EXCERPTS FROM A CONVERSATION WITH NICO JENKINS AND MICHAEL ANKER

Michael Anker-The first part that I was interested in is the title which is, "As the Radio Gently Burned Away", it seems to me that it provokes some sort of nostalgia- was this your intent or what is the idea behind the title?

Nico Jenkins- First I should correct you, it isn't the title of my new piece, it is the tile of the entire show which is a compilation of many different installations, a body of work that I have been working on for the past couple of months or so. The title comes form a Richard Braughtigan short story he's one of my favorite writers and it is- "As the Radio Gently Burned Away the Number One Song Dealt Twenty Three Inside Itself..." and to me its about pop culture eating, devouring itself and so that's where it comes from. Originally I thought about the title for a show in London of five different artists, which I am curating as a sort of defining thing, now I stole it for my own show cause I like it very much- and there is a great nostalgia in it bringing up a radio in this day and age is nostalgic enough also before the radio before pop culture a sort of pure time that is nostalgic...

MA- I was actually thinking of the words in themselves (I didn't know were from Richard Braughtigan) because the idea of the words "burned away " have a sense of nostalgia in them or of what was. So it does have that. The main reason I ask is that I was looking at your biography where you are talking about Felix Gonzalez-Torres. I've read criticism that his art is sentimental and nostalgic, and therefore not serious art. I was wondering how and if one can integrate nostalgia into their work and keep a serious perspective?

NJ- I think absolutely that its possible. And I think that the school of art that I align myself with... I was talking with my friend Fritz Welch, who is another artist- I use the term wet conceptualism because - I think of myself as a wet conceptualist -the emotional a lot of emotion a lot of straight sentimentality if that is necessary. I think it is a very valid time especially after all this cold 70's conceptualism and the 80s and the feminist artists- very cold pieces that had very little passion in them. The only passionate one of them was Jenny Holzer's work where she's bringing in a sort of (body reference)...

MA- skin...

NJ- yeah...

MA- It still seems a bit cold in comparison. What I want to ask you is that if you can capture this emotional experience, what Torres does and this "U.S. Elegant" you speak of, how can the viewer profit from this experience or reexperience? Is there a cathartic level to this experience and is there something magical or mystical involved?

NJ- There is a magical transformation involved. I grew up...going back to the pervious question, nostalgia. I grew up as an American outside of America, which is a very odd perspective. Every so often I would come to America and visit different parts. I was always very aware that I was an American even though both my parents chose to live outside of America. My parents weren't ashamed to be American they were mainly against Nixon...

MA- Where did you live?

NJ- Mainly in Italy, Beirut, Cyprus, Madrid, where I was born.

MA- This makes my the question more interesting, because I thought to myself there was something very American about your work, or about an American experience...

NJ- I'm glad you say that, it is a sort of reifing of the American experience. I grew up with these sort of concepts of America. While I went to high school here I wasn't really living here, I was living on a hilltop in Vermont. I was living with all sort of ideals of America. I think that's where all the nostalgia comes from, its not really true. Its not accurate on a factual level.

MA- Not as if you are the American who lived the American experience.

NJ- I never lived in the suburbs but I am aware of the concepts- I think that gives me a good position to critique from (inside and out). I am separate from pop culture, from suburban culture, however I can still critique it, I am still part of it.

MA- That's good, I didn't know your placement. I knew you went to school in San Francisco which I read in your bio/letter; which I thought was a great way to write a biography. I thought that you actually were from this country. I had this idea that you were brought up in a trailer park, that you identify with this type of living. This brings up what I would like to talk about in your pieces with the picket signs. When I look at the photos of them, and Melissa explained to me what you did, I was interested in the places you decided to shoot them. A parking lot, a shopping mall, all places that represent suburban middle America. In the piece you stand with picket sign saying "I CAN'T IMAGINE WHAT WENT WRONG", your gesture is somber and somewhat pathetic, not angry and revolutionary, whereas the sign in itself represents revolt. This leaves the meaning of the words ambiguous in regard to who or what went wrong. What is the desire behind this ambiguity?

NJ- There is a sense of impotence in both my life and in the work. I was raised with a very social conscience my father was a Marxist my mother a socialist, I went to a Marxist fine art school where we would take field trips to El Salvador. When I was younger I was involved with the communist youth brigade which we learned to break down AK47s and things like that ... preparing for a coming revolution, as a I grew older I realized that it wasn't really coming...

MA- So within the work you are representing the ambiguity to suggest impotence in revolution?

NJ- There is a silent protest, in the words. I'm in this parking lot, I'm in this shop, I'm in front of the greyhound racing track. The visual image comes from a photograph of a protest during the Sacco/Vanzetti trial. They were two Italian Americans, somewhat militant, the government framed a case against them and this is where this protest came from. The Italian anarchists felt very strongly about it, they did a bunch of mail bombings, one of them was on September 16, 1920. It was one of the first car bombs, except it was a horse and buggy on Wall Street that killed 33 people, it was set in protest of the Sacco/Vanzetti trial. That's the photo.

MA- You had seen photographs of this?

NJ- Yeah, I saw in an institution book of the Sacco/Vanzetti trials a series of photographs. One of them, a line of men, maybe six men, all holding signs saying in beautiful black print "Free Sacco/Vanzetti" or "The Government is Corrupt", but they are standing there very sober, very empty, while Sacco/Vanzetti is being drawn towards an inevitable fate. Not even being able to really speak English they're being drawn towards this fate. This protest, now looks totally futile, and was totally futile. Their somber expressions represent the point of this futility, it's futile but it's a statement.

MA- This is very interesting, because this is something that your piece "That is not What I meant at all" seems to suggest, a futility in action. I am reminded of Beckett whose characters continue to do things like waiting but they don't know what they're waiting for. Your art, however, seems more about an attempt at movement or an absurd action to transcend.
One must continue to act.

There is a piece now that I want to talk about, it is the piece with the sofa, entitled "That is not What I Meant, At All". This piece seems to represent an action or occurrence that happened on two levels. On one level (the internal) the people involved were active in the process of watching TV, drinking beer, etc. they were involved with play. On the other level there seems to be a sense that they were being acted upon by the (external), society. What I mean is that they were inactive in a pseudo active environment. I am again thinking of Beckett , the act of sitting, moving, drinking, it is an impotent act, an act that does not transcend itself.

NJ- That is interesting I never thought directly in those terms, but I am reminded of something Malcom X said in one of his speeches. I am not particularly fond of all of his speeches but this one struck me as true. He speaks about drugs being supplied by the government, and alcohol, and tobacco, to keep the black man down. This struck very true with me, and in a sense we are provided with distractions, distractions as spectacle.

MA- This reminds of your piece with the television where these people are actively distracted. It's this absurdity this sort of...

NJ- Originally that piece in its original form was "Unibombers Chamber", before he was arrested. It was an idea. It was to have a lot of Marxist literature around, an old typewriter, etc.... about creating the feeling of a terrorist. He did all these pathetic, futile acts and had all these outrageous ideas about whether the deaths were worth while. In my mind he declared a war and therefore those were his victims of war. It gradually transformed into a piece about a roommate I had in San Francisco who down the road ended up in this bedroom of his, into this sort of pit of hell, where by the time I left he was smoking crack every night and watching T.V. He would still carry around this sort of idea that he was a creative person. All his friends smoked crack, but really they were running in place, they were doing nothing with their lives, they were known in all the bars, these fours guys, dressed really hip, but they did nothing...

MA- This is where I find that accessibility in art is important. Not only accessibility, but accessibility in regards to if one can identify with the space that is created and therefore possibly cathartic for the viewer. I think your art attempts this process. It renders importance on the artist as someone to regenerate the society as Joseph Beuys spoke of. This brings me to your metaphor of shooting a gun in the desert never knowing where the bullet will land. It goes through space and is swallowed up by vast space. Somehow I felt you were talking about yourself as an artist and identifying with this bullet. Meaning that you don't know where your going to land but you are creating a certain space within the movement.

NJ- That is an interesting idea, that's ah...

MA- You and your art to me are not that separate.

NJ- No I don't want them to be...

MA- Because I look at this metaphor as the artist and your art as bullet, working well in your art.

NJ- I wrote that, and I've never thought of myself as the bullet or as my art as a bullet. But you saying that clarifies something. I've always been sort of scared of shooting this gun and the bullet going, and the vastness of the space and it puts a deep fear- the kind that raises goose bumps, also these water tanks in Japan, they're something like a mile wide and three mile deep and they're waiting to see if...they have all these lights shining on them they are perfectly still and they are waiting to see if an atom changes, because if that happens then either it disintegrates or it manifests into another thing. They are watching, adamantly watching, this huge thing. To me being in this pool of water is one of the most horrendous thoughts. If your reading me in my art, which to me is indistinguishable- If I am that bullet it clarifies that fear somewhat for me, because there is this fear of going into this huge space and then landing.

MA- That's what I like while looking at your work. It doesn't know where it wants to land, meaning it creates a space of openness. I am not interested in art that says "this is what I know". I think you open up the space for possible experience. Your art creates a vast space to enter, and I think that leads to this point we were talking about earlier about accessibility.

NJ- I don't expect my art to last. I don't expect the piece "That is Not What I Meant, At All" to exist in a hundred years in a museum I don't think that it will have any meaning then. I am not interested in creating a master work that will be viewed by art students in public 100 to 200 years from now...

MA- If that's even happening at that point...

NJ- I'm interested in more of an immediate, being able to create that space. Perhaps that's why you see me as having the ability to create an experience. I hope to create a space for questioning. I studied all sorts of Marxist literature and I read a lot of philosophy and I studied philosophy for a short period of time in the academy. As a teenager I started looking at Camus. What I like is that he does not provide an answer. He says we should or must act, but he doesn't say how we must act. And that to me is very interesting. If you do not act you are guilty. Camus thinks you are guilty from being born. But, perhaps if we don't act, if we don't feel, if we don't admit that we're wrong, then we are more guilty. When we walk over a homeless person on the way back home, to the bar, or on the way to the restaurant and think- oh he'll pull himself up from his boot straps. We're wrong. If we feel we are guilty why are we doing this? If we go ahead with the act it's better, it is not good, but it is better than not acting...

MA- Its good that you said that because it is part of the essay that I am working on about your art. I am starting from the point you are talking about right now. It's what I think is a departure, a starting point of what I see in a lot of your art. I read today in Bataille's Visions of Excess, "MEN ACT IN ORDER TO BE", and in this essay he goes on to talk about the identification with being, as you are talking about being born guilty. We completely exist by chance, in this sort of infinite improbability of being, which I think provokes dread. What is one to do with their situation since they have become by chance? How is one to respond to this sort of labyrinth of life that they can't quite identify with? One may take one route and enter into complete subordination working nine to five, etc. or one may go into a position that I think you've entered, which is identifying with the responsibility of consciousness which again is what I believe Joseph Beuys was talking about. To make things not for your own ego, not for yourself, but for social consciousness. I think this is a problem with a lot of artists right now who are not identifying with their responsibility, instead they are identifying with the use value and capital gain in art. Since I've been looking at your art I've actually learned a lot about the idea of responsibility in art and artists.

NJ- I think the artists role of responsibility should extend ever outwards. By passion I'm an anarchist, full of socialist, communist ideas. I am constantly disappointed, but I believe that an individual can do this. In my performances, what I look for more and more is a Bataillan sensibility. I create these performances... there is a certain point where I just go, people either watch me or they join in. A rupture occurs where you can just enter and go.

MA- I'm hearing what your saying. Perhaps all artists should aspire to the level of pushing the limit- push the limit on... We lie around afraid at times. What's pulling us back is fear of the unknown. I believe its the responsibility of the artist to create a space that shows this rupture, that moves, that would cause this act of potential.

NJ- This is where I think the unibomber is coming from, my fear has always been, I'm willing to throw the fire bomb into City Bank in protest of their mindless politics. And when I'm cuffed and driving away screaming there will be no one going out on the streets and chanting NICO, NICO we will serve you now.

LETTER TO J

Late February, 1996
Brooklyn

Dear J.,

I just left a message on your machine. I called and was greeted with the long cold whine of your tone and I left my message and I felt my voice echoing in your light faded apartment on the edge of the desert and I envied you your warmth, your crisp air, your lazy skies, your vast plains.

I'm back in New York, cooped up and shut up in this old apartment, desperate for space and dreaming of that sky, J., that perfect blue, barely cracked and both protecting and destroying. When I drove up to meet you that night, when I took the long road over that pass where I could only make thirty miles an hour in the truck and the engine wheezed, the sun was setting and for a moment, before the black caved in and the air shuttered down, the sky was so still, and near where the moon was rising a plane scratched a white line in the precious air, like a childs hangnail catching on mothers silk. You might think I'm exaggerating, playing with words to make this moment more interesting, but I swear, J., that's all I could think of, the childs hangnail...

The day I left you I drove on west as I had been doing for days and I made Barstow that night, seventeen hours down the 40 and when I think of the crowds here, in NY, and when I think of the chaos here, and when I think of all the clambering and desperation here, I think of those spaces out between Alberquque and Flagstaff and Barstow, those spaces so opened up for sixty miles at a time, broken only by some poor Indian selling some turqouise and a couple packs of smokes in a dust bowl dropped between two ridge lines and I wonder why I'm here, why we're here, all cramped up like this.

I woke up out of my truck, cramped and cold, on Valentines day to a plate of Belgian waffles done up with all the sugar lined toppings I could muster out of the bitter truck stop wait crew, whipped cream and frozen blueberries, some strawberry sauce on the side and dammit I screamed don't be cheap on the pecans, 'cause you don't own the damn things and after all, sweetie, it is Valentines day you know. I sat at the counter in the drivers section, because the booths were all taken up by those weird bridal duets called team drivers where they take the missus on the road with them and they're the people who make Atlanta to LA or Oakland to Newark or BC to Boston in thirty-six meth lined hours, crazed all nights, whipping through the deserts, the whine of their trucks easing up behind you and almost blowing you off the road, dragging down the conifers as they climb out the desert but at the end of a run they've got a thousand, two thousand in their pocket and a night to spend it, god bless them. Anyway I sat at that counter and when I was done eating my waffles a beer, a nice cold Budwieser, nothing like it at six in the morning and I drank with the other drivers and you only realize that it is Valentines day when you are alone.

The truck stop was lined with wood paneling, as are all the strip joints, 25 cent video booths, donut shops and gun shows I've ever been to. There is something about the paneling, reflected glare off of fake wood under screaming florescents, that is U.S. Elegant. It is an elegance of the new but also of another time that cannot be dismissed as pure romantiscism. Instead, it speaks like the fly caught in amber speaks. It is a reflected time, a moment stopped, captured. In it is controlled the beauty and contradictions of this vast land; when we'd cut down all the trees, we began to print wood onto to cardboard, onto chopped up, pre-processed, cardboard, just the way we print up money. Only with money it's backed by gold. This paneling ain't backed by nothin' real, son. But it is not only the paneling that is beautiful. It represents U.S. Elegant, as do glass beads, gin joints pool tables, empty stages set up in the corner of bars with old signs announcing who's playing "Fri. Nite". U.S. Elegant is relected in the sun seared highways of southern California, it's relected in coils of old fly paper, in the lonliness of th housing development on the edge of the desert with her sprinklers manicuring her green lawns of death, in old signs, especially those bleached 76 balls hanging over the desert every fifty miles or so. J., I want to create that beauty of lonliness, recreate it, but I don't quite know how without just moving there and living it. You don't find what I'm talking about too much here in the city, too much immigration and other cultures filtering in. I think that is why I'm going to have to leave here, but I don't know what I'll do when I'm here. It might be a little like trying to recreate the steam coming out of the sidewalks, it just would not work out of context. But I've got to try.

Remember I talked to you about shooting the gun in the desert and how you would never find the bullet, whoosh, all this space would just eat it up? Well, this image has stayed with me. I can't get the image of the gun, this most violent and deadly object being totally swallowed by the vastness of the desert, sucked up and negated. In some ways I feel this would happen to my feeble attempts to retranslate this, that the magic I've felt out there would never come back with me. I think the best piece I could do would be to devise a trip that would take this in, the shooting range and the strip bar, the empty parking lots and the old sign posts, the grey green of a stormy horizon over red earth and bring my favorite gallerists and collectors, viewers and audience, out on this trip around this great and beautiful land.

I've begun a new series of works which of course I call U.S. Elegant. I have begun to make stages, the kind of stages you see in bars, in the real lonely ones where the bartender is some mistransplanted Vietnamese grandmother alcoholic who knows the drinks you want and knows to keep quiet when you need her to. I want to make these lonely stages where no one listens to whomever is on and the performer isn't very good and no one is really there anyways, they've all gone home...

Love,

Nico