studio visit
MARCIA LYONS
interview by Susan Walsh
photographs by Bruce Strong
Marcia Lyons does not like to reduce her work to a particular medium. For the past four years, she's been head of Digital Media Fine Arts at Cornell University and director of MEDIARTSPACE.com, an online atelier. However, she began her public career in 1992-3 as a performance artist and sculptor.
Lyons' strong ideas about authorship, public and personal brand identity, and what she calls "subvertising," using advertising as a way of making a subversive comment on what we consider advertising, have withstood her experimentations and gained her international recognition. She received a National Endowment for the Arts award for her drawings in 1994 and the Rome Prize from The American Academy in 1996 and the Banffe Centre Fellowship in 1997. She has also exhibited in group and solo shows throughout the U.S. and in Europe and has served many visiting artist appointments and lectureships.
I recently caught up with Lyons in her spacious studio on the corner of West Broadway and Lispenard, in Lower Manhattan, where she spends a few days a week when not at Cornell in Ithaca, New York. She is preparing for her second solo show in New York, which will open in the fall at a gallery to be announced. Her last New York show was at Folin/Riva Gallery in 1998.
SW: How did you become interested in digital media?
ML: In 1994 I was invited to ACCAD [Ohio State University's Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design] to help bridge the gap between computer programming and conceptual sculptural forms. I was asked what I, as a sculptor, would want computers to do. I said I would want to feel like I could stretch everything with my arms through the screen. I'd make gestural and organic images, not ones connected point-to-point or interval to interval. The programmers came up with extrusions, but had no means of printing out the images, at the time. They wanted to keep the image in ether--what would later be known as the Internet. But I wanted to make something physical, as that was my orientation to making and performing live. All I could do was make hand-made molds of the image on the computer screen and fill it with resin. After that, I started reading computer manuals. I still didn't own a computer and the ones available for sale were far less sophisticated than what I was working with at ACCAD. I taught myself the basics behind computer thinking, computer in the mind. I felt there was a future in computers and art, even though artists weren't yet using computers. I took a leap of faith and went in that direction, biding my time until printers and software began to offer tools that I could use.
SW: We are watching your most recent works on two TVs, a lap top screen, and a trapezoidal projection on your wall. You've said that you do not like black box, video art. How do you describe your work?
ML: A projected environment, a moving image, a background to your foreground. I want to create an inexpensive "archival library" that people can project in their homes. I call these "treatments". There's a message in light, tones, and sounds in the electrical energy. In the same sense as Cinematherapy - the way we can experience and act out vicariously through movies, as the collective unconscious, without paying the consequences - we can use sound, tone, and light as a certain way of being in our homes that will rejuvenate us. I think there's something changing us that relates to the Internet and globalization. There is another kind of awareness happening.
SW: Early in your career as a performance artist and sculptor, your work had social and political messages. Has that carried over into your work in digital media?
ML: No. If it's there, it has more to do with lifestyle and wanting to control the programming of our own lives, of having the choice. We should have the option to control, buy, shop, and watch what we want, when we want. There's this 'repeat, repeat, repeat' on TV all the time. And 'buy, buy, buy'; 'spend, spend, spend'; 'logo, logo, logo'; 'good, good, good' thing. MTV is the only entertainment product that changes its logo everyday. My kids [students at Cornell] understand that personal branding can change everyday. You can be a Web artist one day and a mountain climber the next. No big deal. You don't have to be set in stone for an artificial time frame, after four years. There's freedom there in that kind of identity. I think the Internet is providing an "authorless-ness" that I totally believe in. A functionality that is interactive and a code that is provided to help everyone get up to speed.
SW: The phrase, "You want to" is seen in one of your recent video wallpaper piece, SKINFLICK. What does that phrase mean to you?
ML: The flip side is "to want you." It's like push advertising, which talks the buyer into their feelings and hooks you. This happens on a lot of CDs. If you notice, the first things kids download is music, using Napster is a case in point. It's their first introduction to creative commercialism and self-identification. For kids driving on the net is voracious. They don't worry about paying consequences or IP [Intellectual Property] because it is free and its there for the downloading and access is the same as ownership. They think, 'I like this, I am this, let's keep going and find the next cool thing, the next cool place to be.' Kids use the Internet as an active source to create themselves. Anything on the Internet is totally freeform. And its best transformation is in terms of Open Source free access. Any controls will cause a similar chain reaction we have with other media, namely propaganda and mass belief systems that are nationalized and very territorial and sway.
SW: Tell me about your work at Cornell.
ML: I teach a Total Television Show, graduate seminar called "The Blue Room Presents". Two class titles were, "TV Talk Shows as an Art Form" and "Body Painting Live Effects." People can see the classes online via www.mediartspace.cornell.edu. I just got a grant to do this class globally through a faculty innovation group. The grant is called Tele-presence, which is a new form of active access and in this case Performance Art collaborations. Sun Microsystems will pitch in servers for any city-site [educational site] that will collaborate with us live. I'm hoping for ones in Japan, Monterey, Mexico, Germany or London, California, and New York City.
SW: Is it helpful or a hindrance to split your time between Ithaca, NY and New York City?
ML: It's hard. Something happens during the four-hour drive between Ithaca and New York. I go into a space warp. I'm really focused in the city. I've got things to do, deadlines, and meetings, things I have to give people. But in Ithaca, things are vague. People don't meet with a focus. When I leave New York, I forget about deadlines two hours onto the highway. So it can be counterproductive. On the other hand, I'm able to work 16 hours a day, six days a week in Ithaca. And my time in Ithaca is extremely self-reflective and rejuvenative. It's good to get out of the City, especially when you are trying to come up with something that's not about the art world. Because, the art world can be all about its self, I think it's important to have something to bring to it.
SW: Who or what influences your current work?
ML: Rauschenberg's White Paintings, maybe, combined with Artschwager's fuzzy furniture and his early Line, Table, Window, Chair book, and Yves Klein's copyright Blue is seminal. I'm into mixing furniture with my images so that the image is in the furniture and the furniture is the architectural space. Judy Pfaff, and her bravely physical coming off the wall installations `view as you go by' looking gave me the confidence to work with architecture and try anything. And connected to that, Rosenquist. Laurie Anderson's range out of the art world, popularizing of Performance into cross-over media, scaling projects and politics, and musical invention helped me to express in ways that made me feel less crazy. I am in awe. I also go to style shops like Moss. I like Rem Koolhaas' futuro vision and taste… and movies: Rosemary's Baby, Demon Seed, and Jean Cocteau's Orpheus. I get a lot of ideas from commercials on TV. I am totally seduced by mediated images.
SW: Which contemporary artists do you admire?
ML: Mariko Mori. Her work is beautiful, but it's annoying that she has so much privilege, which gives her another quicker currency. Venessa Beecroft is also brilliant. Her work is not digital, but it might as well be. Oh, and James Turrell. He's a genius. He does what I'm trying to do in the sublime, but without any technology. He uses the earth and sky, light, craters, and the change of day. Brillant, brillant, brillant. The earth is very theatrical, and he has the ability to frame someone's feelings with his work in a spiritual way. He's very clear, while I'm still in cinema mode.
In general, most artists do not impress me. When someone breaks through to show, I think they then get caught up too fast, too much. People shouldn't have shows more than every two years. They blow their wads and they end up looking weak or showing the same work or creating a kind of coping formula that will work. The art market is cruel on the artists. There is a way artists must be cared for.
SW: So where do you see work going in the next few years?
ML: Being inside, I'm becoming more interested in activating architectural surfaces through a variety of options. For example, wallpaper that changes in the form of projected moving images and sound. It's very sci-fi. I'd like to help people visualize their homes and include these surfaces that create a sense-balance of sound, tones, and colors that are transparent. It could make us all a little healthier. I don't think that's far-fetched. It seems very primitive how we live in boxes. I've also got ideas for authorless-ness through the Internet. I want to help kids understand how they have an Open Source for learning, regardless of whether they are in school or not, and that access is everyone's right. The Internet's message is growth and learning. It's easy to communicate with kids all over world and those participating in Open Source are so generous. It says, "We are giving you all Script (language) for free. We want you to be smart and capable." Why not make a whole generation of really conscious kids? I would like to be a part of this change in culture.
SW: Any final thoughts on being Marcia Lyons?
ML: Its only now in my 40's that I've realized what I am, as an artist. It's been difficult to become. You just can't imagine how difficult it is on every level--physically, mentally, emotionally, relationships, survival, making a living, struggle of family. It's such a struggle just to be able to express yourself. You have to learn to organize the world around you. Other people try to organize themselves to conform to the world. An artist has to organize the world to work with their vision.
