know I knew visually after September 11 I realized that I painted these images way before in my paintings of what my studio was going to look like afterwards and one of them was even called Premonition ok so here we go John and Bob Collette is dead company 81 I already have a retrospective and I'm still Justine but I think I picked this image because it shows you because we don't have so much time how the objects besides the performance you have everything here everything was minimal like the performance was minimal it was the creation of Olympia the same Olympia making the doll a reality in the environment I represented a living doll and this also caused a lot of confusion with the feminist because they thought maybe I was bringing feminism back to the caveman why are women represented as dolls and I was not representing that at all I was representing the human condition as I saw it control perhaps by outside forces we know nothing about or at least questioning them and art for me and the art of creation was a way to transcend everything to be free to transcend all the disasters of life that we have to go through and survive in a way that's heroic and dignified so I think I'm sorry because they were called bed series and there was a nude body of myself laying down from above in the bed and the photographs were torn and you could see the light behind it and some people thought I was such an ego maniac because I used my image which so many artists use now but at that time it was still like why does she use her picture all the time well I'm sure we don't want to say any names we don't want to say well anyway let's move forward let's fast forward so anyway one of the pieces like that's in the collage center now it's a more recent piece but it's like the panels you see in the background where the fabrics are used like paint like three dimensional paint but they are soft fabrics that I modify and I transform before I use them and I think in that one which led me sleeping in Radio City a record store in 1980 I think the one in the middle actually came from the living environment and the last one is actually a fragment of the living environment the rest is explanatory you know the uniform and the furniture in that show I also had photographs I had collages I had streetwear collages and light boxes this is only one of the views of the walls in detail but that's 1981 so not knowing what to do as they would have I get a D.A. Day grant in 1983 just at the time I was taking down my living environment which was really really traumatic it was like shedding a skin you know it's like really like the metaphors the cocoon, the butterfly all these metaphors but I was living it but thank god I got an invitation to live in Berlin for a year and I stayed two years and my persona for Berlin was Matahari and the stolen potatoes because for me Berlin offered a sense of mystery and the wall was still up and there was in a way it was very mysterious and I just wanted to kind of communicate that every persona had a philosophy I look at them as guides as spirit guides it's not so much arms so and so it's more like so and so becomes my guide because I think artists at their best are very good mediums if they can translate or communicate or deliver or manifest what's in their vision maybe in a material physical form that's their job so okay Matahari became my vehicle and in this image I have a picture of myself as Matahari in front of the Berlin walls and the stolen potatoes which became a symbol of course we all know that in art the ordinary become extraordinary and potato became a symbol actually and this was from an exhibition I did a little later so the beautiful it was kind of a retrospective so I have the potato sculpture with a black bird which was a symbol I used in Munich a quote but the uniform shows you how the beautiful German uniforms were pieces of art in themselves and sculptures I wore them and then I preserved them that one was actually used in a public piece that was on television called Schustin for the People where I stood on Wall Street on a platform near the Washington Statue I didn't mean to take so much time is it too long? because I realized it was too long and I was going to be short so fast forward another persona Countess Harschenbach I'm invited to go to Munich I'm back in New York back and forth I don't want to lose my love in Berlin I did the sets for example I go to Munich I'm invited I fall in love I have a studio I stay there and created the Countess Harschenbach which inspired my life personal life but was a fictitious character because my boyfriend's mother was Countess Harschenbach I lived on Harschenbach's Strasse etc etc so I was so bored in Munich but I created a lot of works my boyfriend oh god this is such a sleepy town so but anyway it was very inspiring in the way that I was creation I was so creative there because that was my way out and he was in the theater all night so I created also a service called Darcy for Scandal because I felt artists like myself again were invited to all these parties because I looked different I looked exotic Collette from New York is here but I really started to resent it because one it took a lot of time but two I don't think they understood my work at all so I created Darcy for Scandal service where I made images from and this is a multimedia collage as you could see how the images turn into collages and constructions and I inspired by the big collage my life and in this service people had to hire me to come to a party I never really did that I was not interested my phone rang all day and night I had to change it I was interested in again the communicating that idea then there's another construction of oh the house of Olympia I'm back in New York in the 90s after a long sojourn in Berlin Munich, New York I kept the loft I came back to New York I was getting bored with the clansiness I was so happy on Facebook and I said you're so happy to be back to New York and it made me think like when I saw the dirt on the streets of New York in the early 90s I go oh I was about to kiss the ground so anyway back in New York what do I do now so I create the house of Olympia and the house of Olympia it was a time of very political by that time I think I was much more accepted by the feminists you know in fact a lot of artists women particularly for men as well were inspired by my work were working with similar themes genre and everything and so that problem was not there anymore but the problem of survival still was so anyway the house of Olympia was kind of a no result because I come back to New York and so my vision had been interjected in the real world and one of the every persona I think I told you had a theme had rules and one of the rules was retrieving my history the return to children with manners oh I know it was a time of very political art and my work was not very what do you call it accessible what do you say politically correct very politically incorrect I didn't mean to do it but I had to do it because I really felt that art was elevating the spirit to me that was the reason for art and so I continued in that vein and I won't go into the whole thing a collage four by eight feet of myself in 18th century costumes and I co-legalized people other people than myself and masterpieces from the 18th century I had salons in my loft try to make things a little friendlier with the sexes where all this chaos was going on and within each persona I would also either appropriate either well-known artists like I say or be inspired by mythology or inspired by literature but also by great women and sometimes men this one happens to be Sarah Bernhard and it's done with paper and xeroxes and it's myself as Sarah Bernhard and it's a big collage four by six and astrologically I had a lot in common who I found out later after I had done the clock tower he slept in a coffin anyway another theme you might have seen in the documentaries the theme of thrift shops fashion incorporating fashion in my work and this is a show I did in the meat market district in a Japanese gallery and you know the Japanese have a different view on art and fashion so they had fashion and art and in the bottom floor they had galleries upstairs a gallery space downstairs a very special boutique so I put in my life for sale the bed was always a central element whether it was in the environments and has inhabited a lot of my installations and I forgot to tell you as Olympia I replaced my presence with a colled mannequin sculpture I started to do that more and more in my life like I did as a pope in the windows of Montreal I would bless people very often I would put oh it really worked I could talk about that for hours anyway so this is a very feeling that this week so I think I have to wrap it up we need to come back to some of these images it's okay to make sure we have time I just want to say this one this one is my studio there was a place that was like a modular artwork where I kept all my art, my history and invented things and this is right before Sandy and one of the pieces that was going to the collage center that has an image in it right before Sandy this was taken so that's it this will be fairly short because I don't even have the experience and years that y'all have of making art although oops how did I do that sorry I'm going I'll try not to well we can look I mean I really I really identify a lot with what you said Colette and how artists are treated and how things can be belittled in a sort of performance way and also yeah I mean I don't have that much more to say because I think our conversation will be interesting but for me the thing thinking about collage and coming here I thought about how the two images create attention and an imperfection and in a way you lose the ability to be a master sort of anti-patriarchal in this way because it's not it's not clear there's always attention there's always a relationship that people can jump around and guess it by looking at what's juxtaposed so there's no there's no specific genius and end point to it and I think that that is a thread that goes there's no the work itself has its life because the collage creates these tensions and that's all those are my images and I'll turn it over to Judith we have to 4 p.m I want to pick up a couple of things one has to do with the notion of cultural engineering I think each one of you has done a kind of cultural engineering that works in obviously different ways there's certain questions that emerge from me that have to do with anachronism mastery I think it's a very useful term and one's relationship to concepts of mastery to recomponent whether we're thinking about DNA or recombinant technologies then something that you've all touched on in different moments in different ways but maybe glanced around has to do particularly with something like fashion that disparaged appendage to the high art world relationship between fashion and the instruments of fashion whether that's print culture actual costume the exterior cladding the architecture of the body takes on and then thinking about the body itself as a kind of recombinant object be it yoga or bow yoga or I don't know exercise different types of modification these are all things worth exploring further to that the question of anonymity and publicity what it means to Genesis who said you had this 30 year basically private anonymous practice and now you're in a place where that practice has gone public has gone public so that that says to me there's something about archiving not just mining the archive the first images that you were talking about as a librarian I found that very provocative what it needs to be a kind of librarian in a good sexy way a librarian of historical culture a librarian of clothing a fashion of concepts a librarian of fashion magazines and appendages a librarian of bits and pieces of language so I'll throw that out as a sort of potential persona in a very perverse way the notion of the librarian and letting it go I think it's a similarity just from that one we agree with that we all seem to have done and you have to is have an eye for interesting but potentially banal things one day we were walking around trying to explain to a niece of mine how we came up with ideas or how we assembled things and we said it's easy you just take one object and we picked up a golden shoe and something else and we just picked up a box of horns and put the horn on the heel of the shoe and now you've got a shoe on and we were just talking earlier that we've got the anger exhibited in the Courtauld and it's now in a private collection but the archiving was an obsession for me we had rows of firing cabinets we kept all the correspondence going back to that is when we were eleven and having been thrown out of England for the art we made first of all we were doing the collages of the Queen and got sentenced to a year in prison and a large fine and then eventually on appeal didn't get sent to the prison but still had to pay the money and that was when we realized that collage can have immense power it was actually threatening an establishment enough that they tried to put me away and then they actually tried even harder in 1991 and one of the things that set them off was a show we did as Coom Transmissions in 76 called Prostitution and amongst it there was a wall that was left and he thought what can we put on the wall and then this word came into my head Tampax Romana so we made these four light boxes and we put these little sculptures in all using used tampons one of them was an art deco clock with the insides taken out filled with used tampons from a month and it was called It's That Time of the Month another one was a box with a lot of human hair with a tampon inside it was called Larve and another one was a little doll's house room with a tampon with little doll's arms and legs and it was called Living World now that seemed to me like it was obviously humorous there were questions in Parliament the Queen sent law lords down to close down the the ICA gallery and now the Tate Britain brought the tampon boxes just this year and my archive what was left of it Scotland Yard destroyed everything later but what was left was also brought by the Tate Britain irony upon irony and actually he said when he said we're buying the archive do we get the tampon sculptures I wasn't sure if you want them now we've got all these ridiculous letters is it possible for us to put a different glass on the front would that interfere with the concept do you mind if we get screws that look a little bit like those but you know I said I don't care should we keep them in four boxes or one I don't care it was a joke let me get so precious about something and forget that there were questions in Parliament and police raids and they threatened to take away my passport over those same sculptures so there's a living energy inside these things it's like the body falls out as someone else said you said I think somebody said about the body falling out of the picture the first painting we ever did was a painting of the outline of a woman and then an actual wooden shape of a woman painted that stood on the floor or you could put it anywhere else it was still part of the painting it could be in a different room so from the very beginning we were interested in breaking away frameworks breaking away the rigidities of any kind and there's much more in a power involved than you would ever imagine and the seventies was an age of people often deciding to ignore the galleries the most interesting artists were working in the street and doing, you know, adjud propers we used to call it just appearing in subways cars and suddenly all leafing around and create characters and live them for a whole week and now it's being reassessed there was a gap for ages in the art history the seventies a huge amount of work that was ignored the feminist work the performance work anything that they couldn't just pigeonhole and it's amazing to me and thrilling that it's being reassessed don't need to talk about that I don't, I think I talked enough but particularly, well, this is an interesting time because some of us went to Sandy and I showed you the last of my laboratoire but thank God I saved a lot but I understand what it means I called it archivist, you know, the word and as Olympia I was becoming very aware of that too, I was retrieving my history in a way I was involved with that and I guess any personal action I took if it was really honest and sincere and came from a better place it would resonate in feminism art or art in general what's your archive like? I mean I have a pretty rad archive but unfortunately I get worried that I'm a hoarder so it's nice to have this intellectual context to for me to reconsider it as a library I thank you for that I think the three of us as different as we are we have a lot in common we have about 15 minutes left and I would you welcome conversation from the audience are you recording one? I don't think the two of them are pressing the two artists on the panel versus maybe Kate seem to be before sort of digital photography and digital modification that's now sort of the established norm and I was curious how people think that might or might not have affected collage in the general sense that maybe we live with it more and it isn't easier or harder with these tools I think it would be a surprise how many young students come up to me and say what software do you use and we say scissors and glue and they look baffled like who makes that for me as came out it was always a very intimate thing it was a way for transforming and re-visualizing the world over and over privately we still do them all the time but we may never show them again it's 30 years so it's not something we want to do digitally we love Polaroids because they're liquids and there's no duplicates everyone's original and some of the big collages have hundreds of Polaroids cut up after that and that's it they're all originals thank god Lady J took so many because we're still using them up like a funny Valentine there's loads more to come so she's still working away I guess I'll follow up as being the artist who had the choice to make her work all my work could have been digital but none of it is digital it's all done analog either in the dark room or with scissors and paste and I don't know I often wonder about that question as well and how easy it is to collage images digitally I don't have the same surface yeah it's about texture and it is something else about the life that that printed object had I'm just trying to figure it out myself in a way but it seems that a lot of the digital collage is just trying to fool us into believing it's a real image and for me collage is about that stark juxtaposition I don't know to think about the cut collage is not just an assemblage it's also about cutting that can be very physical or it can be completely abstract I do do collages with my finger haha just saying haha we still use hairdressers we have a big pile of them because we're always losing them then finding them again but there's a lot of experience that's lost if it's digital to me it's like in the 60s just to get hold of Henry Miller or Burroughs book was almost impossible because they were banned still as obscene but we found out you could get them in Soho in London in the porno shops because they've been told they were obscene so they stopped them they never hit them but they stopped them so we would hitchhike from Birmingham down to London it would take hours then have no way to stay so wander around Piccadilly till someone offered to let us crash on the floor then wander around Soho doing the porno shops finding these books and then hitchhike back home so there was 3 days and all the hitchhiking involved meeting people you would never otherwise meet now you go and go click on Amazon what have we lost in that experience an immense amount of unrealised experience memories other people's stories lost to convenience that's one of the things that makes me very wary you know how you didn't want to be this commercial artist even though you had the opportunity to meet what I find kind of disturbing right now is how commercial art has become and I mean musically I recently encountered a young artist who does these paintings and installations around hip hop and her whole thing was in her whole belief about it was that hip hop represented decadence and wealth and to me as someone coming up in the 80s who was a hip hop lover that was not what hip hop and rap was ever it was a complete opposition right and I mean going back further than public enemy you know but I find like this kind of newer generation of artists is very very very basic in commercialism and you know what can I get and how much money can I make and I feel like so much is being lost to dating a host and drama it's a real issue a real issue I mean I appreciate fashion I appreciate design I appreciate a lot of art you know right but art is really has a different purpose and I think even this incredible show here with Jean Paul Gautier upsets me because I'll tell you why because there's so few museums okay and there's so many great artists who are still living struggling to just continue to create which is not trying to make a product that's what I was trying to do as Justine. Justine was so pathetic and in a way it's a little bit frustrated that I am even though I'm known that I'm not as successful in some areas as I would like to be to make it easier for me to create I'm also very thankful that I have not been corrupted because at the moment the art world is in a very strange place and I think it's because the pressure of our culture you can't point your finger at one artist, one curator, one pop person because it's really our culture we're promoting gets like my kids I teach at SVA I teach to advertising students you know doing my best to have them not lose their soul you know really because everybody including interns that come in and out of my house everybody is taught even in colleges to make it at any expense and we're creating monsters and I certainly created monsters and I learned that phrase actually from Malcolm Morley I'll never forget it because he's a painter I don't know if you know him he's very famous in 70s and 80s still famous and he said when he did new realism everybody started imitating his style he was so successful and he said I created monsters and that keeps coming to me I literally created monsters but that's not our fault you know it's like if you're going to use religion as a metaphor it's not twice fault that everybody kills themselves you know you know it's that kind of thing but we need to do something about it I have a question for Kate because we were talking about just now kind of the technology effect and there's been a lot of talk recently about an article about the technology kind of in genuineness or you know it cuts us off from this physical experience so I'm wondering for you particularly for you the you know this cutting and pasting or this you know kind of the physicality of the collage process you know it's a response in some way to to the sort of compartment of the technology or that sense of the loss of the hand I don't know it's a good question the cutting and pasting I've been doing since before we all had computers so it's just kind of a natural sketching process for me to make collages in that sort of literal sense that we're talking about a bit here today but yeah I think then what I currently do like this is a collaging in the dark room in a way it is a response because it's like it slows it down and it edits the experience and I can't bring my cell phone into the dark room you know and I can't be online I can't be a screen and you can really take time with the tactileness of the images and they're not on a screen you know and I mean I find that helpful in my process so even though it would be much easier not easier but faster if I were to make this kind of work digitally I wouldn't know what work to make I don't know the computer screen it's like a trash can to me like well look how many problems we've had with it today they hate us because they're irrelevant you know you're using your own images well I'll be able to tell you a bit about it but sort of how do you feel about putting yourself into the work so much how that kind of performance is how they kind of work with the collage the best practice idea sorry but so how do you feel in terms of you making art now using your own I mean I'm my own medium my body's a medium and I mean and there are you know generations of women that came before me like Colette that always have used their bodies in similar fashions so I guess that's you know there's been a shift in that because when we were doing film transmissions we did lots of the the later actions all naked and Cosi got a lot of flack for being naked and for working in porno magazines and porno films in order to archive it and show how shallow it was now she's being invited to be on panels about the history of feminism and there's been a big shift there's Sasha Gray for example who's openly said Cosi inspired her to make art it's about time people stop being so hung up on the gender part of the issue we've always felt that it was very difficult for us to get that across people say oh so it's about gender and we say no it's about identity it's about taking control of the narrative of your own life regardless of anybody else's opinion and being courageous enough to just do it fuck them all she used to say and we liked it so much we made embroidered patches of it in fact that was the last thing she said to me before she dropped her body and she said this year's slogan should be just fuck them all maybe a good ending point