Ten questions from Matthew Metzger for Megan Greene regarding her exhibition Jelly Sandwich:
1.
MM
Would you say that the works in Jelly Sandwich capitalize on the paradox that absence here potentially embodies: The picturing of the absence of a center, the absence of a subject to be looked at as the works’ very subject?
MG
That’s part of it for sure. Turns out I am most often cutting out the middle, where the subject would generally have been found (and was, in the case of the pieces where I am using found imagery, e.g. a poster). And the act of removal isn’t hidden either—most often it’s a sloppy cut out. Like at a sporting event where a player jumps through a banner. The paper afterward looks jumped though. As the viewer of this work, you are arriving after the jump; i.e. the promised thing isn’t there and has made a hasty exit at that. It logically follows that what’s left becomes a kind of archeological site. I’m interested in the extent to which a remnant can be, well just that, fragmentary, referring back to what was removed and the act of removal, while at the same time serving as a new whole, the new full story. It’s that tension between enough and not quite enough that interests me, hence the show title. Though I’ll add that I do hope the work feels more generous than deprived.
2.
MM
Similarly, the wall, both literally and discursively, retains the same sort of paradox upon looking, that which simultaneously presents and divides, shows and hides. Is this something you think about when utilizing the wall in your works?
MG
Admittedly that set of concerns is new for me with this body of work and something I am just getting a handle on. It’s true that with many of these pieces, namely those with parts removed, the wall becomes a surface at play within the work. Upon initial viewing, some people have thought that I had painted large white shapes onto the paper. (With “Audiences Have Kept Me Alive,” for example.) Additive or subtractive; either way I’d be obfuscating some piece of information. In the case of parts removed, the wall behaves as a sort of white wash. I’ll also mention that I learned about John Divola’s “Zuma Series” in the course of making this work and was really blown away by them in their own right and by their relevance to what I am trying to do. In those photos, the burned and spray-painted walls and window frame are as much the thing, perhaps more the thing that the beautiful view of the ocean. The window does its job of offering a view, but the walls around it are what pull you back from the oblivion.
3.
MM
Are the surfaces of your works important to you? Why?
MG
Yes. I have been making collage-based work on paper for some time. I finally arrived at a place where I had to be more open to the properties and capabilities of my materials. Paper is infinitely mutable. Sensitive, in other words—it doesn’t take much to affect a piece of paper. So in that spirit, I have become a lot more interested in welcoming the incidental and accidental condition/marks of the paper I am using. (In #8 I talk more about non-art marks). The paper I have been using in my work isn’t special; it’s often pretty low quality. I use art paper but also a lot of the everywhere-all-the-time paper that is just a step from being garbage. And then, I do use photographic imagery in my work—including movie posters, the images of which are often goofily climactic—and like how a sanded or faded surface can refute the intended immersive quality.
4.
MM
What do you see to be the function of the surface in a given work (overall and compartmentalized) for you? I am thinking in particular of the work “Everything everything else” for example.
MG
Funny, this is the one I was just going to talk about vis a vis the surface issue. So there’s a case where the images are of the cosmos/limitless space, the verisimilitude of which largely depends on the seamlessness of the dark. But, in this piece, the cosmos is taken from a few old posters that were likely in a box for the last thirty years and are not in good shape. So those fold marks form a worn grid and keep the paper from laying flat against the wall, thus thwarting the illusion. I like that. To repeat some of what I said below, folds suggest interiority, a state opposite to the cosmic. (Note that I know nothing about astrophysics. For my purposes, I am using “cosmic” to mean expansive and open).
5.
MM
Is there any relationship or correspondence for you between the crease (the index) and the frame (your compositional limits) in your works from Jelly Sandwich? Especially in “Cubit” and “Popsicle”.
MG
Well, the crease and the frame are both givens of the paper, at least in the case of the ones where I am using posters, which I assume are those you are referring to. The creases are clearly the result of a paper being folded and forming a grid that reasserts the larger rectangle and creates a general uniformity. The folds incrementalize the space. Though I didn’t think about that much while working really—they became like the dirty windshield I was looking through while driving. But often, as I would be drawing away, I’d happen upon a fold and have to decide how to manage it. To answer your question, I don’t think I was often thinking about the crease relative to the edge, at least not as a rule. Re: “Popsicle,” the creased nature of the paper is a very conspicuous aspect of the work. It’s a weird one in terms of weight, because the poster paper is so flimsy and unwilling to lay flat to the wall (because of the folds), whereas the drawing in the middle, glued over the image of a placard, feels heavy. I think part of that heaviness comes from it being a single thing affixed to an unruly grid.
6.
MM
Similarly, is there any relationship or correspondence for you between the hole (the imposed window) and edge (the manufactured border) that you juxtapose with one another? Such as in the three larger works from the installation in the upper room: “Sleepwalker” to “Audiences Have Kept Me Alive” to “Cubit”.
MG
So the general precepts here are the edge directs our gaze and defines where we look and the holes in the surface act as the contrary parts, the unauthorized views. And the clean manufactured edge is the counterpoint to the messily cut or ripped stuff. So I’m aware of that, though I work in a pretty intuitive and exploratory way. In “Audiences Have Kept Me Alive,” the most recent piece in the show, I created the outside edge and the holes simultaneously. They determined one another. The space between them—the drawing—became a DMZ of sorts. In this piece, unlike the other two you mentioned, I am not taking the manufactured edge (and rectangle) as a given.
Speaking broadly of the holes—in many cases they offer a kind of rudeness, like someone jamming a finger into an untouched birthday cake. (Which every kid does). When some part is missing, we think about the missing bit and why it was taken away. It becomes important because of its missing-ness. Like looking down into a volcano and thinking about the fire. (You can see I enjoy metaphors.) Though, in the case of a piece like “Cubit”, I am not so sure. Maybe there was nothing before and I am being generous with the bit that is there. I like the alternate notion that removal might yield revelation.
7.
MM
Do you have certain strategies in the studio for developing and maintaining your instinct and intuition for what is necessary in your process of making? If so, can I be lucky enough to know what they are?
MG
That’s the millstone, isn’t it? Thanks for even suggesting I might have this figured out. So I know by now that my drawing hand wants to make certain things. For good and for bad, I have my tropes and tendencies after making a lot of work over a lot of years. (To be clear I am not hinting at any kind of mastery here—I’m exclusively talking about what it means to contend with one’s habits). So I have had to figure out how to challenge the marks, shapes, etc. I seem to gravitate toward. I’m always trying to make work that feels surprising and somewhat confounding to me. The use of found imagery has been instrumental in this—it’s a gift, using images and surfaces your hand/mind wouldn’t have conceived of and clearly didn’t. It’s an inherently reactive or conversational way of working that I like a lot. It’s also maddening when you have committed to a given piece of material for some reason but it has text on it you don’t want and say, Eddie Murphy’s head. (No disrespect.) What has been new to me in this work has been finding that I cut and rip in a way that is different from the way I draw. That may be obvious, but broadening my approach to the material, i.e. paper, and allowing for its mutability has meant welcoming a countervailing voice in my practice. I can surprise myself far easier with a pair of scissors these days than I can with a pencil. That’s me working against my own limitations. I’ll also say that my instincts can be really unreliable—time and again I have made pieces that I thought were really solid completely fall apart for me a few months later. I’ve gotten somewhat better about this but it is still there. My only way of contending with it is by being a prolific maker in the hopes that I’ll get smarter as I go. Plus if you make enough you can always hide the shitty stuff.
8.
MM
The works in Jelly Sandwich seem to float between two poles of subjectivity, honest nostalgia and the diary, or in other words, between the cultural production of an imagined otherworld (80’s sci-fi films, green / blue and TV screens, sleepwalking, fabricated outer space, etc.) and the intimacy of a private, felt self. With this in mind I wonder if the exhibition could perhaps function as a love letter to the longing teenager?
MG
I love that. I’ll first say I was a huge letter writer for a good two decades of my life; subsumed by the email unfortunately. Incidentally, a lot of those letters went to my now husband—we each have a big box of correspondence received from the other person during our many years of being friends. So that format is very familiar to me: as yet another folded surface—i.e. given an interior and thereby made private—that once opened still bears the mark of its containment. Perhaps the folds themselves suggest the intimacy of the content.
As for the found materials I have used lately: I’ve gathered scraps here and there from the arts high school where I teach, mostly unfinished notes of some kind that weren’t even important enough to be thrown away. (I wrote/passed a lot of notes to friends in high school too…). I suppose I was drawn to how unedited/un-self-conscious they are and supremely edited/self-conscious, since high school is so much about fashioning the self. I was chaperoning some students on a trip to the Anderson Ranch a few years ago and recall Jackie Gendel talking about the appeal of non-art marks. That stuck with me—marks of the hand that aren’t made with art production in mind. I welcome those into my work, always as found material, since my hand is incapable of making them. (Unless it’s a grocery list or something). As for posters—I hung them on my wall when I was younger like everyone else. Salon style, before that term meant anything to me, tacked up wherever there was space. And poster paper is pretty crappy but I still remember trying to pin the corners carefully and trying not to rip through the holes, which invariably did and needed to be re-pinned. The spirit of that, the earnestness and the act of testing one’s allegiances—I think that is in this work, though I admit I hadn’t quite thought of it like that before. In a few places in this work there are scraps that my twin toddlers had ripped out of their books. It’s not important that they are the ones that did that per se. But, it’s probably apt that being a mother of young children means a loss of control in many ways, of stuff, substances, even of how one moves one’s own body (often awkwardly when dealing with a heavy child). It’s constant surprise and re-negotiation. That can be maddening as a human being but is desirable as an artist. A simpler way of saying this is that my work may have loosened up because I often have food on my clothes.
9.
MM
I was told in my health class in college that when the U.S. military drops food from helicopters into starving countries, one of the staples is a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. A student in my class asked why that, since it was such a crappy and cheap food. My teacher said because it surprisingly had an immense amount of nutritional value for those who were starving, and that between the protein in the peanut butter, the carbohydrates and fiber in the bread, the sugar in the jelly, and that the sandwich when falling held its form and required little ‘packaging’, that it was perfect under the circumstances. So to keep with this, would you consider the work in Jelly Sandwich to nourish to some degree the contemporary art viewer’s appetite? If so, in what way? Or would you consider the work in “Jelly Sandwich” to come out of some aspect of you as a contemporary art maker / viewer that is starving? If so, for what?
MG
Interesting you bring up the part about deprivation. Mike Schuh and I talked about this, because I had some worry that my show title would suggest I was making fun of those at subsistence level who can’t be picky about their food. I’m certainly asking for a poetic exception on that count. I should also mention that I was someone who wanted (and got) a PB&J sandwich in my lunch for all of elementary and high school. Though that’s more of a coincidence with my show title, it is a sandwich I have spent a lot of time with. However, I think it is critically different from a jelly sandwich (which to continue the health theme, is basically a sugar bomb). I have almost no experience with the latter, because I believe firmly in the presence of all three constituents. But I like how the jelly sandwich just squeezes under the wire of acceptability while failing to rise above suspicion. That’s part of what I like—the question of how much the incomplete, the fragmentary or the misbegotten can carry the day.
The other thing I wanted to add which might be a non-sequitur is that I am someone who has a pretty intense degree of garbage guilt. I am always visualizing the stuff I throw out sitting in a landfill, just sitting there, not decomposing at a remotely satisfying rate if at all. Even paper, as I understand it, sticks around a lot longer than we think.
So, to continue to not exactly answer your question, I talk about the sandwich in my artist statement because it’s a common food of humble parts yet has a lot of unspoken rules around its assembly and consumption. It was a useful metaphor to me while making work that, to belabor the metaphor, is missing its crusts, is missing its middle, is half eaten, half un-eaten etc.
10.
MM
Lastly…for you, what is Art?
MG
I’m going to answer this in the lowercase since the uppercase feels too vast for this somewhat secluded and insufficiently read person to answer well. For me, art is going down to my basement everyday and talking to myself, with pictures, with the hope of them speaking to someone else. I think it’s more than marking time. And I hope it’s more than whittling wood, but I can’t be sure. I try to squelch my doubts with discipline as much as I can.
Megan Greene is an artist living in Chicago.
Matthew Metzger is a visual artist, co-editor of the publication SHIFTER, and Assistant Professor of Studio Art at the University of Illinois at Chicago.