The seventh season of The Artist’s Institute is dedicated to Lucy McKenzie (b. 1977), a figure whose work, quite fittingly, plays with both terms—artist and institute. For McKenzie, inhabiting a particular genre or style, be it of painting, fashion, or literature, is an occasion to test the boundaries of artistic work and to play with the armature of how an artist is produced.
McKenzie makes works drawn from the artistic milieu of the cities and social circles she inhabits. Early paintings appropriated the language of 1970s Scottish murals, while more recent projects have reconstructed archetypal domestic interiors by employing faux finishing techniques. McKenzie has also founded a record label, a bar, a fashion line, and is currently experimenting with the field of crime fiction. Each of these forms enables her to construct a world on her own terms, while avidly celebrating and supporting the artistic pursuits of those close to her.
In this new season, we dedicate ourselves not only to McKenzie, but to the coterie of friends and collaborators she brings with her, and to the friends and fellows that have been carrying artists’ conversations forward at The Artist’s Institute over the past three years.
Interview with Lucy McKenzie
Jenny Jaskey: We are about to begin six months together at The Artist’s Institute. We’ve divided your time here into four “episodes,” a nod to television and its unfolding plotlines and rotating cast of characters.
Lucy McKenzie: “Episode” can refer to an incident, unfortunate or otherwise.
JJ: I enjoy that potentially more sinister take on the episode, one closer to how suspense fiction unfolds, or how collaborations can go awry. As with many of your past projects, at The Artist’s Institute you’ve asked a number of long-time friends and collaborators to join you for the season. What attracts you to working this way?
LM: It’s not unusual within the performing or applied arts for people to work collaboratively so it’s surprising that it’s still considered so in relation to visual art. Opportunities can be shared. My collaborators do something I want to be close to. Also, working collaboratively, like with writing, means I can better control how my work is contextualized. … Read more
The seventh season of The Artist’s Institute is dedicated to Lucy McKenzie (b. 1977), a figure whose work, quite fittingly, plays with both terms—artist and institute. For McKenzie, inhabiting a particular genre or style, be it of painting, fashion, or literature, is an occasion to test the boundaries of artistic work and to play with the armature of how an artist is produced.
McKenzie makes works drawn from the artistic milieu of the cities and social circles she inhabits. Early paintings appropriated the language of 1970s Scottish murals, while more recent projects have reconstructed archetypal domestic interiors by employing faux finishing techniques. McKenzie has also founded a record label, a bar, a fashion line, and is currently experimenting with the field of crime fiction. Each of these forms enables her to construct a world on her own terms, while avidly celebrating and supporting the artistic pursuits of those close to her.
In this new season, we dedicate ourselves not only to McKenzie, but to the coterie of friends and collaborators she brings with her, and to the friends and fellows that have been carrying artists’ conversations forward at The Artist’s Institute over the past three years.
Interview with Lucy McKenzie
Jenny Jaskey: We are about to begin six months together at The Artist’s Institute. We’ve divided your time here into four “episodes,” a nod to television and its unfolding plotlines and rotating cast of characters.
Lucy McKenzie: “Episode” can refer to an incident, unfortunate or otherwise.
JJ: I enjoy that potentially more sinister take on the episode, one closer to how suspense fiction unfolds, or how collaborations can go awry. As with many of your past projects, at The Artist’s Institute you’ve asked a number of long-time friends and collaborators to join you for the season. What attracts you to working this way?
LM: It’s not unusual within the performing or applied arts for people to work collaboratively so it’s surprising that it’s still considered so in relation to visual art. Opportunities can be shared. My collaborators do something I want to be close to. Also, working collaboratively, like with writing, means I can better control how my work is contextualized.
JJ: I am drawn to how you use the art system—which often privileges the individual artist, if only in name—to the advantage of a whole group of interlocutors. So, for example, responding to a solo show invitation with a group exhibition, or channeling resources from gallery sales into a project that won’t be monetized in the same way, like a fashion line. But in your response, I’m also hearing the felicity of finding other people with the same passions. Could you say more about how aesthetic desire carries your work forward?
LM: It’s exactly that, a vehicle to carry things forward. When it comes to materials that get me going, whether that’s illustrations of cats in dresses or right wing interior décor, I’m unabashed, but it has to be in the service of something more dispassionate. Using appealing aesthetic forms to embody concepts means the work gets more complex, both rationally and irrationally.
JJ: In addition to our public program, we offer a seminar at Hunter College with your work as our starting point for considering contemporary art and culture. Art historian Alex Kitnick has given this semester’s course the title “The Artist As…,” which points both to the malleability of the term “artist” and to the search for occupations that might fill it out. The artist as… activist, critic, curator, or laborer, for example. How do you see your practice in relation to using the many channels of cultural production now seemingly available?
LM: Whatever form is best suited to an idea, I am willing to try. Differentiation through naming is not enough though, it’s about how you do it and within what context.
JJ: You once wrote that “Social engagement within contemporary art is itself a form of trompe l’oeil.”
LM: I think the discourse around work with a use and social dimension does not explore its falsity enough. The work of artists like Thomas Hirschhorn or Rirkrit Tiravanija is described as having a kind of transcendence into a realm that is somehow more “real.” It’s not that I think their work is “fake,” rather I am skeptical of the rhetoric around it and would not separate it from other forms that are more honest about control and simulation.
JJ: You continually place yourself in situations where you learn a new skill set or explore a particular subculture. Our pedagogical mission seems well-suited for this, and I’m interested in how your presence here will give a slightly different valence to the possessive of the artist’s institute—that this could be an institute for you to develop your practice too, just as we’re trying to get to know it better. We’ve talked, for example, about using your fashion line, Atelier E.B., as a case study for economics students at Hunter College during our third episode. And in response to your recent work with fiction and archetypal interiors, we’re inviting academics in literature and architecture to speak about style and interiority as they relate to female subjectivity. Given your interest in instrumentalizing the various resources around you, I wonder how you think about the Institute’s role as a vehicle for your practice?
LM: That we can develop something over six months is unusual, and a teaching institution is one of the only places where you can do that. Also unusual is the opportunity to show work with a formalized connection to various groups of students. I like the seriousness, as a balance to the hysteria I generally feel about my chosen subjects.
JJ: I hear that you’re currently working on a two-act play that you’ll stage here in New York. How did that project come about?
LM: I’ll be staging two scenes from a longer play I have developed since Te Kust En Te Keur, a group show I organized for Mu.ZEE in Oostende in 2012, which occupied the façade of the museum, which was formally a supermarket. I want to present something which extrapolates on both the ideas behind that show and the results of the experience. I have commissioned two of the artists who were involved in Te Kust En Te Keur, Lucile Desamory and Caitlin Keogh, to make props for the staging. I envisage writing fiction and drama as an extension of my visual practice, not separate from it, and I want to test ideas by seeing what happens to them if they expressed in text rather than just image. Where you then stage the play is a whole other issue…
JJ: In your second episode for the Institute, we’ll be thinking about pattern, and you’ve invited the designer Anthony Symonds to join you and show some of his recent garment patterns, along with Eric Gjerde, a specialist in origami. How are you thinking about these two contributions in light of your own work on the Alhambra Palace?
LM: Eric’s wife Ioana, also a graduate of the decorative painting school I attended, showed me the film Between the Folds. It’s a documentary about the current renaissance origami is enjoying, its relevancy to design, science, engineering, and art. It also reveals how the origins of the form, like many traditions, are much more specific and recent than one would assume. Eric has friends involved in a recent copyright lawsuit with the painter Sarah Morris, which is a very interesting case study, and origami tessellations have the same geometric roots as Arabic pattern. As a fashion designer, Anthony Symonds’s pattern-making is exceptional and he has had experiences within the fashion industry the polar opposite to my own company Atelier E.B.’s. I wanted to pull these threads together, the complex social implications of something as simple as pattern.
JJ: You’ll also be attending the New York Crime Fiction Academy this fall, and we’ll dedicate our last episode to the outcome of these pursuits. Your decision to go there is not unlike the time you spent studying decorative painting in Brussels. That training was about perfecting a procedure or technique, learning how to make faux-marble or a convincing trompe l’oeil still life. Crime novels are formulaic too. What about the procedural nature of these pursuits interests you?
LM: I find the technical similarities within such different practices as writing and painting extremely exciting. Specifically within these fields, but also for the way recognizing construction and method makes you question procedure in general, received ideas about standards, and guidelines.
JJ: The writer Michael Bracewell will be contributing a series of texts for this season. You both have affection for outmoded genres and bring a certain kind of romanticism to your work. How is the term “genre” relevant for you now?
LM: I think the artist who most shares my curiosity about genre is Lucile Desamory, whose film Abracadabra raids the same trick-bag of signifiers within the genre of “haunted house” as I did with crime fiction for Unlawful Assembly. When she presented the film at Tate Modern, Martin McGeown pointed out that “haunted house” is already implicitly haunted by a repertoire of trapped characters and situations. Genre implies commercial appeal, something which is not at first glance stylistically recognizable as avant-garde. Using genre means playing with structure, and capitalizing on its appealing familiarity. Genre does not die, it changes and adapts. I’m interested in pornography for the same reason: rules.
JJ: Speaking of genre, I wonder if something like “appropriation art” is not itself something now commercial and consumable—or rather, one kind of appropriative strategy has gone from being an avant-garde gesture to a benign one. You’re using appropriation in a different way than artists thirty years ago, and for our first episode, I’d argue that you’ve mapped an entire cycle of appropriation. Specifically when it comes to borrowing imagery, have you noticed this genre changing within your own practice over the years?
LM: I feel too embedded within appropriation to see it clearly enough to define it. It comes from having a history in music and subculture where previous forms are always adapted and sampled as a matter of course. Coming from that realm has made appropriating more mundane and mainstream sources thrilling, like Agatha Christie or Fifty Shades of Grey.