Interview with Lauren Kalman: the Ideal Body

Lauren Kalman’s Interview12\136The Ideal BodyLauren Kalman’s branches the gap between sculpture and jewelry. Using a wide range of mediums Kalman’s installations resemble sterile jewelry store displays with sheek reflective pedestals and slick photography. Sometimes made from casts of her own body Kalman’s sculpture can be worn as jewelry, becoming performances that she then documents with photography and video. Kalman’s puts herself through pain and discomfort as she interacts and wears her own work, highlighting the painful, cultural mannerisms that are involved in attaining the ideal body.

Matt Christy- A lot of contemporary work seems to be a hybrid between drawing and sculpture, for instance, or drawing and performance. I’m wondering if that applies to your work.

Lauren Kalman-I think I have my hand in a lot of cookie jars. Recently I’ve been thinking of myself as working in hybrid materials, sort of having a hybrid practice.

M- Also between jewelry and sculpture.

L-I think that was the initial jump for me. Being able to think about things made on the jewelry scale and things that were worn as sculpture. Then I started to take images, which I was really resistant to initially. But it seemed to be the right solution to “how do I present this work?” Because off the body it’s pretty dead, it’s much more active when its being worn. That segued into video and instead of documentation this is now a medium that’s part of my vocabulary. It’s been a process of having a problem and needing to find a solution and letting that be a window for whatever materials seem to work.

M- Because you work in such a vast array of mediums. When you display there’s not just an object, so I was wondering if that was a real conscious decision, to avoid being an object maker?

L-I don’t think so because I feel strongly rooted as an object maker. Even the way I approach videos, I think of them very much as objects. They are things, physical things; they relate to objects in the world like the tv or the movie theater

M- Which is one reason you’re exposing the guts, the jewelry of the electronics.

L-Right, that is part of the interpretation of the entire piece. Exposing interiors.

M- There is a relationship to wounding too, so that a wound becomes a jewel and a rupture in the skin becomes beautiful.L-That’s certainly a layer to it.

M-The way I was interpreting the material diversity was that you were keeping the work conceptual so that I’m not thinking about the object. I’m thinking about the objects use. An object maker has commodity appeal, especially a jewelry maker so, “how can I get away from just being a maker of jewelry or a sculptor?”

L- I start with the object. Well…that’s not true, I do start with the idea, but the vocabulary of object making is one I’m really familiar with. That is where I feel at home, as opposed to repetition in imagery and video. It talks about commodity, and advertisement, the way we are bombarded with information, but it is also always open to different reactions.

M- There is a real sterility to the display.

L-Somewhere between medical, health and beauty, the spa, a place where being beautiful and healthy collided, that language of beauty and sterility. An aesthetics of the kitchen, all of a sudden we have really sterile kitchens. But also the isolation of the object; the focus is on the thing and the image. I think it pulls from a lot of different places.

M-That line between health and beauty, really I guess, it’s the line between beauty and sickness that you’re really treading.

L-Right. For instance, I’m really interested in anorexia and how being unhealthy is almost…its been reversed. Not only is it this image of beauty, it’s the image of the ideal body which is also a healthy body, and its sort of been flipped on its head. I just saw an ad last night which was for aesthetic medicine instead of plastic surgery.

M-Can you talk about the pain and discomfort that you go through.

L- It’s a direct link to female beauty and the things we go through to be beautiful. Foot binding, corsets all fall under the same line. I think this is a little more subtle. It’s not quite so body altering. I hope it’s just enough to push it over the edge and have people go “Ugh. What a minute that kind of looks like a grill or that kind of looks like my earring.” It’s close enough to home but foreign enough to make you aware of it.

M- Do you think of the pain and discomfort as a real integral part or just a by product?L-It’s become more important because it highlights this absurdity. A lot of people look at the work and will say, “I wouldn’t do that.”

M-But they’re doing it.

L-But they’re doing it.

M-It’s these aesthetic social pressures that are being placed on the body.

L-It’s a rich place to pull from because it’s so ingrained in the culture.

M- It’s invisible except when it becomes painful in anorexia or something.

L- Even body modification. My mom will see someone with big earrings or stretched ears and she’ll make this face. And I’ll say mom you’ve had your ears pierced since you were a baby! There is this social disconnect.

M-Do you think about transgressing materials?

L-I’m interested in boundaries. I’m interested in the point when objects or fluids or whatever it is, when that transgresses a boundary, and how that can be either sacred or taboo. And how it can easily oscillate back and forth between taboo and sacred. Jewelry dances between precious and grotesque. When I talk about transgressing that’s what I’m thinking about.

M- So you’re not thinking about transgressing a material value system, like gold.

L-That’s certainly a part of it. Especially with the piece with the drooling tongue…The gold and the saliva become mixed. The saliva has transgressed its boundary as inside the body where it’s functional and makes sense and when it gets out it’s disgusting. Like hair, when its on your head its beautiful and you take it off and it’s gross. The gold is mixed with that and so you can’t easily separate them. So what is the value of that gold? Is the saliva elevated? Is the value of the gold decreased? It just stays at that point of no value or questionable value.

M- In advertisement beauty gets sterilized. The female gets sterilized. Beauty gets sterilized. Beauty becomes assumed. I think of you as disrupting that.

L- When you say that I think of the body as image instead of the actual physical body. The body that’s imaged is clean and complete. Nothing goes in and nothing goes out. That becomes the icon of the body and that’s imprinted. Which isn’t possible in this real physical body that bleeds and sweats and excretes. In that way images in advertisement sterilize the body. It makes it an object.

M-It denies the body. It denies aging and dying and rupturing.

L-Right, and I think you come to see yourself as an image rather than as a body.

M-One thing I like about your work is that beauty seems to pervade everything, adornment flows out of the diseased or healthy body and right into everything we touch or make. Electronic guts feel like pearls and teeth feel like pearls and tumors feel like pearls.Are you beautifying the abnormality or are you disfiguring the jewel? Do you want me to look at the rupture in the skin as if it was a jewel, or the jewel as if it was a rupture in the skin?

L-I hate to not answer your question but its both. Some days I approach it from one end and some days I approach it from the other. Jewelry functions as an extension of the body so in that way its fetishizeing the wound. Then on the other hand I’m making an object that is like the thing that is grotesque. So it’s always both.

M- You have a lot of writing on your site. Is that a byproduct of having already made it? Is it an important part of your practice?L-I think that it’s reflective, but also a way of organizing ideas when the process of making seems very intuitive or impulsive. It’s a way of sitting down and saying what am I really thinking about. I know these things I’ve read are coming out in the work, I know they’re there, what is it that’s happening really? It’s a way of clarifying and editing. It makes decision making easier. What’s the fluff, and what can I get rid of? What’s not really working for me? Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it can be overly analytical. It’s part of the reason the work ends up being very sterile. I’ve been trying to hone it down to what is absolutely necessary.