Ten questions from Fred Schmidt-Arenales for Nick Bastis regarding his exhibition Foyer:
1.
FS-A
So the snails are this organic manifestation of waiting: the art gallery and the black material they reside on don’t provide enough sustenance to justify consciousness, so they wait, they hibernate. And you have this piece Waiting room, chairs stacked against the wall, not even a waiting room in being, but a waiting room waiting to be deployed. Nick, what are you waiting for?
NB
I appreciate your observations but I’m not sure what they have to do with me personally.
2.
FS-A
Your exhibition text suggests movement between the Midwest (Chicago, Detroit) and Europe (Vilnius). Aside from your actual travel between these places, can you talk about how the work might be addressing this kind of movement? Because it feels present to me but buried under something.
NB
The work is partly guided by an interest in the way that value might be constructed in relation to space and time in some very literal ways; the native snails that I stumbled upon in Vilnius are not eaten there but bred in Lithuania for human consumption as escargot in most of Western Europe, and when in Chicago, they are considered an invasive species by the US Department of Agriculture. The techno music that partly informs the sound in the space originated in the Midwestern United States, yet the most prominent Chicago and Detroit DJ’s are much more present and supported in clubs in Europe, even Mexican bars in Lithuania. It became clear to me that whether music, animals, or food, there are things that are known to be “of” a place that are perhaps more at home when displaced. This ‘burying’ that you refer to is not necessarily a strategy of the show or a manipulation of these sounds or objects but inherent to the things themselves and their circulation.
3.
FS-A
I know in previous work you’ve staged snails on chairs, and in a way placing them on found objects narrows focus to their stillness, their waiting. But here you’ve given them something unrecognizable. At first glance I thought it was an upside-down scanner with the flap hanging down. What is it? Not as in what is it, what thing is it, but rather what is it doing as separate from chairs, from domestic thing?
NB
Well, firstly, it is a chair of sorts. The vinyl object is a booster seat made to raise little bodies in barber chairs.
As a thing, it does perform certain practical tasks; the black vinyl lends itself visually to the marks produced through snails’ sleep, it is already a thing meant to receive a body in rest (a child or a sleeping snail), and as much as the work strives to find some sort of comfort in the delay, this delay extends to knowledge-seeking, being in the presence of a thing that feels somehow familiar but yet maybe unnamable.
4.
FS-A
I love that the video reaches into the lower part of the gallery via its displaced speaker and that the sound becomes more important for the space as a whole than for the video itself. How did this come about?
NB
How is this value of importance decided? I don’t know if I can say that it’s more or less important for the video than it is for the space or vice versa.
It seemed that in some ways the space was architecturally undecided. Building the wall that separated the upstairs/downstairs spaces more directly produced an opportunity to upset that separation, or even augment it, through the existing two-channel sound of the video separated by the architecture.
5.
FS-A
You’ve heightened the feeling of separation between the lower and upper halves of the gallery, you’ve split them and joined them, split them with a wall, joined them with an electrical current, split them by category (video/not video). And the video seems to operate in the realm of myth whereas the work downstairs seems to be pointing more clearly to itself. Is there something about the real and the imaginary going on here? The “world” (downstairs) and the “ether” (upstairs)?
NB
I think there is if you say there is.
6.
FS-A
What about whiteness, what about guns? These are separate questions in some way, but watching that video I see you processing something potentially very personal, or at least adjacent to yourself. As another white person I feel implicated in the kind of critique that the video seems to suggest – can you spell that out?
NB
Again, if you feel implicated then it might be your task to spell that out. But, speaking for myself, and referring back to this question of value in relation to time and space in some literal ways, I was initially struck by these guys and their gun-shooting lunch habit for a variety of reasons. Can gun-“play” still be “play”? When is it play and when is it not? These particular young men had little-to-no knowledge of recent gun related events making headlines in the US, but clearly as we’ve seen from police responses in Walmart, apparently a bb-gun is a toy for sale in aisle 3 but it can miraculously turn into an assault weapon in aisle 5 a few minutes later when in the hands of a particular person talking on their cellphone. Is that a myth? Who or what becomes implicated by these shapes that project other shapes is often dependent on who is holding that shape and what their shape might be, or who is looking at that shape and projecting certain fears or subjective responses upon them, in some cases with horrifying consequences. Everyone is implicated in their own response to what they see and how they react, or how a thing they might not fully understand is approached.
7.
FS-A
I’m also sensing an awareness of being an American; this goes back to my question about movement. In a way this show gives us a kind of split personality, the American upstairs (with all of the brashness and obscuring of self) and the European downstairs (with all of its inward focus and biding of time). Would you agree with these characterizations?
NB
No.
8.
FS-A
Speaking of boundaries and splitting, Hanging piece is made of grocery dividers. Grocery dividers are truly a line in the sand, an uncrossable boundary, a reusable border. “Don’t put you’re food over here, this is where my food goes. This is where my food stops and your food starts.” Why did you hide this in the space between the buildings?
NB
I felt like I was placing it in the most public of locations the gallery could offer. Rather than being inside the gallery, the piece where it is has the potential to interact, even if futilely, with the wind, with the publics that might typically use those dividers in other more trafficked spaces like the grocery store. This is why it hasn’t been photographed, because it will remain outside to be seen by anyone at anytime who might want to see it, unlike the show that has visiting hours and a set duration.
9.
FS-A
Using animals in the work in some ways is like using performers; it suddenly implies a whole life behind the scenes. One starts to ask: how did these snails get here, how do they survive? How did they get on this vinyl shape? Short of literally answering these questions, are the dynamics of this hidden choreography part of the work for you? Or just part of the lead up, the support structure?
NB
I am not interested in withholding anything specific from someone experiencing this work, but at the same time I don’t think that the ‘hidden’ aspects of these snails arriving on the cushion need to be displayed, much like the crate a painting might arrive in isn’t always shown in the gallery space. Sometimes it might be, sure, but at this point maybe that gesture is a bit mannerist or didactically illustrating something about networks or circulation rather than the thing really doing something within that circulation. The choreography within this work is both shown and imagined, it is both local with the movements of the snails on the cushion and global as their values and legal or nature as commodities shifts from the variety of places in which I have shown them.
10.
FS-A
I hate to bring it up, but for me the snails refer primarily to winter. Having visited Chicago from California, and to find out the snails are also visiting from California, I couldn’t help but read When you don’t find what you’re looking for, sleep as a directive. Sleep through the winter, wake me up when this is all over. And we can expand winter to encompass more than the weather here I think. Either I do like the snails do, or I take it as a warning. Which is it for you?
NB
Sleep can be seen as something to endure in order to get to waking life just as the value or lack of value of waiting can be placed in relationship to the thing that may or may not arrive at its end. But, that might undervalue the stick that a carrot might be hanging from, especially when that carrot could be speculative.
Nick Bastis is an artist currently based between Brussels, BE and Vilnius, LT.
Fred Schmidt-Arenales is an artist living in Los Angeles.