Q+A: Liz Glynn Discusses Her Sculptures for "Made in L.A." -... BLOG DESIGN EVENTS ABOUT FASHION ARCHITECTURE INTERIORS SEARCH SURFACEMAG.COM ART GO SUBSCRIBE Get Surface today and save 48% off the cover price. 1 of 6 8/15/12 10:29 AM
Q+A: LIZ GLYNN DISCUSSES HER SCULPTURES FOR MADE IN L.A. 08.15.12 ART By JULIE BAUMGARDNER As a child, artist Liz Glynn was fascinated by the mummies she saw on display at the Museum of Fine Arts in her hometown of Boston. I was pretty morbid as a kid, she says, before pausing. I guess I still am. While the mystery of the dead may have prompted an interest in the macabre, it was the intrigue of ancient civilizations that left a lasting impression. Glynn, who now operates out of a Chinatown studio in Los Angeles (she arrived at Cal Arts for an MFA after her undergraduate degree at Harvard), is not an artist that can easily be pegged she creates sculptures, but smoothed blocks of marble or molded lots of clay don t describe her pieces, which contain elements of performance, audience participation, and natural materials. Surface caught up with the 31-year-old artist to discuss her inclusion in the Hammer Museum s first biennial, Made in L.A., which is on view until September 2. Let s start with your piece in the Hammer Made in L.A. show tell us about it. The installation of the Hammer consists of three works. Upon entering the gallery, one encounters a small window cut into the wall, which opens onto another wooden structure, seemingly a wall of forklift pallet stock. Through the window, viewers can look into Passage (Giza Gaza), a wooden tunnel mimicking perspectival etchings of the Grand Gallery, an ascending tunnel inside Khufu s Great Pyramid. The reclaimed forklift pallet slats resembles the wood used to line the floors of the pyramids to ease tourist access, and also the entrances to some smuggling tunnels between Egypt and the Gaza Strip. The concrete form, Tunnel (Gaza Giza) is also based on the form of a smuggling tunnel in the same region. Both forms suggest ideas of passage between life and death as well as crossing an international border illegally. The left bank of wood turns out to be a series of cabinets, Anonymous Needs and Desires, color-coded by the type of item they contain (yellow for food, white for fuel, turquoise for clothing, red for illicit substances, etc.). The idea in this case was to create an archive of objects smuggled across the border, as reported in journalistic accounts since 2007, as a contemporary parallel to chests of objects in a pharoah s tomb, containing everything the deceased would need in the afterlife. The objects are copied in cast lead, as the military operation at that time was called Operation Cast Lead, presumably a reference to bullets. 2 of 6 8/15/12 10:29 AM
Do you have a particular fascination with the Middle East? I m fascinated by the richness of the ancient civilizations and the technologies that they produced, from advances in metal casting to complex systems of accounting, not to mention the system of surveying which produced the Great Pyramids. In the contemporary sense, I m curious about the disjuncture between our perception of these ancient civilizations and the tendency to separate them. Only recently have museums begun to list the modern country next to the ancient civilization that it preceded: Iraq to Babylon, for example. So why Egypt? I began a series of works entitled III in 2010 with a pyramid installation that served as a site for nine performances structured around the Book of the Dead, exploring irrational fear and ritual in the context of the financial crisis. When the Egyptian Revolution happened in January of 2011, it presented a new set of circumstances to consider. I followed the protests closely and while researching the fate of artifacts in the Egyptian Museum, I stumbled across some references to the smuggling tunnels. Then I visited Egypt in June 2011, when the U.S. State Department travel advisory had been lifted, to develop a better understanding of the social dynamics in Egypt at the time. Why use different materials? Is there significance to each one or using each one? The wood from the forklift pallets bears the marks of anonymous commerce from the forklift skids, and a series of movements carrying the weight of some unrecorded consumer goods. There s always a conceptual link between the medium and its reference point; as much as I would like to, I can t walk into my studio and make a finished sculpture without a reference, even though I often make drawings trying to build out of unformed intuition. I ve used bronze for its monumentality, trash for its entropic qualities. What's your relationship to L.A. and thus the Hammer show? For me, L.A. is a self-made city. Many of the great collections of art here Armand Hammer, Hearst were assembled by wealthy patrons seeking to form their legacy in the image of history. This pliable relationship to historical material is very different from the gestalt piety I grew up with, outside of Boston, and it s changed the way I work with both history and material. I attended a very rigorous liberal arts college where I would read every word of a text, and a lot of living in L.A. has been learning how to toss the book out of the window and decide what really matters without checking my notes. Artistic production in LA has also tempered my workaholic nature; labor alone impresses no one! This space has allowed me to open up a much larger context, and the experience around it, rather than to spend all of my time shut in attempting to perform Herculean feats of sculptural virtuosity. 3 of 6 8/15/12 10:29 AM
Does the environment and natural world play a significant role in your works? While specific environmental concerns don t often come into play, I m very interested in the idea of life cycles in the philosophic sense. A lot of my work deals with cycles of growth, decay, and renewal, usually in the context of empire or state, but often as a metaphor for the personal or political. The central question is whether or not it s possible to recover from destruction or even obliteration, and what form such a recovery takes. How you want the public to act or perform in your work? Do you control your pieces? I see my role somewhere between an architect and a scientist: I create a structure which is scaled so that the actions of one person have a visible impact, and, as in a controlled experiment, once the structure is set in place, I allow whatever happens to unfold. Even in the context of a performance that seems to be spinning out of control, I take pains not to intervene. Looting is a built-in possibility of the piece, and some of the cast lead objects have been stolen or damaged. But for the potential of looting to be present in the work, the piece had to be open to it, and the guard needed to be positioned out of view of the cabinets. Unintended consequences have often informed later works. Explain your creative process. How do you conceive and approach a piece? Each work usually starts with the seed of a reference discovered while researching the last project, and then a slow and painful process of several months of reading and research occurs. After the research, I need some time to allow details to settle, and forget most of what I read, while allowing a few particularly resonant ideas and fragments remain. Then, I begin making drawings and models, connecting ideas, trying to allow concrete forms to emerge. At some point, usually a timeline or specific space for exhibition is attached to the project, and then the parameters for the installation or performance are developed in response to the site. Finally, production begins, presenting a whole new set of technical challenges: where can I cast lead, how do I decide which object goes where, etc. And then, my studio becomes a chaotic, sleepless hurricane of production, as most of the sculptural work is incredibly labor intensive, sometimes working with one or more assistants to help complete the tasks where my hand isn t immediately necessary. Unfortunately, I tend to complicate the process along the way, adding objects and detailing; I m completely unable to predict the final form of a work before it s done, and everything looks like bits and pieces right up until the end. Once it leaves the studio, what s left looks like a warzone. 4 of 6 8/15/12 10:29 AM
Title image: Installation view of Made in L.A. 2012, at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. All photographs by Brian Forrest. Hammer Museum Liz Glynn e-mail / share 0 COMMENTS ADD A COMMENT RELATED POSTS VIEW ALL ART POSTS CAMILLA LØW'S SCUL... ARTIST STIJN ANK T... FRANK LAWS CREATES... TOM FRUIN BUILDS A... JOIN THE MAILING LIST ENTER E-MAIL JOIN FOLLOW US 5 of 6 8/15/12 10:29 AM
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