T a l kin g Arc w i t h

Ali s on Sa ar

btll hookJ: Alison, eefking about your work, you have said , .., love rhe idea

that materials have memory, the idea of working with mater ials chat have

expe rienced more than I have." T here is in each of us and in rhe objects

that surrou nd us a place of primal memory. I believe rhat we have memo­

ries that extend beyond what we have consciously experienced. That we

carry with in us ancestral memory. \"'hen I look at your art, I am ncr rrou­

bled by the fact that you dra w upon real ities you have not d irectl y expe ri­

enced.

Alison Saar: \Vle don 't JUSt rem em ber th ing s that we've expe rienced.

There are the memories that come to us in visions-as dream s. It 's simi­

lar to when you're g rowing up and there 's this playing and prerendi ng -c­

an inventing of worlds. T hat 's act ually also where I starred gett ing th ese

materials from , and so those sons of ga mes are things I cont inue to do, to

put myselfin those places. Before I do a piece I spe nd t ime in th at imagi­

native space. For examp le. the piece I did abo ut South Africa came to me

afte r I finished reading in the pape r abo ut the life of a boy there. I felt a

psychic connect ion with his story and began from there to invent.

bh: Imag ining as a way to be empat hic, to move into worlds we have not

experienced yet have come to unders tand, is a way of knowing reality that

is no longer valued in our cu ltu re. I found that cr it ics and reviewers com­ment ing on your wor k don 't discuss imag inat ion. T hey are mu ch more

fasci nated by you r fam ily history than by th e way your imagi nat ion

works . And they often assume that your aest heti c vision is shaped more

by family trad it ion in art maki ng than by your aut onomous engaSement

with tha t imag inat ive realm you JUSt talked about. You ident ify with

something and create wor lds around it . It is often assumed that if we have

an expe rience to dra w on. we do not need to rely on imag inat ion, that it

T ALlON'C Aln wn-u AI. ISOl': SAAR n

JUSt son of comes naturally to us in some way. \'Uhen I look at your arc

work, I see it as coming our of a powerfu l imag ina t ion . I don 't assu me

that your expe riences as a black person and your use of black subject mat ­

rer mean that you do not vigo rously work [0 cre ate . Everyone assu mes

th at Picasso was insp ired by African an that he imaged differently . Yet

you r eng age ment wi th Afr ican , Nat ive Amer ican, and other cult ures

conveys an ecrive. intellect ual seeking for inspi ring subject matter that

can go unnot iced or be devalued . Your work is so dreamlik e.

AS: Someone asked me if I dream any of my pictures. I don 't . Actuallr. I

dream all of my anxieti es about making art.

bh: T hat d reaming . tho ugh. is part of the creative process.

AS: W hen I' m working with specific ideas, information from cultures

outs ide of my own. I seek to understand them th roug h my own perso nal

experience in relatio n ro everyt hing I feel: my pain . my unde rstand ing of

love or anger, what I hop e for and dream abou t.

bh: The influence of dreams. whether those that happen when we are

asleep or dayd reami ng, is evidenr in your work in pieces such asSolletifitd.whe re you see th is secret preache r doi ng his th ing and . like a r iff in a

song , you rake it and fiy wi th it , take i t somewhere else. On one hand ,

you 're walki ng around like a no rma l person and you see an image ineveryday life , but all of a sudden you begi n [ '0 have a vision about that

image, a kind of waking d ream. It has a mystica l d imension, as though

you take that conc rete image and you have these X-ray eyes or some­

thing, where that image begi ns to visually deconstr uct and then is rein­

vented in this imagi native space as something sim ilar to what it was yet

different . T hat process is happening throug hout your work.

AS: I make art about everyday experiences and often the concrete process

is very ordinary and mu ndane. I rake the ordinary and go with it into the

surreal.

bh: Talkin g with you abou t your work is different from other inrerviews

I've done, because you are one of my girlfriends as well as a powerful arti st

2<1 AR T ON MY M IN D

whose work I knew, loved, and was moved really deeply by before I metyou, Our speaking together is a more inti mate thing , W hen I was writ­ing my questions, I found myself preparing them d ifferently, like I'dwri te, "Don't you just love it when Bessie Harvey says, 'W hen J fi rstfound him, he was a big limb, but I knew he was a beautiful man: J knewthat when I pulled him om , I said to him, "Ain't you pret ty?" He said,"G ranny, I ain't nobody," but I saw him and I JUSt could n' t wait to gethim home." · I love th is statement - there is JUSt somet hing so basic yet

deep in it. And irs JUSt the eart h iness, the maner-cf-facr tone of thisstatement made by a black woman folk art ist that leads rhe complexity ofvision behind that state ment to be ig nored, go unseen. W hen I th inkabo ut Bessie Harvey's work, I am remi nded of the Buddh ist rea cere­mony: the way she takes something that appears ordinary and exposes itselegance and g race. But she does so by bringing it to a space of simpl icity.A simi lar energy is at work in your scuff, Both you and I love folk art; itenchants us. I am enchanted by your work because of this quality, the way

that so much of it appears simple. but in act uality emerges from a veryconvoluted, complex visionary process.

AS: What 's most amaz ing is that the piece was complete in Bessie Har­vey's mind , and when she saw that thing , that piece was made.

bh: I know, that is so deep ,

AS: And that 's how she makes it , that way is mysterious. Other peoplecan't see it. That 's true of visionaries. They're just nat bogged down with

technical bullsh it in terms of how the piece has to be realized. They JUStsee this thing. t ie it together with wire,or Blocit together with spit, or what­not . The fact tha t their mind does not consciously reg ister the processdoesn 't mean rhat it hasn't happe ned. Most arns rs canr work that way.

bh: All visio nary arrisr s risk maki ng work tha t will not be seen in its

comp lexity because rhey maybe lack the skills to adequa tely articulatethe process. We can see this in the way Horace Pippin's work was writtenabout for the cata log accompa nying the retrospect ive. Critics calledatte nti on to biog raphical details or the social context wirhour speakingdi rectly about rhe images. It 's difficul t to describe exactly what happens

TA LK ING ART W IT H A LIS O N SAA R 2'

in visionary momenrs . J put a lot of sophisticated ideas inro my head thatcome to me from books, from schooli ng , and from other pe ople . How­ever, when J sir dow n ro write, often it 's as thoug h I'm cransponed to amagical space. I don'r always remember what happens. I have a magicalencounter wirh words where all of a sudden something appears on mypage rhar is rcrally not in line with anythin.';; that I consciously thought.Arti stS like yourself, and other folks who've gone to school and beenrrained , also have those moments where all that trai ning falls away andyou're at that visionary moment where you see it and can make it happen.

Intellectu al eli tism , certain academic ways of think ing about creat ingart , leads to the insistence that the process of a folk art ist or a native art istis SO rad ically differem from that of an art ist who's been trained. Because

you have had academic train ing, the folk ele ments in your work thatenable you to fuse the ord inary with the surrea listic can be , and some­rimes are, perceived by people as "cont rived. "

AS: Ir's peculiar, because. again, you know, the separatio n of artis ts intothese two camps happens in art magazines like Art/ orum, where thesepeople arc considered g reat art ists because they're crazy, or becausethey're roeally out there, and [he reality is that it 's a genuine dear visionthat g uides their work. Many arrisrs, taught or untaught , st ill experiencethis magicdl process, but they are forced to demonst rate technical fi nesseto fi t the work inco this rigid , linear format . It has to go on thi s rig idcreek that art dons have dictated art has to go along, It has fa go throughall these machinat ions where one thing precedes another in a linear fash­

ion th at can be docu mented . There's rhis assump t ion that it 's all causeand effect , that thi ngs happen one after another, but theydon 't always. Attimes things happen simultaneously. My art comes to me from direc t ionsthat don 't always follow a ranonnl. Hnea r process.

bh: The crit ic Susan Cra ne writes tha t "Art is not simply the discreet ,delectab le, bea ut iful object . but the transcendental power of creariviey,

the alchemical potentia l of materials." The primacy of material is alwayshigh lighted in your work, rhe way [he material works on you. Unl ikeBessie Harvey, you don't always have the image in mind ; sometimes themate rial makes rhis dem and on you . It 's as though there is this ki nd ofspirit power. Daddy Gus, my grandfa ther, used to say that there was a.

! 6 A RT O N M Y M I NI)

spirit Foroe calling out to us in every object. rnenmes J look at a piece ofyours and it 's as though the material itsel said , "Alison Saar, th is is whatyou're going to do." And it's not-as people seem to think when they'rewriting about your work-that Alison Saarsays, ~Wel l, O K, I'm going to

take my lit tle journey to Mexico now, and I will appropriate such andsuch." It 's not a conscious, premed itated process. Even moments of pre­

meditat ion are disrupted by the unexpected. I was st ruck by a criric sayingthat they ger the feeling that you don't JUSt "use found ob jects," you use"soug ht-after' objects, and I though t , well , but one can go seeking andfind somerhing that one was nor looking for. One can find something andsee in it someth ing that one has been seeking. The desire to flatten every­thing out into this binary model again and again is someth ing that reallyblocks our understand ing of the creat ive process. It is important, when welook at the work of any g roup of people who 've been marg inal ized,whether we're talking about white immigrants or eny of us, that there be a

willingn ess to acknowledge complex- it)'-profund iry- mult ilayeredpossib ilit y. There is so much cultural criticism that extols the virtues ofcultural hybndi ry, tra veling, the notion ofbncolage. of moving betweendifferent environment s. border crossing, all these terms- yet I am fasci­nated when crit ics don't bring these theoretical standpoints into the dis­cussion of your work. Theycontinuallyq uote a phrase you once used whereyou said you often fl,.'Cl as though you are "floating between tWOworlds't-c­usually to refer to your having both African-American and Euro-Amencan

ancestry. Since you talk about this mixed background , crit ics often ignorethe significance of rhe "border crossings" you choose that are not "g ivens."Much of the passion in your work is expressed as you celebrate those bor­der crossings that rake place in the imaginarion, in the mind as well as inreal life, and those journeys are not ralked about enough.

AS: Actually. when I first used that phrase, "float ing between tWOworlds," I was tal ki ng about the rwo worlds of realit y and magic. Yet

when cr it ics applied rhe statement ro my backgrou nd. that made sense aswell. Meanings change. Pieces that I made ten years ago have very differ­ent meanings for me now. W hen people ask me to help them understandth is work , J have to state again and again that fat me the work means d if­ferent th ings at different li mes, dependi ng on my exp erience and as Iaccumulate knowledge.

T"'l- KI NO ...Il.T WITtl ...L1S0 N S...... II. n

bh: Also, histor ical context changes . Much of your early work was very

prophetic in that you were creating art that art iculated ideas ebour bor­der crossing way before there was all this fancy theory, before Bennerrc nads, before all of these things. Yet cr it ics now acr as though you do the"erhnic" th ing because it 's in sty le. And some of them demonize you bysuggest ing that the work appropr'iares the folk or black underclass andpoor expe rience in an oppcreunis nc manner. Yet so much of your workpredates that kind of hedonistic consumerist approach to the "other" thatsays, "Oh, yes, now I have all these ethn ic shops where I can buy cool arri­facts from Africa, Mexico, Tiber ." I had thi s experience yesterda y. I was

hang ins OUt with a friend who was looking for an apartment . He wentinro a bu ild ing where we knew an apartment was for rent, a bu ilding Ihad once seen a South Asian woman exiting. So we went inco the apart­

ment for rent . There were all these South Asian e reifacrs and little Bud­dh ist th ings. I was expecting to meet the Sourh Asian woman I had seenbefore. We opened the door to the bedroom, and the tenant was sin ing inthere . Suddenly I thought about the assumptions I had made, rhar therewould be th is linear correlat ion between the int erior visio n all t hose

objects in space were giving and the person who put them rcgerber. Irhink it 's rhar kind of longing for linear order that people have in a xeno­

phobic and crazy society. So many folks want to be able to identify, codify,contain everything . And we' re constantl y challenged when rbese fi xednotions of ldennry are di srupred . I th ink rhere are some people whowould have been offended by the facr rhar there were no amfacrs in thisspace tha t came from white culture. To me, that gap is interest ing. Jdon'twa nr to place a SOrt of value judgment on a person, saying, "Oh, she'seppropr ieving; that 's bad ." To me it is much more interes t ing to know

what are the energ ies and long ings that move her to chose ob jects! And Ifeel like chat same interest emerges when I see your work, the art ifactsyou borrow from diverse cultures.

AS: Sometimes because of the fact char I was doing my work long beforethere was any interest in mu lt icultural ism. erc., people have come up to

me and said . "Oh , the Wh itney Biennial really JUSt pissed me off. becausehere are all these artists of color being shown, and it was a barrage, and a

m ult icultu ral bandwagon sort of rhing." And I've pointed out to themrhar many of [he arti sts in chis show had been mak ing art for twent y

14 ART O NMYM I NI)

years . Yet it cakes be ing in this show to leg iti mate the art - to make itmore visible .

bh: The moment white peop le decide It's cool to "eat the other," theresponse ro all our work changes. And sudde nly issues of eurhennctey, of"Will the real black person please stand up ?"come into play.

AS: Right. Ir's clear that people are very suspicious.

bh: Alison. we were always involved with Frieda Kahle's work. I've lovedFrieda Kahle 's work since I was a little g irl, bur then when it became thiski nd of hip sig n of cool, I began to feel somehow like my claim to a rela­t ionsh ip to that work is validated not through my experience as a South­ern black g irl involved in spi ritual mysticism or interested in Mexico orwhat have you, but filtered throug h the validation Kahlo now receivesfrom white folks; validared by Madonna, saying in some magazine thatshe's interested in this. It becomes th is wacky th ing , because there's apart of us that wants then to pull back and let ou r fascination with that

artist go, because you don't want folks to see it as coming OUt of this cui­rure of consumerism - where everyone want s to "eat the ot her." Let's faceit , the cultu re of consumerism that eats the othe r has indeed made FriedaKahle a household word in places where she mig ht never have been heardof, and there's a vulgarization of work and process there. However, ro sub­ve rr this, all of us who have loved her work and who think crit ically aboutit have to lay claim ro ccn rexrualize those moments in our lives when thatwork first came to us. The same is true of your work. A lot of your work

calls for a recogn ition of the importance of sub jugated knowledge. Yourwork and your being were act ual ized at a histor ical moment when therewas th is real demand on the parr of African4American people in resis­tance aga inst racism for the recovery of subj uga ted knowledge . Thatprocess of recovery wasn't rben related to class pcst noneliey at regionalsrerus-c- wheeher yO ll are a Southern black person or a Northern blackperson, whether you grew up in a rich or poor neighbo rhood. lr wasrelated co the collective yearn ing to know more about ourselves as blackpeople in the dias pore. tr's as t hough we were saying, "There's thi sknowledge that we don 't have," and none of us have it. So much abo ut

black life- black bisrory-c- bas only recently been documented. Nobody

TAI .KIN G ART WITH Al.l~ON S AA R ?'i

had al l the informat ion . It 's not as ifpoor people were sitt ing on it , and

rich people went and took it from them or what have you; that just was

not the case. Can you talk about you r experience searching for subjugated

knowledg e? W hat did you want that knowledge to do in your life? I

know when I Went to Stanford Uni versity, I bega n 10 see rhe rural South

that I came from in a new way. I went back to those art ifacts that I had

often taken for granted in my life and saw them in a new way. J hear that

same shift when you talk abo ut go ing to roots, both real and imag inary,

that you might not have thought about in Laurel Canyon .

AS: Yeah, for example, I did thi s p iece abo ut the South, and I' ve never

lived in the South, I can say that my rnorher's people came from there; bu t

it was never a concrete part of my experie nce, Yet when I went chere, I Saw

this p lace as a part of my heritage that I did not know anything about. To

me, the South was Hollywood versions of it, Gont u-itb Iht \Vind ancl soon.

I was shocked to find that when I Went there I felt a deep kin ship, a con­

necnon to these surrou ndings, that was rransformar ive,

bh: And the reasons you felt that intense spiritual connect ion canner be

explaiued c-- tbcy arc part of life's mystery, You know, I've been in love

with this man who lives in another count ry, and I was w-iring him a letter

in which I said, "You return me to the Sourh , even thoug h you 've never

been th ere," That his presence doe s this is pure mystery, T he da nger of

identity pol it ics, and of 100 much narrow essentialist value be ing placed

on d irect experience, is 1b.1.1 it denies the realm of magic, of myst icism .

AS: Everyone out there is JUSt highly suspicious of :lny bond between cul­

rure s and folks that can't be documented and expla ined by liard facts, by

d irect experience. Most folks don 't want to feel the magic happen. Whenind ivid uals see my work and feel alie nated , usually it 's beca use they want

my connect ion to th e places to be explained in a way tha t mak es sense,

The work doe sn't exactl y work thar way.

bh: No matter how m uch folks in the academy validate new espiseemolo­

gies- ways of knowing that transcend reason c-- rnosr folks want every­

th ing expla ined in a linear, rationa l way. For example, maybe rein­

carnat ion info rms our sense of connect ion ro places , people, objects we

3ei ART ON MY MI N D

know nothing about. This is a realm of experience that many people inour society migh t say they don 't believe in. j ungs notion of the collect ive

unconscious is so tied coAfrican diesporlc notions of ancest ral knowledgeand ro a belief in ancest ral memory that lives with in people. Wh ile manyAfrocentric thinkers are eager to eckoowledge that there are real arrifacrsthat docume nt African cultural retent ions in the so-called New World ,specifically from the culrure of West Africa, these same individuals refusero acknowledge psychic connections thaI bin d pe ople. lha t t ranscendtime and space.

AS: That is why the work of an untraditional scholar such as Roben: Far­ris Thompson has meant a lot to some of us. He's willing to look beyondthe rational explanatio n. The fi rst t ime I saw him. 1must have been sev­

enteen yeats old. After struggli ng with art histor y. seeing it through theeyes of Germans. of the English, seeing rhe limited way these g reat, pow­erful. wonderful art objects were ta lked abou rc--so cold ly and withoutpassion or cenderoessc--I wasdelighted to seea professor who was willingto rake his tie ofT and put it around his waist to show what a di fTerem pos­

ture in another culture looked like. When he talked about diesporic con­necrionsc--a link between African music and the blues-folks d id notwant to hear it mixed up. really. They questioned how these connections

could be documented .

bh: And connectio ns that can't be scienti fically documented are nor rec­ogn ized as meaningful by the academy. Yet when we do enter those sub­cultura l worlds in the United States at Saneer ie, or in Yoru ba, we enterinro a world where people are tota lly comfortable with nonons ofe bordercrossing that 's nor concrete. that emerges from spirit possession. In thoseworlds. the idea tha t you can be entered by a force and spea k a languageyou don' t know, all of these things, is accepted. Many of the white folkswho talk end lessly about mult iculturalism would be uncomfortable with

truly accepun g ways of knowing that challenge the privileged place thatreason occupies in the \'\Iest . We lack ways of talk ing abour that sense of aconnection with an art ifact from aoorher culrure that feels primal , likemy obsession with altars. As a little child. I Was d rawn ro altars. On e ofmy favorite church songs was one that asked, "Is your all on the alta r ofsacrifice laid ?" And it was sung with th is ki nd of sp irit of angu ish and

TA LKIN!: ART W ITH ALI SON SA AR ~1

long ing that in t rig ued me. I wa nted to see alta rs-to know what

rhey meant in out lives cross-c u ltu rally. I let that passion lead me to

whe re altars can be fou nd. That passion for alt ars t hat su rfaced in a

Sou thern b lack chu rch, in a li tt le to wn, led me to France, toMon tserrat, whe re I saw t he sh ri ne of the b lack Madon na, wh ere I

sawa ll these white hands st roking that shrine . Rather than see ing no

eonnecricc be tween the alta r of th at Sout he rn black chu rch and th e

shrine of rbe black Madonna , I see it as a pa limpsest . where there's a

thread that 's woven th roug h our li ves rhar p ulls us to ward t h ings .

And yo u ate lu cky, Ali son , because you were g iven some of ehe se

th read s early in l ife.

When you talk about your dad being interested in pre-Colum bian art

and African art and da Vinci , he was offer ing a world where you could

make certain connect ions.

AS: That 's true.

hh: And wh at's exci t ing about your wo rk is th e way you make borde r

crossing a sacred yer playful ritual. Thar spi rit of playfu lness rhar I see

in you as a person , the way you like to m ix t he del ighrfu l wi th t he

dead ly serious , is there in you r work . The spi rit of play in folk art or

prim iti ve art is so rarely talked about as ri tual istic, as evoki ng a vision

of li fe, an ontology, th at we can use to apprehend reality. I see that rit ­ual play in specific fig ures you have created , like The Tobacco Demonor

The Col/on Demo» , where , on th e one hand . rhere is p layful ness, yet

th ese fig ur e s are co ns t ruc ted to embod y evil , everyt h ing we mighr

d read.

AS: I think I have to do that, mix the sacred and rhe profane in my work;

it's a process of exorc ism. If I d idn't do ie in the work, I'd JUSt jump off a

cliff. These are const ruct ive ways of facing t rag ic, painful expe riences.

And char's how the slaves sur vived all that pein -c- cbrougb creati ng , by

making music , dance, poetry. That's how, you know, we survive in Haiti,

in Mexico. You JUSt some how rurn it aro und; you're up agai nst death,

then you make death thi s buffoon, this tr ickster. and that 's how you dea l

with what you face, and th at 's how you su rvive it , because ot he rwise

you'd JUSt lay down and die.

n "'R T O N M Y M I N O

bh: I reme mber when I first learned in hig h school about carnival in other

cu ltures , Wle did nor lea rn its deeper meaning , about "eat ing of the

flesh. " those layered metaphysical di mensions. the issues of life and dea th

that are a part of th e carni val. Instead, we were taught to think of carnival

as prim itive p lay, For tOO long in this cu ltu re we have had to witness

African art an d Afr ican-American art ta lked abou t in ways th at deny

there is something happ ening in the work that is deep- not obvious ­

that what you see on the surface may be a smiling face, but the smi ling

face may b e ril ted in a manner that speaks to suffering , rhar change s the

meaning of th at smile. T hat willing ness to crit ically engage art by black

folks in all its profund ity is st ill very diff icul t in a culture ofdominat ion

wh ere people do not learn to look beneath the surface, For example,

many folks look at your piece T~ SN4kt Charmer and see it as G race Jones.

AS: It 's curio us, he becomes G race Jones, in people's eyes, because of his

hairdo. But as I produced the p iece, in my ima g inat ion, it was a snake

charmer, a man who had these po wers , who could hold the snake sus­

pended in his mcu rh. W hether he was a shaman or a g ypsy, he could go

between people and sur things up.

bh: You're arti culat ing thar there 's this ru pture between art istic in ren­

ncnah ry and what is culturally received , Maybe somewhere in your

unconscious you created this piece, which you envision as male, in a like­

ness s imilar to a woman. And aud iences associate that piece with Grace

J ones. I even bega n ro chi nk of it as her, or of her as a m yster ious fi gure

like a snake charmer. I didn 't have problems seeing this image in mult iple

ways. Agai n, it goes back ro breaking out of the culture-of-dominatio ns

insistence on binaries: it has to be eith er/or, it has to be what you int end ,

t here has to be th is control. And I thin k what we've been addressi ng

today is that art is in teract ive in the sense th at the pieces aren't JUSt your

intent ionality. They aren't JUSt even your life experience- they are all of

these d iverse elements coming together.

AS: Th e people who see (hat piece as G race j ones are add ressing issues in

their own lives. And I thin k it 's really great tha t these images are so pow­

erful that people are immediately d rawn to them and that someho w their

lives are being addressed by these images,

l ' ,HK 1N G An ' W lT ll ALI SO N SAA ll H

bb: On one hand , folks proj ect onto your work much that you did notintend; on the other hand , they don 't always pay att enti on to what isthere. I am fascinated by the proactive sexual images in your work. Piecessuch as Fearand PdSJion, Lot 't Potion *9 , and QJlt'f!n ol Slxha evoke pleasu reand danger , and des ire. Romance and desire not as the boy-meets-girlstu ff, but as faral eeerecrions of erotic passion rhat dri ves folks wild , Youmake a link in the work between obsessive longing and suffering .

AS: My experience wit h passion is that it C3n easily turn inro somethingreally self-destruct ive. It 's very scary and , at the same time, it 's alluring ,

seductive. I made this piece DailfeU'ilh D'mgtr, and it 's this woman doinga really hot dance, and there's this male fig ure that at one angle becomes askeleton, and it 's desire depicted as Iife-and -dearh Struggl e, as ali-con­suming , I've always been strugg ling with how f.1.r I can go our there to theedge without really endangering myself, without falling off, The dangerisn't just physical; it 's mental, psychic danger. We Can let go or become soobsessed with a thing that it can reall y kill us and just d rown out everyrat ional though t in our heads. My work explores the tension between thewildness within , the primit ive, and the rat iona l an imal. There is t hat

dual quali ty within all of us. And bcr h are really im porrnnr aspects ofwho we are.

bh: The re is this teasing, seductive q uality in your work when you comeface ro face with danger, You present an image that is ord inary or arcbe­typal. like the heart -using it to symbolize romance and desire, Thenyou expose the da rker side, the vision of being d riven mad by des ire,When I think officnonel work that is akin to your art , works like Mar­

guerite Duras's Tlx Rm'hhing ol LQIStein and Clarisse Lispeceor's writingscome to mind , Like these writers, you create a world where people 's long­ings are SO inrense they th reaten [Q consume the self.

AS: These pieces emerge from personal st rugg le. It was initially very d if­fi cult for me to make those pieces, because it felt like I was walkingaround naked,

bb: I participated in Shu Lea Cheung's installat ion Tbose Plulltring Objem

01Desire , which was at the \Xlhitney, The museum was not prepared for

H A RT O N M Y MI N O

the responses it engendered. In the installation, you could put a qua rte rinto these red phones and talk. I read a very intense, passionate love lett erthat I wrote to a man in my life, and I was really stunned by the numberof people who Hsreoed to it over and over and over. There was even sometension in the museum about the fan tha t they were acq uiring so manyq uart ers . And peo ple were raising the q ues t ion Is thi s art ? or Is it tOOmuch like the real thing ? I mean, you're d ialing 1~900.0ESJ R E , But Ith ink what peopl e heard on those phones that we do n't often hear isangu ish , an aspect of loving tha t we don't often talk abo ut. African­American expressive cultu re, particularly mu sic, has always g iven voiceto rrag tc dimensions of love, We rarely set' an equivalent in art , We do in

your work. Your sculpture Sapphireisan erot ic, sexualized image. It artic­ulates black female notions offemale desirability, the sense that the bira­

cial woman, or white- looking black woman, is trul y sexual, truly exotic,but always rorcured. In your work you expose the inner cont radic tionsthat may not be manifest on the outside. There's the oute r surface andthen there's this inner world that is full of inrerweavings and coruplexi­ties , We can all d raw that heart shape, yet you open up these figures andthere's so much going on , In your Black Snake B/ueJ, who is that mysteri­

ous lady on the bed ?

AS: T he idea for this p iece came to me from the song "Black SnakeBlues," It 's abo ut a black snake crawling on th is lad y's bed -and it 's away to talk about infidelity, t ransgression, The woman's long ing forsomeblack snake to come into her bed is exposed. She needs and desires more.People aren't really ready to deal with f ierce female passion,

bh: The politics of passion and desire that is articulated throughout your

work needs to be d iscussed more by critics. Wle need to do more (0

describe the naked black fi gure. \VIe need (0 talk about the vulne rabi lit y

in these images-the passion of remembrance. These longi ngs that weknow to be universal in peopl e, t he long ing to connect , to experiencecom m unity, to embrace the mysterious. Your work calls us aga in andagain to that realm of mystery.