SPARK
SI-010, from issue3, 2022.
When you are getting really evasive answers, just keep asking:
“What Do You Really Mean?”
Courtney Malick is a writer and curator based between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Her work focuses on video, new media, sculpture, performance, installation and the intersections therein. Through such media, her work parses current sociological issues, behavioral tendencies and cultural shifts by producing research-based exhibitions, publications and discursive events. In addition to her curatorial practice, Malick is also a contemporary art essayist, critic and editor. A founding member of DIS Magazine, she also contributes to art publications such as Art in America, Art Papers, CURA Magazine and Kaleidoscope.
UDÖ You recently had a very genuine interview with Fatima al Qadiri in Kaleidoscope Magazine: what was the framework around the conversation?
CM That issue of the magazine was about collaboration. Fatima and I have always been in the same circle of collaborators so it really made for us to engage in a conversation editorially.
UDÖ Oh, that’s why it felt like the conversation would have happened without publication anyway and the magazine was just the artifact of your relationship.
CM We talk on the phone a lot but I haven’t seen her in person in a really long time because of the pandemic. I think it was the first time I have been to her house in LA and we sat in the backyard. This was right before her new album came out. We talked for hours going off to many, many tangents! So what is published is only a little snippet.
UDÖ But you also interviewed so many visual artists, no? What is an art publication interview interested in knowing?
CM Some artists that I have interviewed are very reluctant to go into much detail. What does their work mean? What their work doesn’t mean? What were their intentions? Sometimes you have to tease out answers to them. I wouldn’t expect artists to be able to easily express what their art means. However once you show real interest in them and their work, they start to reveal threads that they didn’t necessarily include in a press release. Be careful to not get too biographical like: “your mother died when you were young and how that relates to this art project.”. Even though I am friends with a lot of different artists, I care little about the personal journey of an individual artist. I look at art for larger cultural and social issues. That’s why I try not to get too much into personal narratives.
UDÖ What gets artists talking?
CM Most artists get interviewed when they have a show that they are opening for, so it is generally in their interest to promote it. However, it is really helpful to bring references to the conversation outside of an art context in order to make it not only revolve around work. When you are getting really evasive answers, just keep asking: “what do you really mean?”. You have to think about the publication’s readership and context. When writing for an art publication you assume your reader is well versed in contemporary art. But if you are too micro-cosmically talking about the art and the art world, it also loses interest. At the end of the world art is about life and conversations around it should connect back to life.
UDÖ A good interviewer also comes with a point of view. Your Instagram bio says that you have an upcoming memoir chronicling the NYC post-internet art cultural wasteland & glittering overindulgence. I’m curious.
CM Fatima has been telling me that I have to be the one writing about our crazy times in NYC in the early 2000s. When the lockdown happened in 2020, I had all these pieces lined up to be published in conjunction with art shows but you know what happened. So Fatima was like: “It’s time to write your book.” In a time like the pandemic, nobody wanted to read heavy and intellectual art writings but people had a hunger for hearing about young and cool people partying. The Lower East Side was having an Italo Disco moment and my friends were all crazy party people. There are even stories about guys I fucked. However there is a cultural relevance to these stories. It was the last time young adults were living their lives that way before social media and smartphones took over everything. Nobody paid that much attention to the internet but the fact that everything is going to be posted inhibits people’s potential behavior. It limits people from being fully connected.
UDÖ I have been to many passe parties that looked so good online, even though no connection was felt within the group. And contrastingly you are talking about a moment you have documented in your memory rather than your smartphone.
CM If it looks fun in the images, nobody cares if it was actually fun.
UDÖ As you are critical of social life today, you are also critical of normative ways of curating an art show. I was excited to see the show you curated in the Farago gallery where art is only visible through window displays and the exhibition ephemera can be purchased from the newspaper stands around the gallery for twenty five cents. How do you set up a conversation between different works of art?
CM There are always visual or conceptual connections between the work, but also there is the space they are put in. What kind of space is it? Where is the light coming from? What direction people are moving? I see myself as an audience centric curator or writer, so I think the most about the experience of the visitor. You would have all this insider information about these works, the artist behind them and your own interpretation of them but you have to imagine that you don’t have any of them in your head. Sometimes, it’s even better if the works are not harmonious but there is an odd tension between them.
UDÖ Tension activates the work or carries the story forward.
CM You have to find a balance between making a space inviting yet interesting.
Follow Courtney Malick here
interview by Utkan Dora Öncül
Spark Interview-010