New Romantics: Lauren Collins and Gerard & Kelly

0:00Hi. Hi. So good to meet you. So good to meet you too. Hi. Finally. I know. Welcome to Chanel Connects. I'm Yana Peel, President of Arts, Culture and Heritage at the House. For Season 5, we journey to La Pausa, Gabrielle Chanel's villa on the French Riviera, to hear artists and innovators discuss the future of creativity and the innate curiosity that powers their work. This time, American expats in France connect. Here are writer Lauren Collins and artist duo Gerard and Kelly in the Cloisters of La Pausa.

0:44So we are Gerard and Kelly, and we are artists who are also from America, but now based in Paris. And I'm Brennan Gerard. And I'm Ryan Kelly. Hi, Brennan Gerard and Ryan Kelly. I'm Lauren Collins. It is so nice to meet you all after delving into your work. I have so many things I want to ask you. I feel like there are so many points in common, but so many not in common also that are going to be fun to discuss. So I'm happy to be here with you all at La Pauza. Well, we're very excited to meet you. And it's so funny because I feel like we should have already met in so many different ways. And we've been following your work and reading your work.

1:31Actually, we remember that there was an article that you wrote several years ago about Tina Segal, whose work was very important to our work, especially when we were starting. We have got to talk about The Kiss Solo, your kind of reinterpretation, perhaps rebuttal, of Tina Segal's work, The Kiss. The Kiss Segal. Oh, you found that. Yeah, I am just so curious to learn how you came up with that. Actually, do you want to get into it? Sure. I actually think, yeah, KISS is a good place to start because I think one of the correspondences in our work is relationships and intimacy. KISS solo is a video installation.

2:13Multi-channel video installation. Yeah. And it is actually related to a performance that we made first called Reusable Parts, Endless Love. and the two works are both responsive to Segal's Kiss, which we encountered at the Guggenheim Museum in 2010. And we were challenged by it in many ways. Like Tino, our background is in dance before we studied visual art film. And I think we saw that there was this choreographic aspect to the work. Of course, we were challenged by the persistent male-female relationships. Well, that was what I was going to ask. Was it an important moment because it was a blow-your-mind moment?

2:55Or was it an important moment because it was a, like, we want to have our say? I think it was a bit we want to have our say. And over time, you know, we've met Dino over the years. And a really funny story about when he saw our Kiss Solo project. He said, well, yours has a lot more ass slaps in it. That's what we're looking for. like all right the old ass flap meter um but yeah i would say at that moment it was like the challenge of like no you know we we want to address these issues but from a different point of view right and um so what we did because we were not permitted to photograph or video record the kiss as it was taking place in the rotunda that's like one of the stipulations of tino Seagal's art, right?

3:48Yes, especially then. So we made audio recordings in our cell phones. That's, I mean, undercover reporting. It was undercover reporting. It was. Yeah, get in there. But so you, okay, you got the goods. We got the goods. We deciphered through that process that it was a 12-minute choreography repeated on a loop. And so it was, you know, it was a description of a kiss his right hand on her left shoulder as he leans in to kiss her they descend to the floor i mean it was a bit like sports casting right yeah and we didn't know what we would do with it but then it became the germ of a our own performance and then a video installation where individuals of different genders would perform a kiss solo where they had to do both the male and female parts on their own bodies yeah so we kind of became even though maybe the The first impulse was the recognition that it was only a male and female couple.

4:46So you saw that and that pissed you off, basically. Well, it was also like, how? Or just like you felt it was like, I mean, I'm putting words in your mouth, but just like a failure of imagination in a way? Absolutely, a failure of imagination. And then... But maybe that's always how art moves forward is in the blind spots. How did it go over?

5:11I think it was, how did it go over? I think that the first response was perhaps right on and like more kind of replacing one form of representation with another. But then we started to realize that we were kind of more interested in how representations of intimacy are reproduced and circulated and how those representations tend to find a model, right, which might be called like normative. And it doesn't even matter what the genders are, right, of the two. Right. But there is this idea of romance that has been so constructed. and we were thinking about how when we became a solo it was about that kind of idea of the intimacy with one's self this is something okay i'm like sorry for the swerve but i've been dying to ask you this as people who work with your bodies as well as your minds because i only have one of those modalities like i had this real hang-up about the physical aspects of speaking French, like molding my lips in a certain way.

6:22Yeah, yeah. But because to me, I'm not trained in that. To me, it felt like almost like putting on a mask or is this a certain form of hypocrisy? Like having to like morph not only my, you know, what? Not only what's going on inside my body, but my entire presentation to something that maybe I'm not. But what's it like for someone who feels a license to perform? In the process of the translation or performing this new language, for me, there was a lot of freedom in that. And I think it's also that freedom of almost escaping your origins. Yeah. And that is the side of movement and migration, the more positive side, right?

7:11the kind of new freedom that one can find by being within a strange language in a strange place. And I think that that is something that we really tapped into when we were working on Eileen Gray's work. She's an Irish woman who moved here to France, who built a house actually very close to where we are now. You can almost see it from the end of the garden. She was one of the major architects of the 20th century. For a while, she was completely forgotten. And now there has, for the past few decades, there's been a resurgence and an interest in her work. And we're discovering just how radical she was.

7:54She was mostly known as a furniture maker. Right. Right, I know the lights. The lights. The lights. Chair. And the chair. Yeah, right. She always was kind of, that being a stranger is also about becoming more free. Yeah. I mean, that's something the three of us, if I'm extrapolating correctly from your bios, the three of us have in common hardcore provincials. North Carolina. Wilmington, North Carolina. North Carolina. South Carolina. Ohio. I mean, Pennsylvania. But it's different from someone, I mean, from growing up in New York City. Totally. Of course. Did you consciously want to reinvent yourself?

8:34I don't know if it was entirely. Yes. Oh, Ryan. The simple answer. My first encounter with culture was when I was 11. And my parents drove myself and my two younger sisters to New York to see Cats. Hell yeah. The Gateway musical. It sure was. It's like you do something like that and it opens a whole universe. I remember driving back on Interstate 80 heading west and I'm looking out the back of the car at the disappearing city, tears in my eyes, and I was like, no, I'm going there. So that was a very clear decision to get out and reinvent myself. And, you know, there's a lot of correspondence to both Eileen Gray and Chanel in this respect, I think.

9:28This kind of self-fashioning. So it's interesting you say, did you learn French by kind of imitating the physicality and gestures of the French? I'm like, I think I learned New York that way. Oh, that's so funny. You're right. I also had to change my language and how I spoke. I mean, so did you guys. Right, there's definitely like a code switching. And then when you go back, are you able to slip easily back into... Easier than I might wish to. Yeah. I was reading Vivian Gornick's memoir, Fierce Attachments, which I love so much about her. I was just thinking about her. That's so funny. Oh, that's incredible.

10:05About her upbringing in the Bronx and how her mother just, you know, scraped and scrabbled and put her everything into sending her daughter, to making it so that her daughter could get an education. And then once she did, she was outraged. Yeah. How dare you speak these words that I don't understand? Yeah. Which is, you know, there's that freedom, but then there's also the worry that you're alienating yourself from who you are or from what made you. It's a fine balance. It is a very fine balance. I mean, because we're touching on, like, the link between translation, repatriation, which is what we're doing.

10:51I don't think I'm going back, right? Yeah. And the transfuge, class transfuge, like the kind of. Right. Yeah, don't you love the phrase in French, the social escalator? Isn't that? Yes. And the class transfuge. Yeah. Yeah, and I think that these are very pertinent topics right now, and they're definitely structured our life. I don't know if you've read A Woman in the City. Is it called A Woman in the City? It's her latest one. Yeah, I haven't because I just. You just read The Fierce Transfuge. I'm on a Vivian Gornick tag, and that's next. That's great. So tell me what I have a little. Well, this is about being a single in the city.

11:25And I think that this state of freedom that one could have in the solitude is something that Eileen Gray knew a lot about. And our kind of speculative, the film is a speculative fiction, right? And we're trying to imagine what her last day and night was in the house, right? Which is really so funny because it's right just down there. and I think that one of the things that she was dealing with was attachments, attachments to place but also to other people like entanglement and then the decision to be alone, to be single, is this continual difficult practice, right? But there is great freedom in that too.

12:09Well, there was such a sense of me watching the film, the sense of trespass spoke to me so much. You know, it felt like she had her, you know, the Wolfian ideal. She had created that for herself, a room of one's own. And not only a room, but a perfect, you know, villa with her witty stencils and everything, you know, a place for everything and everything in its place. And the way she was dressed and you sensed order. and contentment in her life. And then everybody comes in and takes her space in a way. And then because the film was so interesting and because you stoked my curiosity about Eileen Gray, whom I didn't know very much about, then I got to reading about Le Corbusier and the murals and the afterlife of the house.

13:04And I loved the way that you were able to give a premonition of the trespasses that would happen later. Absolutely, absolutely. But this also gets back to the nature of home itself. And I think that we have this idea that home is a kind of remove from the world, but you have to, it's actually more, I think more we have to think about what is the boundary between the world and the home. So it, but I think that she was really consciously trying to build a home and then there was a trespass. So that boundary, she had not yet figured out that boundary yet, I think. But so what does it mean to you?

13:45I mean, are you kind of going with like the hermit crab model where your home is where, you know, I think you can also find a home, like language can be a home. It can be a place as much as a nation state or as much as, it's interesting to think about expanding or, yeah, expanding the notion of home. Where do you feel at home or where do you make your home? I mean, I think the search, I mean, this film is the most recent chapter. We call them chapters. Very linguistic, I guess. In a long kind of study of different, mostly modernist homes. and we're usually looking at the relationship that was kind of obscured or set of relationships that might have been obscured and maybe even was the impetus for the design.

14:43So a home like Eileen Gray's or Le Corbusier's City Radius where we worked before, the Schindler House in Los Angeles, these sites are often narrated for their formal invention, but that's rarely why they were built. Because that's not how we, it's not how you go out in public and talk about your art too, right? It was so interesting to know the intimate and the emotional backstory behind. Yeah, I mean, like you look at - I mean, you're really, you're trying to get into that, which is - Definitely. And that is, I think it's also what, it's our own emotional backstory that drove us in our work to investigate the architecture.

15:29And we were doing this work, like the Kiss Solo, around the couple, in part because it was the moment when we were kind of reflecting on, I think we went to art school and realized we were the only duo there. And it was like weird. And it was, we had. Did you think there were going to be a lot of duos? Yeah. Maybe a trio. Exactly. I think it had just become natural for us, right? How did you start working together? This, oh, we met at a... We met in New York. We met in New York. At a party, as happens, and immediately within three months made a performance together. And because we had no resources, we moved in together immediately following that.

16:18And I think we thought, I mean, we were a couple. We were a romantic couple and living together. But I'd say our primary activity, because every couple needs an activity, was making art. And if we hadn't been 20 years old, I think... Better than whittling. We might have understood that from the jump, the nature of this intimacy was about co-creation and not necessarily cohabitation or the co-creation of domestic space. Right. We were there to make art together, but it took us 10 years to figure it out. So where do you, I mean, having this history together, these different frequencies on which you either do or have known each other, where do you find solitude?

17:09I'm fascinated by that because for me, my process of creating is like locking myself alone in a room for hours on end. and but the older I get it's funny because I've started really craving collaboration I think now you're getting to the question of architecture because we went to graduate school we discovered we were a duo that it was a unique thing you know yeah we did this series of works around the romantic couple because we we knew we were not a romantic couple but we understood there was something very important and significant. We felt like we needed to study it in our work. Like, what is intimacy?

17:55Right. You know, what is a couple? And that led us to, you know, leaving school, returning to New York, moving back into the apartment we had lived in as a couple. Is that a work of art? Because it should be. Like, just give it a title and call it a day. Yeah. and needing to kind of read adaptive reuse our you know tenement apartment in Bushwick now as a kind of uncoupled couple and it was the recognition of how impossible that architecture was how resistant it was to our desire to live in a different way than a romantic couple that led us to modern living, to this project of investigating modernist domestic spaces.

18:47So just to make like a language analogy, you found that architecture was a kind of grammar that was becoming too constricting. Like you wanted to find new ways, new forms of expression, or you wanted to know the rules so well that you could then break the rules, which is also what you can of course do with grammar and language. Yes, I do think we felt very limited by the grammar we were working with to write the kind of ongoing story of our relationship. And as artists, of course, we are telling our own story always through. Yeah, I call that embedded biography. Embedded biography. If you're writing about something, I mean, I just mean that's not a real term.

19:25But I always think about it because I just finished a piece about, it's kind of the Algerian Nutella. And it's a hazelnut paste and it went viral this summer. And then the EU banned it and there was a whole polemic around it. But I thought it was kind of the perfect Trojan horse for writing about the Franco-Algerian relationship. And anyway, I got really into it. But the way I ended up writing it was totally also as a Trojan horse for my story. It was about, you know, homeland and how immigrants relate to the place they came from. And what happens when the place that you came from changes dramatically?

20:06Well, I think also the way that we, I mean, it's also very interesting the way that autobiography appears in work. You know, like I was just thinking. In our work? Our work, but also even where we are now. Like how this, we're in this courtyard where it's modeled off a Cistercian Abbey, which is also where, you know, Gabrielle Chanel grew up. So the ways in which we're not always fully aware of the ways in which our autobiography, our most important subjective experiences, those things that shape our vision of the world, how they show up in our work and our decisions. Yeah, and I'm just thinking about how your early years and your unconscious and everything that goes in, those early experiences are also something you can try to shake like an accent, but it's going to come surging out.

20:59You know, even if you master another way of speaking when you stub your toe or the other thing linguistics. Yes. Like at the moment of orgasm, you're always going to speak in your real voice. Your mother tongue. Yes. Your mother tongue. Exactly. Exactly. I'm saying a lot. Yeah. No, but it kind of goes back to this question of like about travel and freedom, what we were talking about before, about this. It's a dialectic between the freedom to change, but also there's certain aspects of yourself as you continue to work, right? As an artist, as a writer, that you realize what you cannot change about yourself.

21:36And so it's this like constant push and pull, you know? And yourselves when you're working. Yes. together. Yes. Is it? So I think this is why, because we are a collaborative and we've been a collaborative for 23 years, so there was not, there's no solo practice outside of it. Right. Yeah. But we're two individuals in a collaboration. So language is essential. Is it easier to communicate in an artistic collaboration than a romantic one? Oh. I mean, what are the respective communication challenges?

22:21Okay. I'm thinking about physicality now. I'm thinking about in a romantic collaboration or romantic partnership, you have a whole other language. We also have a physicality in our relationship, but I would say language. I feel that when we met, we started a conversation. I remember that conversation. The day we met. Literally, what was it? What did you start talking about? We met at the Rainbow Room. What a great period detail. So the Rainbow Room is on the top floor of Rockefeller Center, right? It's in the 40 Rock? Is it 30 Rock? It was the restaurant that slowly spun around itself. Yeah. With a view onto Manhattan.

23:10I think that might be an architecture that you need to revisit. It's true. It was an architectural event. I was a ballet dancer at the time. And so customarily, kind of being invited to drinks. And then I decided I would just crash and stay for dinner. Nice. And I was told you can, but you've got to sit with the staff, which was Brennan. And he was telling me about, you were working on a 1989 portfolio. It was an art auction. And so he's talking about Kiki Smith and Nan Golden. And my mind is blown because I knew nothing about art below 14th Street. And you couldn't, like, Google it under the table because it was 23 years ago.

23:55Exactly. And I just remember how animated Brendan was. And Charles Ludwell, he knew so much about the award. So I didn't really know that much about it. But I was extremely passionate and extremely passionate about things that I had just discovered recently. But isn't that also part of a relationship is that you discover something, you get a passion, you share it. It's like there's not, you don't actually become an expert on it. You're actually kind of like, you're just sharing a passion. That's the best part. And particularly in a city, there's a whole kind of like layer of discovery that goes with every relationship.

24:30You know, where does that person's restaurants? And then you break up and it's like redacted on the map, you know, places you just can't go anymore. I feel like everyone, if you live in a city long enough, particularly when you're young. I mean, to go back to your question about what is, is it harder? What is the artistic versus the romantic? And I think that one of the things that happens in a romantic relationship that we've learned too through the work is that you have all these codes. And in an artistic collaboration, there are no codes, right? There's really, like there's codes in romance.

25:01You can kind of draw upon the help you at the beginning. There's all of the myths that we have culturally. Okay, the framework. The framework. There's a framework for how this is supposed to go or can't go. There's a time. Yeah, that's super interesting. But then you stay in a romantic relationship long enough and the codes are also no longer helpful, right? Exactly. And that is the point I think that got really interesting. I think that's a little bit kind of how we, so it was after 10 years into our relationship that we uncoupled. And there was something about that that was very interesting.

25:36But also that at that moment when the codes no longer work and you do have to invent something. This is going to be, you guys are really touching something. I mean, this is going to be an earnest one, but that's kind of like the project of life. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think there's something incredibly poignant about just knowing that you have gone through the passage of time with someone and that you've created a history. And like, to me, that there's a lot of weight to that in a romantic relationship. I mean, sometimes, you know, that can drag you down too. But I, yeah, I really connect.

26:20with that. Time can be a holy thing. We've been talking about the notion of timeline in private life and intimate life. But I've been thinking, I've spent the last almost 10 years writing, working on a book that's almost done, about what began as a white supremacist massacre in my hometown of Wilmington, North Carolina. And it's also thought to be the only successful coup d 'etat on American soil because the white men, the white aristocrats of the town went out, they murdered black men in the streets, and then they marched to the city hall and they overthrew the municipal government. And this happened in 1898, and it's usually told as a story that begins in 1896 with an election, and that at the outer limit ends in 1900 with the state legislature passing a grandfather clause disenfranchising black men.

27:12And the whole project of the book is to expand and blow out the timeline of that story and look at the long-term consequences, you know, into the present moment, into the consequences for people who are living today, both families. It's a multi-generational story in the way I tell it, but it's a political story too. And so anyway, I think it's incredibly important to think about moving the goalposts and the parameters of history because how you interpret history depends on where you think it begins and ends. Totally. Wow. That sounds really powerful. And this happened in your hometown where you go?

27:55In Wilmington, North Carolina. Yeah. And is it a foundational myth kind of of your place or did you have to do it? No, it was kind of hushed up for a long time. And of course there were people who knew about it because they had suffered or survived or because their ancestors had been perpetrators. There were people who knew, but there weren't people who talked about it in public for quite a long time. That's changing. But no, it wasn't a foundational myth at all. It was a taboo. Reminded us of me, of like, reminded me, I'm not in your head, of part of the reason why we made our film, Eve for Eileen, at Eileen Grace House was because we were told a story that we knew was not historically correct.

28:39And we didn't have a lot of the resources because a lot of the archival material is not there, and plus we're not historians. But so you smelled a rat. We did. Just from the start. From the start. So we realized we needed to turn to fiction and to art in order to, I would just say, we're not trying to tell the story, but to what you're saying, open up history. Absolutely. And in a way, watching, I so envied you. the freedom, the liberties that you were able to take. And I don't think they were emotional liberties, is what's interesting. I mean, you can sometimes get at a greater emotional or spiritual truth through fiction.

29:22I feel like we've talked so much about history and time. What about the future? Like, what are we doing now and what are we doing next? Aren't we moving in here? Oh, yeah. I already called my room.