STUDIO VISIT
LARA TAUBMAN talks with Liz Cohen about her "Bodywork" project in her Phoenix, Arizona studio, May 2007
OTHER STUDIO VISITS
Liz, Give me an update of the project at this point?
Right now I am working on a prototype that I am almost done with for these sliding panels on the car. When the Trabant becomes an El Camino it becomes six feet longer but it leaves a lot of holes in the car panels. I have to figure out a way to fill in the spaces and have it all collapse when the car closes and be straight and look good. So I have been working at home on the prototype trying to figure it out.
Is this the last step of the car’s structural mechanics before you actually paint it and put on the finishing touches?
No, there’s one more major step which is the sliding roof. The cab of the car goes into itself to make it go from being a Sedan to becoming a little truck. So let me show you what I am talking about. If we go to Myspace.com there is a little video link to watch a small video I have posted on Youtube.com.
By looking at images and her short film on Myspace Liz explains to me the workings on the car
.
So these panels that you are creating right now for the prototype are made of plexi-glass?
Yes, but the real panels will be made of fiberglass and then the rails and the hinge pins will be made of steel – I’ll make that all on the mill in the shop.
So you are fabricating new panels that will fill in the open spaces when the car contracts?
Yes. The prototype is for scale, testing, etc.
I remember the drive shaft you had to have fabricated especially for the car and you had to keep returning it to the shop to get the specifications right for it. Are you fabricating these pieces yourself?
I will actually be doing all the fabrication for this so I will be making molds of the panels and creating all the parts. The drive shaft had to be fabricated because it was splined so when it rotates all the parts spin at the same time. The body shop isn’t a machine shop so we don’t have certain machines so the work had to be sent out. But we do have a mill and a lathe that makes it so I can fabricate these new pieces myself.
And is that something that the guys tutoring you at the shop will walk you through?
Yeah, Bill (Cherry) walked me through it. I mean he can’t hold my hand through this because he’s on the clock so I talk to him on his breaks. He tells me how to solve the problem then I am on my own so I have to figure out how to solve a lot of things myself.
I feel like I have been really fortunate. I can’t tell you how many people have helped me with this project. People like Don Barselotti at Elwood Bodyworks who’s hosting me at the shop had faith when I just showed up at the shop two years ago and I asked if I could do this thing and he said yes even though he’d never met me. I have been there for a long time now and it could be space they use to work on a car. He doesn’t charge me a cent and they have been really generous with me.
Then there’s Creative Capital without whose professional monitoring support I don’t think the project would be where it’s at right now or have gotten the attention that its gotten. My friends have been very supportive and when I go to the specialized car parts vendors all over Phoenix I can’t tell you how many discounts I get when I tell them what I am doing.You know people want to help out when someone is doing something. They want to be a part of it or help to make it happen.
Has it been easy to sync all the different elements of this project, i.e. travel, being in the shop, doing emails and business everyday?
I have been juggling all this stuff. It takes a little longer than it would if I had a whole bunch of assistants but I don’t have an assistant. I think its just accepting that this takes awhile. One of the biggest challenges has been to cancel out the noise of people that don’t understand that this could take so long. People don’t understand how long it takes to build a car but on top of that I’m someone who has never built a car before and on top of that I’m not hiring someone else to fabricate it.
If you did have the resources to fabricate this and you wanted to do the same project would you?
No, it would be a totally different project. Like I just said, I think a lot of people are really surprised how long its taken to build the car but I think if you sit down and look at all that I have juggled to be able to make this work, I mean: raising the money, securing the space, learning how to do something from the ground up.
For me this project came out of a dissatisfaction I had with my previous project, the Panama Project. I got frustrated with it while I was working with a group of transsexual sex workers. Over time I became closer to them and they started asking me to dress up when I was photographing them. I hit a wall with the kind of relationships that I could create there because there was a barrier that I would never be able to penetrate around the group membership. I am not interested in doing sex work so it made me start to think about the boundaries of group membership. As someone who was interested in documentary and investigative journalism getting in and being able to become a part of something is important. Getting invited to someone’s house which was a big deal to me wasn’t enough anymore. I felt the Panama Project was truncated by not being able to have the full experience of being a part of what I was looking at. If it was going to be an investigation then I wanted to have the total experience of being an outsider and an insider. I wanted to design my next project so it could reach its full end.
Do you think that you have achieved that on the Bodyworks Project?
Yes, I mean its complicated what makes you “in” and what makes you “out.”
What do you mean?
Well, you can only ever really be yourself, I mean you can’t actually be inside of someone else’s psyche. So in a way you are always the other. I haven’t finished the car yet so it’s hard to tell. I mean, I think I have gained some cred so far with the guys at the shop but also the mini-truck guys and low-rider guys through the Myspace and Youtube sites. Those have given me some level of credibility. Part of it is that I chose to do something where I don’t fit the stereotype of the person who would be building the lowrider and my East German car doesn’t fit the stereotype of the German car that would be made into a lowrider.
What stereotype is that?
It’s the archetype. Like a 1963-64 Imapala car and then the Latino guy in his twenties or thirties. Of course, it’s not the way the whole custom car world is – it’s pretty diverse and lots of people are there with different motivations. But I think at the car shows that me and the car will always be a freak element. The car is a freak element, me being the builder of the car is a freak element.
You’re a woman…
Yeah, partly because I am a woman and partly because I grew up with professional parents, I didn’t grow up around people who used their hands. I mean my Dad was a surgeon so I guess he did use his hands but in a different way. I didn’t grow up around a lot of people who tinkered around. I don’t have that in my background anywhere.
Do you think the lowrider people will look at you as an artist or a mechanic or both?
I think the audience is so varied that people will come at it in different ways. We all recognize it if it’s a weird car but I think a lot of people in the United States don’t know what a Trabant is. I don’t think people have that much access to them as an idea or as a car. Alot of these guys that have the crazier cars really have conceptually driven projects themselves. Some of them have really complex narratives around them so it’s hard to say how people do come to it.
So now that you are at the tail end of this project with about 6 months left in it do you think it has answered your desire to infiltrate a group more deeply than the Panama Project?
I think it’s hard to answer in those terms. I have had to do certain things by myself and I have had to face things that have been immense challenges for me.
Such as?
I now understand what goes into the labor of love of building a car. It’s not so dissimilar as to what it’s like to be an artist.
I started this project right after graduate school. I was living in the Bay Area at the time and I hadn’t established myself as an artist yet, I was teaching adjunct at different places and I had this big idea. I had no money to fund it or knew what it would take to make it. It was a challenge trying to find a new place for the car when the Oakland lowrider shop I began the car in closed. When I needed to find a new shop I realized I couldn’t make the project happen if I was also teaching several days a week, going to the shop on the days that I wasn’t working and balancing a shoestring budget.
I quit my jobs in San Francisco and moved back to Phoenix, Arizona where I am originally from. I cut out my overhead by moving in with my mother which was a difficult decision but I had to make the sacrifice for the car. Then I found Elwood Bodyworks to host the project. So a combination of my mother’s generosity, getting the Creative Capital grant and the shop were the things that saved the project.
So when you are done with the car what are your plans for it?
I want to compete with it and see if I really did something. I will show it primarily in the Southwest and then see how it’s received. I’ll compete in the radical section of the shows and hopefully get some recognition for what I have done.
I know that the bikini model is an important part of the project. Are the car shows going to be performances for you? Will you let the car be judged as the car alone?
Well, it’s hard to figure out where the competition begins and ends, I mean the act of competing the car is a performance but I will be at the shows in a bikini.
How has the persona of the bikini model transformed over the course of the project?
I think that the first pictures look a lot different than the last pictures. Grinder, 2005 is one of the first pictures and Steering,2006 is one of the later pictures. Ones more coy and one’s more in charge. The Steering picture is a lot more commanding.
I think it’s interesting at the beginning you take a more coy stance and then as you find out more about the car over time you take a more dominating role which has really challenged a lot of people.
Yes, my relationship to the project has changed. In the beginning I think I fetishized the tools a lot more. I mean to me the tools are still beautiful, they are amazing objects. The photographs are a way to document the project, I see them as movie trailers that encapsulate every aspect of the project in one picture. So they also document where I am, where the car’s at and where it’s at in the shop.
What has been a real change for me from the first to the last pictures is my relationship to the guys in the shop. In a way the last pictures I took shows that my relationship to the guys is so much closer. Like my favorite photograph was the one in the lunchroom. (Lunchroom, 2006) It's two guys, Chico and Abraham and me as this kind of apparition genie figure. It’s a funny photograph. The car’s not in it – its about the shop. It’s about my relationship to these guys and the lunchroom.
I know we talked about this once but how have the guys related to you as a sexual figure in your photographs and how does that figure into your daily interactions with them?
You know the guys are totally cool. I’m like another person who works at the shop to them. I mean, obviously my body relationship to them is different. They don’t roughhouse with me, they do a little now but they didn’t at all before. So there is that. Then when I do the bikini shoots, it’s just accepted as a weird event.
Do the guys like being photographed?
Some more than others. I mean they’re working when I am doing these, they’re on the clock so I have to be respectful of the shop’s time and everybody’s time.
Is it entertainment for them?
Yeah, I think its cool for them to see the car develop. Especially since no one at the shop thought I was going to be able to do it. There was this disbelief that I couldn’t figure this out. They don’t think that anymore and I think it’s been exciting for people to see this kind of weird Frankenstein be born.
I would like to talk about your relationship to Hollywood musicals and how that relates to everything you do?
I don’t know about Hollywood musicals but more about Broadway musicals… You know, I loved Annie as a girl and I wanted to be in it. I went to the tryouts for it when they were in Phoenix.
Did you get in?
No, I didn’t but I was in some other musicals. (laughs) My parents took me to see Les Miserables, I saw Phantom of the Opera… But some of my favorite musicals growing up were Jesus Christ Superstar and Hair. I like how musicals are about bigness. I think of all my pieces as opera “bigness.” I like that “bigness” feeling. When I finished the Panama Project I was coming to terms with some sad things in my life and the subject matter was difficult. When I came out of that project I knew I wanted to do something joyous.
There is also an element of “dress up” in your work.
I think as far as theater and acting, my project has a relationship to method acting. It’s different in that I won’t be doing a performance of this later – the photograph is the performance.
Talk a little about how you have been perceived by feminist thinkers or your relationship to contemporary feminism on this project.
I think it’s so hard to put a finger on what contemporary feminism is but I think there are so many varied responses to my work. Like I’m getting emails from young women who are writing their theses and are including my work and their interpretations of it. There are people who are very angry about the project who think it’s like a jack-off or dangerous or that it’s self-degrading.
I have said this before in interviews, I didn’t invent the trope of the pinup bikini model. It’s been around for a long time and its here to stay. So I’m not going to waste my breath fighting it. If you look at the way pop culture is right now everyone has a relationship to what once called soft porn. I don’t think its soft porn anymore its just a part of the way people present themselves. It’s all over the pop culture sphere. So this isn’t shocking, it’s not new. I just think it’s a play to make a power pull and how to use it. I think every action has a lot of room for varied interpretation so it depends on how people are coming at things.
Wasn’t it Emma Goldman who said “It’s not my revolution if I can’t dance to it?” So I think this is the same conversation people have been having for a really long time.
Is there anything else you’d like to say about Bodyworks?
Well, I feel lucky that the project is always a piece so its always show-able. I never really have to be in hiding. You know, the project can be engaged with all the time.
Are there any future plans that you want to talk about here?
The next project is underway and will be a musical, a film, a play and a live performance.
Great! Thank you!
