Art Across Disciplines: Aria Dean & Rachel Rose

0:03Only connect, urged the novelist Ian Foster. He wrote this more than a century ago. Today, those words resonate more powerfully than ever. Artists and creatives collaborating across disciplines, geographies, and perceptions are truly leading the way. So join us. Let's connect.

0:27Welcome to the third season of Chanel Connects. I'm Yana Peele, Global Head of Arts and Culture at Chanel. In this series, we bring together global changemakers from the worlds of food, film, art, architecture and beyond. Some are old friends and collaborators. Others are meeting for the first time. All are focused on what matters most and what happens next. And now we get to listen in.

1:08Rachel Rose is known for her intricate video installations which investigate our changing understanding of the world. From labour in 17th century England to explorations of outer space. In this episode, she connects with fellow artist Aria Dean who uses film and sculpture to produce meditations on blackness and artistic theory. The conversation touches on their multidisciplinary practices, the use of memes as critique, and how the weight of history inspires them.

1:51I was reading your book last night, which is brilliant. You're brilliant. Thank you. And so much to talk about there. But I thought maybe because I read it last night, it would be a nice place to start. How you inhabit your role as a writer and a critic and a thinker and how that relates to or doesn't relate at all to what you're making, how you think about these two different roles within yourself. It's shifted a lot over the years, I think. I mean, I think that book, which is, yeah, it's like a book of collected writings that's coming out with Sternberg this year. That book is weird as an object for me because it's like writing from 2016 to 2022.

2:31So it's like I'm, you know, 22, 23 years old to like 27 years old. I think there's different dispositions towards writing, I think, even in the book. But I think in large part, I've always thought about writing as part of my practice. And most of the writing I've done has been very much like part of my research practice for my work. So, you know, I was thinking about this yesterday, kind of the like artist as writer versus like the artist as critic in a way even and sort of like a lot of them, yeah, I'm writing about other people's work, but generally I'm writing about it like for myself or to sort of figure out my own relationship to the work in order to understand retroactively something, retrospectively something that I've made or to understand something I want to make going forward.

3:17Like in the book project, there's a lot of writing in there that, yeah, it was coming from a real place of like urgency and like almost like, yeah, frustration, maybe anger sometimes just I think with like a contemporary art world that I didn't feel like had like space to like hold the things that I was interested in or like the conversations. So it was kind of a lot of time like throwing a grenade into the room being like, let's talk about this and um I think if anything as I've gotten a bit older the sense of urgency doesn't I don't I feel like they're like urgent concerns but it's like I'm I'm have much more of like an internal practice of writing and thinking about those things and but I know but I mean you also have you know you work in a variety of disciplines as well I'm curious how they relate to one another for you like video sculpture painting and drawing and how do they relate to one another?

4:09How do you know what format something needs to exist in? And does one come first? Are they in successive phases in projects? Well, up until two years ago, my practice for the past 11 years has been strictly video and the ways that the videos are installed, which I guess are conditions with materials or something like this. So it has not included drawing or painting or even sculpture beyond thinking of the screen as a sculpture. There are like a few different ways I thought of the screen as a sculpture, like the Whitney putting the screen in front of a window, making it semi-transparent so that the color on the screen, when there was bright colors, you would be in a normal cinematic space.

5:01And when there are blacks in the image, they are transparent and you see the outside. So using the screen as a kind of sculptural tool about light and location. Or in Kinsals Breggins, the screens were jacquard woven the way that like Nike knits, like that knitting is woven. And stills from the films themselves were woven into these kind of screens in a sense making them tapestries, but in an opaque gray. So in that case, I was using the screen as a relief sculpture. So for most of the films, the screen operates as just a screen. But when the image projected aligns with the image that's woven into the screen, it becomes relief, like as though the light is pushing into the screen, it creates a kind of momentary dimension.

5:56So really up until two years ago, I was only thinking about sculpture and painting in relationship to the video and the video installation. And I felt strict about that. Actually, I felt, I would say repressed about that to a certain extent. Like I will not do anything other than this. This is all I care about. This is all I want to do. And I want to be clean in what I'm offering the world. Yeah. Can I ask, did you at the moment know why you felt so strict about that? Or in retrospect, do you know why? Because I think I've had similar kind of like similar negotiations with like video and sculpt.

6:38And I, you know, do have been doing sculpture for a long time as well. But like almost increasingly, I'm like, maybe I want to be more strict about this and like, I don't know, it's an interesting choice, I guess. Yeah, for me, I did know why. It came out of a severe doubt that I had and still have about the art world and about making art and about what the role of art can be basically to an audience. It's only worth it for me to make something if I'm both learning from it and learning as I make it. And if I'm creating a container that an audience can actually enter for some kind of attentional sustained period of time.

7:30So I think I felt like for me, the only way I knew how to do that or could figure out how to do that combination of things was in film. And then for me, the installation was an extension of that. Like, how do I figure out suturing the physical experience of the film with the place that it is? How do I draw out form and content into a speaker, a screen, a way that you sit, artificial, natural light, speakers, so forth? So for me, it felt kind of like I didn't know how to learn from or to open up some kind of feeling within painting or sculpture or drawing. It felt to me excessive. Like it was some perspective.

8:13Yeah, I didn't. Yeah. That's changed. But that's what I felt for like 10 years. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. That resonates for sure. It does. Yeah. We're talking about like installation, working across different things. In your videos specifically, what motivates you to approach the subject matter that you do in these projects? I'm led there. So it's not like I pick a thing and then that's what I'm doing. One example might be Enclosure. Like, why did I choose to make a film set in 17th century agrarian England? This is random to a certain extent. But what happened is it's kind of like simple. It was 2015, and at the time I had been offered this commission to do a show at the Park Avenue Armory.

9:00This was before Trump was elected. And the work I had made before that was Lake Valley, in which it required me to, like, essentially up my game on storytelling a bit more than previous works because of the nature of cell animation and the economy of it. So I was like, okay, I'm going to basically learn more about storytelling. So I was like, okay, I'm going to read like Shakespeare. Dumb, but that's what I thought. I was like, I'll go to the source of something. So then I was reading these series of biographies on Shakespeare, which are set in different years, like 1597, 1609. And they just take a year of Shakespeare's life and they talk about what was going into him writing what he was writing at the time.

9:48And there was a page or two in this book, 1609, that described Shakespeare on his journey back and forth to his country house in Stratford-upon-Avon, back to London, back and forth every two weeks, that there were refugees on the side of the road, that just hordes of homeless people everywhere. And I was like, oh, what's that about? Weird. Especially because what was happening in Syria at the time and the refugee crisis across Europe, this kind of mass disruption. It was striking to me. So then I looked it up and started to learn about the Enclosure Acts, which then I just kind of went down a rabbit hole, which is this moment in British history, which then becomes a kind of moment in all of European history, in which the land was being previously untouched, common or royal land that was hundreds of thousands of people were just living on, had farms on, had their whole livelihood on, was being seized, resold, chopped up, forest burned for a new kind of class of person, the doctor, the lawyer, the bourgeois effect of the Enlightenment, to now have country houses, but also to now essentially atomize and industrialize a landscape that was previously not so.

11:12And so the Enclosure Acts became the foundation for the agricultural revolution, which is the foundation for the industrial revolution, which is the foundation for a certain kind of capitalism that we live with and permeates every aspect of our lives today. And so my choice to look at Enclosure and to make a film called Enclosure and to write the story that takes place there was I was curious. I came across it randomly, basically, out of a completely different interest about storytelling. And then I became curious about like, well, if I look at this moment in time, how can I look at where we are now?

11:52So I give that as one example. Maybe it's better to just start with that one. It's an interesting mode because I think it's sort of this abattoir thing I did in Chicago, I think, like lives in the same kind of like methodology, maybe almost in some way. So I think that's, yeah, that's really interesting about your work. And I'm a fan of that. Well, that leads me actually to ask you about your interest in blackness and a simultaneous criticism, strong criticism of identity and how you look at that in your work through the lens of your videos, also your sculptures, and also maybe your choices in subjects when you're writing.

12:38You know, as I was saying before with like the motivation for a lot of both my writing and my practice comes out of, you know, a sort of question about like my own, you know, why do I want to do or not want to do certain things in my own work? And I think for a very long time, you know, since college, let's say, like I've been really interested in sort of the what to me feels like a narrow scope of options, you know, around like what one can do as a black artist, also like as a woman artist, like what kinds of things are you supposed to be interested in? And from that, as an artist, what kinds of aesthetics are you supposed to engage in?

13:13And there's like a very, you know, robust history of writing and work around like what is the black aesthetic. And at a very early point in my career, I started to really begin both through writing and my physical objects and videos, try to untangle like the, you know, what that means. Because to me, it feels obvious that there's no singular black aesthetic. And even further, there's no essential blackness whatsoever to speak of. Like, there's, you can't look at something and be like, well, that's black because X, Y, Z, like, you know, we look at things like hip hop. And like, the only reason people still consider hip hop, you know, that has a relationship to blackness because of the fact that it was initiated by black people in New York, but also like there's something formally about it that, you know, maybe like has a, a texture that relates it back to that, but it doesn't, you know, it, you know, there's now hip hop at an industrial scale and all kinds of people do it.

14:06So like, why does that, why does that have any sort of, that's just like a cheesy example, but like, you know, one that's in popular culture. So I think largely in the last few years, I got really interested in, I got interested in like structural film and materialist film and minimalism as like toolkits to sort of start to look at like, okay like if there isn't you know a clear like cultural blackness or a clear like aesthetic of blackness then what is like the structure of blackness um and you know kind of untethering blackness from identity like untethering blackness from the idea of like being a black person like like blackness being something that like black people just inherently do but rather like some sort of like force in the world that is and isn't related to that so it was kind of like and it was really, it's been, you know, difficult to sort of, it's a very fine line, I guess.

14:56Like, how do you make a case for a very serious investment in blackness, but a critical sense around identity? Well, actually, just going from there, I'm wondering, can you speak about your interest in memes or your interest in work with memes in terms of this question around identity? I read an essay called Poor Meme, Rich Meme in 2017. And it was about blackness and memes. There had been a smattering of articles already at that point that talked a lot about like the use of like African-American vernacular English in memes. The sort of like Vine was still a thing. And there was a lot of like black teenagers were like, you know, making the lion's share of the content that was going viral on there.

15:39and memes were kind of like gaining kind of traction and there was and also a real economy kind of developing around them so I wrote this essay that tried to I guess it was kind of the first attempt to do I think a version of what I was talking about sort of like the structure of blackness being the primary thing so I kind of yeah I wrote this essay that likened the structure and movement of memes to the structure and movement of blackness as I saw it historically Yeah, like collective production, I guess, in part, and sort of like kind of asking not like why, not making a claim for like memes are inherently black, but like blackness and memes share some sort of conceptual affinity with one another that's worth investigating because they also both propose models of production and circulation that evade traditional ownership structures.

16:33So I think that was what was really interesting to me. And that mobilized a lot of like a lot of the work then that I did. That kind of kickstarted my at least mentally my ability to sort of start to make things that felt like they could be. I didn't create a blackness without using like the semiotics of blackness, let's say, you know, things like the things that are just like obviously so cliche, like basketball and cotton and things. But that do appear in a lot of art by black people in the contemporary art market. But when I look back on that piece, it feels very much like artwork, I guess, in a way or something.

17:07There are something that really responds to a specific time and place. And I've found that a lot of the time I've had kids come to me who are like, I critiqued your meme piece in my art history class or something. And I'm like, that's great because it definitely needs to be revised and thought about. But yeah. So I know that Robert Morris is one of your biggest influences and you reference him in your work. You've written about him. What's your approach to drawing on him? And who else are you thinking about? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah. Robert Morris is my, I think both like the structure of his practice and like how, like what he thinks being an artist meant or, you know, what he thought being an artist meant and how he operated in the art world at the time is one major part of it.

17:53And then also like the actual like work and the sort of, yeah, like his project, I think both have been extremely influential on me. And I think, you know, I think in general on the first part, it's like he was an artist and writer and he very much included like writing and criticism. I wrote an art for him a lot. Like, you know, it was very much part of his practice. But as, you know, as what we were talking about before, it was always so much a part of like what he was trying to make. and he had a very playful approach to it. He wrote things that were like under fake names and, you know, major art publications.

18:29He wrote things that were like, you know, performances to be delivered by like actors playing art historians, but he had a very performative writing practice, I suppose. And I think that when you look at his objects, like which are so reduced and, you know, minimal as like sort of one of the like kings of minimalism or whatever, like, and then you read his writing alongside that suddenly what might appear to be like very stoic humorless work suddenly gains like a dimension of humor and playfulness that I think is so important to it and I think also what has interested me in him is um a very like reflexive relationship to his own identity as a white man so he did a lot of photographic performative work and yeah otherwise like performance stuff that sort of parodies various like positions of like kind of like heroic like white male figure like the gangster the cowboy the intellectual and yeah it's there's a critique of identity in his work that I think has been referenced by some people like Maurice Berger kind of like sniffs it out in some of his writing but he's been like really like also yeah just in general, like a soothing presence or something for me.

19:42And yeah, do you have any artists who, yeah, feel like kind of totemic for you? Well, not totemic in the same way, but when you said soothing presence, I immediately thought, oh, that's Robert Smithson for me. Another Robert. Yeah, yeah. Another Robert around the same time. I mean, his book of collected writings, it's like, there's basically three things always on my desk. It's Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, It's Danny Rubin's script for Groundhog Day. And it's Robert Smithson's collected writings. And so, I don't know. That's who I think of as a kind of soothing reference. Peter Goodall, the film critic for me, was like, I had a book of his collected writings.

20:22Which, it's weird also when you go through these, when you come in and out of phases or something. Because I recently went back to this Peter Goodall book. And I was like, oh, because I want this essay that I know I love and it'll help me think through. like I was feeling like emo about a show and I read it and I was like I don't I don't know what like I don't know what it was that this was giving me and I was like I know there's something here and I'll probably in a year we'll come back to it and be like ah but it kind of um yeah having this sort of like you know it's like maybe also like the way that you know sometimes listening to an album like feels really good and you're like oh that's like that was you know 2015 or something and it's like you don't need to go back to it all the time.

21:02But do you feel like the role of the artist has shifted at large? Okay. So I think I want to bring it back to the sculpture that we were talking about before we did the podcast. And I think that it illustrates this because it's such a successful sculpture. Okay. So on the FDR in front of NYU Children's Hospital, there is a very large sculpture of a Dalmatian with a taxi upside down balanced on its nose. So the Dalmatian is almost like playing ball, like bouncing a taxi on its nose. And every time I drive past it, which is frequently, or I turn onto the FDR from the corner of that, I'm like, I think that's the best sculpture of all time.

21:52And the reason I feel that this sculpture is so exceptional is because it's taking two very New York City everyday things, a dog and a taxi cab. It's putting them in relationship to each other. So in other words, let's say it's taking two replicated things, easily replicated images, things that are not in any way unique or hard found. It's putting them together in a position that even that in itself is not so unique. But the combination of the scale is totally surreal and completely impossible and in that beautiful. And it speaks to and for an audience of a child. It's a child that's walking in and out of that hospital or parents of a child that are walking in and out of that hospital.

22:49And they're the ones that see this kind of dog friend, which is also in the form of a sculpture. And literally the image, the sculpture in three-dimensional space is expressing like the impossible can be done lightly and with joy somehow. And like, that's maybe what the audience walking in and out of that hospital directly needs to be reminded of or directly needs to experience. And when they see that sculpture, they get a whiff of it. To me, this is like essentially what artists and art can offer. It can offer specific batteries in the form of sculpture or film or two-dimensional work that give us what we need.

23:38It's been lovely talking to you. So lovely talking to you. Let's do it again. Let's do it again. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thanks for having us. Thank you.

23:53This was Chanel Connect Season 3. It's been great having you with us. Don't forget to follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Revisit conversations from the first two seasons with guests including Tilda Swinton, Kehinde Wiley, G-Dragon, Keira Knightley, and Grimes. Thank you.