Interview with Jessica Jackson Hutchins
ICA Senior Curator Jenelle Porter speaks with Jessica Jackson Hutchins about her art and the works she currently has on view at the ICA.
JP: The centerpiece of this exhibition is a new sculpture called Symposion. In your words, what is a symposion?
JJH: A symposion is a Greek classical-era feast that involved eating, drinking, talking (about philosophy and politics), and sex. It took place in a special men’s room called the andron that was found in almost all upper-class homes. The andron was built to house no more than twelve kilni (standing wooden couches), on which the symposiasts would lie. The intention was that they could lie comfortably reclined, yet be able to hear the verbal nuances of every other member in the room. Exacting attention was paid to every aspect of the aesthetic experience. The events lasted for twenty-four hours or more, always had a sexual aspect, often some drunkenness. I have always loved the Greek vases that depict the symposion, where the figures (rendered in either black or red) circle the vase, each connected to the next through some kind of sexual activity. That way of solving the formal problem of figures on a vase is a genius design technique. I made a piece about it in my grad school days called Suck and Blow. I’ve also made work about Plato’s Symposium, a text that includes written speeches given at a symposion. Aristophones is the humorous, bodily one who farts and burps and tells the story of the creation of the two sexes, when the gods split humans—then four-legged creatures—into two separate beings, thereafter in search of their missing half.
JP: How did these visual and historical references translate to the visual qualities of your Symposion?
JJH: I had been working on the piece for a while when I realized that the figures should break out of the frame of the couch and move around it, which got me thinking about the way figures circle a Greek vase—the movement of it, the circling around that leads to a sort of endlessness. I love those beautiful, delicate, sexy drawings. So it was interesting to take the decorative element and translate it to a monumental scale and make it the support for the vases, a kind of flipped Greek vase. The vessels, called kraters, were specific to a symposion, and contained a mixture of water and wine. A symposion is a convivium, a feast of elevated status that incorporated the sacred, political, and sociological.
JP: In fact, one of my favorite sculptures of yours is called Convivium (2008). You’ve often looked to ancient Greece, which has had such a great impact on Western visual culture. How do you connect your work to such an enormous history?
JJH: I’m interested in mythologizing the everyday, which is something that is embodied in these kinds of events. So that connection is the very point. These meals—the symposion or convivium—involved the intellectual, sacred, physical/sexual, and social drives of people. The participants were going for communion on all these levels, and to achieve it they had to create precise “formal” conventions that immediately signaled a symbolism that would convey the exaggerated significance of everything. That’s something I’m really interested in, the right and meaningful articulation that is necessary to create connection. So much is written and thought about what cannot be said, about the failures of language. I see it as my job to try to get as close as I can to saying the unsayable. It’s something we’ve all been working on for a long, long time. I’m trying to use the powerful language of objects to do this, and so much of that power derives from history, art, and literature. I recently visited the Neue Museum here in Berlin and was just floored by their relics from the Homeric era. The gallery labels sometimes include bits of text from The Iliad and The Odyssey that describe how the relics and vessels were used and what they signified. So much knowledge and beauty is embodied in these objects: the experience of traversing history through our encounter with them is really overwhelming. There is a connection to enormous histories just in the encounter with simple objects.
JP: With regard to using everything that’s out there, Convivium was one of your first major works to incorporate ceramic. At that time you had been working with the material for only a few years, and then only occasionally and in smaller works. You were initially untrained in ceramic technique, though you’ve learned quite a bit in the years since. What has developed in the work and in your approach to the material?
JJH: Actually, using ceramic gave me more immediate access to all these histories we’ve been discussing, since it has been around everywhere, forever. In basic ways, clay allowed me to start thinking about vases and cups as sculptures, but also still as themselves. I started thinking about sculpture in a very direct and elemental way. I get so much pleasure out of every aspect of it: the handling of the clay, the challenges of the firing process, the color, and the surprises of the glazing process. The more I’ve learned about ceramic, the more I’ve wanted to push it, and that is all kind of circular. I wanted to make bigger things, so I had to start making my own clay. And I get bored easily and don’t like to repeat myself, so I use lots of different firing techniques and glaze strategies, clay bodies and modeling techniques. I also occasionally still like to build a papier mâché support and cover it with clay slip and fire it. It gives the piece the feeling of a relic or something unearthed, damaged by time.
JP: Walk me through the process of making your own clay and employing different firing and glazing techniques. How do your making and thinking processes get you to these slumping, misshapen, and really almost falling-apart ceramic sculptures?
JJH: It’s not that complicated or probably very interesting. I mean, I know some people who mine their own clay from special places and are super specific and scientific about the whole process. But I typically buy commercial clay, or find it in reclaim buckets if I’m working at another studio. I sometimes like a certain color of clay and how a glaze affects it, and so there it’s just a color question that drives the piece at first. Often the clay is too fine to allow me to make things as big or unreasonable as I want, so I might add some material to it—like grog [fired clay fragments], nylon fibers, and paper bits—so that it is more forgiving for sculpture. Or I’ll make the object out of a strong, sculptural clay body and then paint on top of it with clay reduced to a slip [liquefied clay].
I use different firing processes depending on the size of the object, the kinds of surface I want to create, or sometimes just for convenience or feasibility. I have an electric kiln at home that I use a lot, but I only fire it to cone 6 [2165 °F]. But if I want a thing fired hotter, for whatever reason—because I think it’s tougher, or I want to use a cone 10 [2284 °F] glaze, or because I think it makes the ceramic stronger—I have to use a big gas kiln, which is a lot more labor-intensive. But gas-fired work is really beautiful in a different way, and in salt and soda firings you can do different things to get new surfaces. These are labor-intensive and usually community events. When the kiln is at about 2100 °F, you add dampened salt and/or baking soda to the kiln. The salt and soda make a natural glaze on the clay, and it can affect other glazes and slips in interesting ways; this is a really ancient process. Ceramic is a kind of endless medium.
JP: Why three pots for Symposion, why these colors, and what are we to read from their being nestled where they are?
JJH: There are six bodies, and the pots are sort of distributed among them: one for every two bodies, like two bodies drinking from one another. I fired these pots in the electric kiln because I wanted shiny, bright colors and more consistent surfaces to stand out against the busy blackness of the paper surface of the bodies. I wanted the pots to sit like flowers on the figures. I wanted both sweetness and crude earthiness. I remember that I had to fight for that yellow; it kept slipping off the blue underneath, which I found a bit boring, so I had to sandblast and re-fire the vessel several times. I wanted the pots to be sort of joyful and decorative, but also to have a weird shape so that they would fit harmoniously together. That is why I left the bottoms open, so the two forms had more of a connection.
JP: Speaking of the interaction of ceramic and the body, I want to ask you about our ordinary
relationship with clay. It’s something we handle every day, in the form of the morning coffee cup, the dinner plate, a porcelain toilet. Paper is also something we hold in our hands almost daily. Does your work seek to elevate these materials to “art status,” or bring the art object to a more quotidian place? Or both?
JJH: Yes, of course, both, which is nothing so new in art. But I’m going less for a theoretical sort of art/life thing—you can only take that so far—and more for a raw sort of intimacy, which is enabled in part by the commonplace nature of some of the things I use, and, I think, the imperfections.
JP: I’ve selected several of your recent works on paper to present alongside Symposion in this exhibition, all of which represent punctuation marks. So, we’ve got speech and we’ve got language. Why is your interest in language made material, even sculptural?
JJH: I think many artists are fascinated by the mysteries of language, and most particularly with its relationship to the physical, for example, the distance between sign and signifier, or more literally, the graphic sign as physical object. Or the relationship of the visual sign of the word to the object it describes, mimetically, like hieroglyphics. How many students do rebus art? (I think a lot.) Ezra Pound got into it with his ideogram method. In Instigations of Ezra Pound: Together with an Essay on the Chinese Written Character [1920], he edited a text by Ernest Fenollosa in which Fenollosa misunderstood Chinese language to be essentially ideographic and non-phonetic. I came across a quote I like while I was looking up the name of that text just now: “In reading Chinese we do not seem to be juggling mental counters, but to be watching things work out their own fate.” There is a certain romanticism in the attempt to turn language into little pictures, making it more pure—a funny way of attributing independence to words. So the words are something; they exist in their own right—like a cup—and are not a sign for something else.
One thing that is going on in the punctuation drawings is a sort of ironic engagement with this kind of romanticism. It’s like trying to take that physicality of the written language mark to the max, with a kind of irony, but also with defiant insistence. In my drawings, the marks of language are made from bed-sheet scraps or cups—intimate bodily things. This speaks to the notion that we are all trying to close the distance. I thought about that all the time when I was a student, and I wrote an essay about William Morris titled “The Physicality of Language.” It was about how his attention to the beauty and solidity of the text (specifically in his use of embossing and typography) and the objectness of the book itself influenced modernist poets like Yeats to think of words as objects. This culminated in the Objectivist poets’ consideration of the poem as object, and, of course, artists like Lawrence Weiner, who refers to flat vinyl letters on the wall as “sculptures.” But now I am less concerned about distances. I just want to smash things together.
Images (from top to bottom): Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Symposion, 2011, couch, collage, enamel, fiberglass, glazed ceramic, ink and papier-mâché, 47 x 115 x 78 inches (119.4 x 292.1 x 198.1 cm), Courtesy the artist and Laurel Gitlen, New York, Photo: Dan Kvitka; Jessica Jackson Hutchins, And U Being, 2011, Cups, ink, paper pulp, and spray paint on paper, 34 1/2 x 30 1/2 x 2 1/2 inches (87.6 x 77.5 x 6.4 cm) Courtesy the artist and Laurel Gitlen, New York, Photo: Dan Kvitka.