Sara Greenberger Rafferty

Frog in the Pond, 2008, C-print, 14" x 11", Edition of 5, 2 A.P.

I had the chance to catch up with Sara Greenberger Rafferty and do an interview...she has been doing some fantastically unique work over the past few years. I really enjoyed her show at the Kitchen and am looking forward to her new show. Tears opens at Rachel Uffner Gallery this Wednesday, the 9th and runs through October 25. Don't miss it!

Jon Lutz: How long have you made work focusing on many kinds of performers and/or entertainment?

Sara Greenberger Rafferty: My work has been about performers -- or more accurately performance -- since I was an undergrad working on a project dealing with social class. Early on, having made a pact with myself (which I sort of later broke) never to make an original image of a person's body or face, I depicted the performance of self exclusively through objects, props, and pre-existing images -- stand-ins, if you will. When I first moved to New York, I did a few performances as a retailer named Sophie Spar, where I sold artworks disguised as products for $20 or less. I then began working on a project, which never fully materialized, about the cakewalk (a syncopated music and dance heavily associated with minstrelsy).

Installation view of BANANAS at The Kitchen, 2009
Photograph by Adam Reich

JL: When did this begin as an interest for you?

SGR: I didn't take on magicians or comedians -- explicit entertainers -- as a subject until 2001 or 2002. Perhaps surprisingly, this came by way of my interest in the history and imagery of the cakewalk and the American fair (e.g. 1893 Worlds' Columbian Exposition in Chicago and more modest county fairs across the country). I started to become interested in the iconography and space of performance such as the fair, the stage, and the screen. At about the same time I began collecting comedy LPs and re-awakening my obsession with comedians, which began in my childhood. I read everything I could about Harry Houdini, Fatty Arbuckle, Buster Keaton, Phyllis Diller, Lenny Bruce, and Dick Gregory. In a sense, I have been sort of working my way through the history of performance or recorded performance, and now, with my new series of color photographs, I am focused more specifically on television.

While my work uses performers and entertainers as imagery, the theme my work is not really entertainment. I think things like stages, microphones, comedians, props, and backdrops may be constant threads in my work, though because I don't see my work as being about entertainment, I don't think it will be necessary to always use these forms.

Cardboard Spar, 2004

JL: Was there a particular work that opened things up for you?

SGR: One of the first works I made in this vein was a cardboard version of a comedy club in my studio. It wasn't particularly sophisticated but the handmade quality and the fact that it was literally coming off a wall became very important to me because it wasn't full installation nor was it sculpture, but some sort of elaborate wall work, like a very deep relief. This work is very reminiscent of Rupert Pupkin's basement talk show studio in Martin Scorsese's King of Comedy. Scorsese's work was actually very influential to the works I was making at the time, specifically The King of Comedy and Raging Bull.

Shavings, 2007, C-print, 14" x 11", Edition of 6

JL: Do you find yourself attracted to entertainers of particular eras?

SGR: I definitely relate best to performers of previous eras. As I said, it seems I'm working my way from the Civil War to the Bicentennial. I am not aiming to be nostalgic at all: it's just easier for me to process the visual material of the past, and use references to a certain era of photography to speak about more contemporary issues. Also, the people -- or people as characters -- I am using as imagery represent the canon of comic personas and documentation (television, photography, film). If I were to venture a guess, I would say this tendency arises from the fact that with 'historical' material I can have a more detached relationship with the primary sources, I can view them and analyze them outside of their time and context. Whereas, if I made a work using images of say Mary Lynn Rajskub or Dave Chappelle or Zach Galafianakis it would be more difficult for me to make it my own through transformation, because of contemporary cultural context and associations. But this could be a cop out.

Vicki, 2009, C-print, 24" x 20", edition of 5

JL: One of the most interesting things about your work is what is not happening or playing out as you might expect. Microphones and spotlights have no subjects, pies hit a wall in (lieu of a face), an empty Houdini case, and 2D, abstracted narratives. Is there a portrait of a “lost art” going on here or any critique or acknowledgement of shifts in manners of performance?

SGR: Thank you. I think of a lot of my work as playing out as a performance of non-performance. This could be interpreted in a number of ways, among them the performance of the everyday character, the way we perform in our daily lives or that the non-performance is related more to a non-compliance, a refusal to do what one is supposed to do. In some cases, the 'wrong' object is performing and in a lot of cases the figure is totally absent. I think ideas about damage, repair, obfuscation, failure, injury, humiliation, abjection, pathos, and humor are fairly important to my work. I depict a lot of 'benign violence' which would be the pies, the punches, and my new series which could be called spills.

JL: You’ve done a lot of work specifically about stand-up comedy. Do you see a connection between being a stand-up comic and being an artist?

SGR: I'm sure I could make this connection, however, my use of stand-up has to do purely with aesthetics and ethos. I like the aesthetics of stand-up comedy as a model for my art-making: up against the wall, pared down, masculine, one-person scale, engaging and not obtuse, only alienating by design, etc. Ideally I would like to make work that operates as good stand-up comedy does, something that is engaging but has the ability to deal with real shit, something that is crafted but not too flashy, something human scale but could engage a whole room. I have always been struck also by the connection of body to content in stand-up and how the comic's body (gender, race, stature, age, etc.) comes to bear on the meaning of the jokes.

Pies with Color Studies, 2008, C-print, 16" x 20", Edition of 6

JL: I’m curious about the process used in your 2D work. Much of it is photo-based, but what are you are actually photographing? Are you creating your own “originals” of different mediums?

SGR: All of my work is grounded in photography. Even sculptures I make generally have a definitive frontal view and I am always thinking about photographs. Most of my 2D work is in fact straight photography of "props" as I call them. I started by simply making drawings of photographs and framing the drawings flush as photos are usually framed. These were a type of re-photography to me because they were mechanical reproductions of the most basic (and time consuming) variety.

Then I started making the punch photographs, which were gouache reproductions of photographs on gessoed paper. I originally thought I would frame these and exhibit them as drawings as well, because I thought it would be really funny to have a one-of-a-kind work that was ruined or negated. When I tested this out, I found that the punched drawings were generally too pathetic. (As an aside: my work really needs to evoke pathos without actually being pathetic. I am constantly trying to make sure the work looks provisional without actually being so.) I

studio shot
Shuffle (Ace Five), 2006, C-print, 16" x 20", Edition of 6

decided to put the punched drawings on my copy stand, light them, and print them as photographs. This turned out to be the correct decision because the re-re-photo added a trompe l'oeil effect and also a shift in scale that turned out to be crucial. In more recent photographs, I have used a combination of found photography, Photoshopping, photography of props in my studio, and other straight photographs. In my newest photographs, all of the props were made in the studio with very modest supplies and then scanned and digitally manipulated. It's funny because I described my new work recently as "portraits of comedians," which ends up sounding like very different work than it is.

Harry Shearer

After a seemingly endless election period, Harry Shearer’s The Silent Echo Chamber, now at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, feels like the appropriate palette cleanser. While Shearer is mostly known as the voice of many Simpsons characters and for his various collaborations with Christopher Guest, it is less known that he has been exhibiting these videos of "found" live feeds since 1992. It's surprising how enthralling and fun it is watching television screens of public figures sitting, doing nothing while waiting to go on air.

The Silent Echo Chamber at the Aldrich closes on Feb 8. See my interview with Shearer below:

Jon Lutz: Your various projects really seem to compliment each other and bring something different to the table. The same could be said for The Silent Echo Chamber. Can you talk about the impetus to create this work? How long have you been making videos?

Harry Shearer: I had started collecting these images when I realized that we were in the first generation of humans where so much ordinary behavior of so many well-known people was being videographed, and that somebody should be collecting it, after which I nominated myself. So, at some point, it seemed interesting to assembled the images for public view, and the art world seemed the most congenial place to do it. I started with a show called Telesthesia, a word I'd like to think I made up, at the Fullerton Museum in Orange County, CA, in, I think, 1989. Then came Barney's windows in NYC in 1992 for the figures involved in the Democratic Convention in the city, then The Wall of Silence at MOCA's Santa Monica storefront, commemorating the OJ trial circus, and then a long pause before the Conner Contemporary Art gallery in D.C. invited me in 2004 to do what became Face Time, the immediate predecessor of this show.

JL: Do you see yourself as a “video artist?”

HS: I see myself as a guy who puts these shows together. The term "video artist" is relevant only in the sense that gives people a recognizable category into which to insert this stuff.


JL: Your long running radio show, Le Show, features your recap of the lesser-known, but significant news stories of the week. You approach the details of these stories with a dry mix of sarcasm, humor, and critique. With The Silent Echo Chamber, it appears that you have taken a more objective or contemplative approach. The biting wit is replaced with a powerful ambiguity that emerges while watching figures like Karl Rove stare blankly, James Carville fidget, or Joe Biden eat a sandwich. Is there any kind of critique here of these individual personalities or is it solely up to the viewer to come to their own conclusion?

HS: That's one reason I enjoy doing this in an art context: much more conducive to ambiguity, multiple meanings, or total lack of meaning, than the comedy/satire world, where you really care whether the audience "gets the point." There's much less critique intended here, although some may occur to some viewers. But I think, in terms of what these shows mean to me, they're much more about the contrast between TV as we know it-basically, to a large extent, radio with pictures--and the possibilities of a truly visual medium.


JL: Most of the figures are politically involved, but then you throw in people like Dr. Phil. Are your choices of subject matter colored by any personal experiences with these people or comments upon the entertainment/news business in general?

HS: Choices constrained by two factors: the ubiquity of these people, and my ability to access images of them.

JL: In one case, Ben Stein and Henry Kissinger are shown, at different times, on the same screen. Given that they bear some resemblance to each other, there is some evidence that you have done some subtle constructing and arranging for humorous effect. Is this deliberate or merely coincidental?

HS: I'm very scrupulous--or obsessive--about not editing or altering the videos. It's too easy, and then it's about me. Kissinger and Stein showed up on the same screen because neither of them is in the immediate current spotlight, a la the other folks, yet they both amuse me. And, of course, that's the Jewish screen.

JL: You have also appeared on cable news shows many times. Is any part of these about your experience of waiting to go on air? Is there an inside joke here or something going on that someone not familiar with television production might not know about these clips?

HS: No, as a matter of fact, there's no joke. Well, if there is a joke, I guess it's that never before in human history has so much valuable time been spent by so many "important" people sitting around doing nothing. That may be a distinctive mark of our era. Or of our (former) prosperity.

Mark T. Stockton

Poised, 2007, 1983 series, charcoal on acid free paper, 108" x 72",

Madonna I (After Lee Friedlander), 2008, 6” x 4", graphite on 26" x 20" BFK Rives

Mr. Olympia (small), 2008, 1974 series, 9", graphite on 26" x 20" BFK Rives

Last year, Mark T. Stockton was gracious enough to participate in my show, Perfect Strangers Daily Operation. I’ve been keeping up with his work on his website and noticed some new gems. I'm not often drawn to work dealing with celebrities, but Stockton's drawings have something good going on. They are more about the former lives of the stars and how their new lives contrast with the original context of the photos; Tom Cruise as a teen idol on the cusp of stardom, Madonna as a struggling artist’s model, and Arnold Schwarzenegger as a championship bodybuilder.

One of the original Lee Friedlander photographs of his Madonna group, from which Stockton's Madonna I after Friedlander comes, is actually now up for auction at Christie's. Check out his Madonna and others in an upcoming at exhibition titled, Drawing in the World, at UArts in Philadelphia. It will be on view from January 22 - February 22. The reception is February 6, 5pm -8pm. There will also a lecture by James Elkins "Can Drawings Think?" on January 27 and a panel with John Yau on February 4.