Caden Manson and Jemma Nelson (above) are the driving force behind Big Art Group. The multimedia theater company celebrates its ten-year anniversary with a takeover of Abrons Arts Center for four nights, April 15-18. The collaborators and life partners took a break from their busy rehearsal schedule to chat with independent producer and curator Earl Dax, who will also host the group’s opening night party in conjunction with PUSSY FAGGOT! at The Delancey this Thursday, April 15.
Portraits of Big Art Group photographed for EVB by Matthu Placek
Earl Dax: Before we begin the actual interview, tell us what can people expect from the Big Art Group ‘takeover’ at Abrons Arts Center?
Caden Manson: We started Big Art Group in August 1999. That’s our official birth date, so we’re at the end of our tenth year. I’ve known Jay [Wegman, Artistic Director of Abrons Arts Center] for a while, and I wanted to do something big with him. We thought it would be great if we took over all three of his performance spaces and did something on past, present and future. The Sleep is the present. It’s the New York premiere of the work. Fleshtone in the playhouse is the future because it’s a fully produced preview of the work. We usually take about a year to make work, and then we show it, then go back into rehearsals. Actually our work is never finished until it doesn’t get performed anymore. There’s a lot of radical shifting in the first year, year and a half of the work, so we’re showing Fleshtone mid-way in its development. For the past we made two different four-channel installations based on existing work. One of them is The Imitation. The other one features the animals from S.O.S. I took them out in all that gear into Greenpoint along the waterfront, and I shot all scenes from the animals and made a small 20-minute movie. Those installations will be going in rep. They’re free, and they’re running all the time.
Earl Dax: In doing some preparatory research for this interview, I came across this passage in a review of your show S.O.S. by San Francisco-based performance artist Keith Hennessy, and I’d like to get your response:
“Is Big Art Group the Dada provocateurs of our time: meaningless art to confront meaningless spasms and twitters of unending war and capital accumulation? Why don’t I love it the way I love the Dada of 1916? Half my friends thought that S.O.S. constructed a brilliant and empty spectacle about the brilliance and emptiness of the capitalist spectacle. How brilliant! How empty! The rest acted like they’d snorted poppers and ran naked into a summer rain, smiling widely.”
Caden Manson: Jemma and I were talking about the way that people perceive our work, the way we talk about our work the way we understand our work, and I’ve come to a realization that our work - I’ve always said our work is queer, we’re queer, but I didn’t know that the core values of it are queer, things that are… not like ‘gay,’ not like pride week… it’s more radically queer than that. It’s in the idea that the work has to be read. It’s not really watched, it’s read. And there is all this coding. You can read the code or you can watch the show. You have this option, and if you’re reading the code you get a different experience than if you’re watching the show. And when you watch the show the work plays with you, and it really subverts your expectations because we’re working with all these signs and symbols of capitalist culture, and also representation, and we’re queering them. I think that’s how different people respond to the work. Some people who can’t deal with queer identity are completely repelled by the work. They don’t like that we’re twisting the values, that we’re twisting the meanings. We’re talking about presentation, we’re talking about realness. You know what I mean? In S.O.S. we’re screaming realness all the time, and we’re talking about this presentation of self, and how some people don’t even question the fact that they’re presenting themselves because they’re part of the hegemony. That, sometimes, can make people very uncomfortable.
Jemma Nelson: The work also asks the audience member to take an active position in terms of how they’re watching it and what decisions they’re making, and I think that some people from maybe a more conservative background, or a more conservative aesthetic background, want a moral delivery, a moral outlook, and our work is questioning about moral standards and what the outlook should be. I think it’s interesting to say that we’re talking about consumer culture and we’re talking about the dominant economies of our times and images and transactions and people’s relationships and then say, “Well, that’s meaningless.”
Caden: We’re programmed to think that.
Jemma: We’re programmed to think that’s disposable. If you believe that’s meaningless that’s a statement in itself.
Caden: It’s a really dangerous thing to say. As Americans, we are voracious image eaters. Images are a main tool for communication, more so than the word, and we can’t get enough of them, and at the same time our culture is telling us that images are meaningless, but there is a reason why… and then we eat them. We eat them and throw them away and don’t think about them which is really dangerous. Because there’s power in all of that. There’s a real kind of power to feeding people images, and then saying they’re garbage. Don’t pay attention, because then we’re being programmed. Our work is very much about short-circuiting this programming inside audiences’ minds and really confusing them with their sort of perceived values which I find is radically queer.
Earl: In a generation raised on MTV, accustomed to a barrage of images, does your work run the risk of being lumped in with the spectacle?
Jemma: I would love that. I would love if we occupied that kind of cultural space because I think that then once people picked beneath the cover and looked underneath they’d be like “Oooh!” No, I don’t think we run that risk. I think the work is too challenging. I think that part of that challenge is because it’s live, because it’s a theatrical event that is experienced, so there’s that basic subversion. We’re talking about televisual culture. We’re talking about film culture, but you’re seeing how it’s constructed. You’re seeing the pretty side of it, and you’re seeing the ugly side of it. I think that forces you as a viewer to take account of that information, and what it is, and the power in that.
Earl: If you were to give a handy guide to ‘reading’ a Big Art Group piece what would it say?
Caden: I would just say “I’m from Texas, and my dad was an oilfield worker and he said, ‘Believe none of what you hear and only half of what you see.’”
Jemma: Watch the hair. There’s always a story in the hair. [both laugh]
Caden: The only signifier of character is usually the wig and the shirt. The body is constantly morphing.
Earl: How did Big Art Group begin?
Caden: I had been living in New York for four years, and I had gone away and come back. I wasn’t making any work at that time. Jemma and I were already together, and I was assisting directors. Then my mom died, and I thought “Why I am I assisting other directors? Why don’t I just start a company?” So I started the company. Jemma and I did that together… and also with Justin Bond. He was in the first show.
Jemma: [with a gently mocking tone] I was in a legendary downtown band called “Tinkle.” It played Meow Mix. We had our one early opening moment at Squeezebox.
Caden: We just began to make work, and one of the defining organizational structures was that of a circle erased at intervals so it becomes a dotted line. It would be an organization with lots of entrances and exits - lots of ports, lots of holes to be filled… so that the company could come in and out of it. Because everyone’s lives - especially in this sort of experimental work - everyone, their lives are very complicated. No one is living off of their art, so we wanted to make a porous organization. We wanted to have a group of people that we were always working with, even if those people were moving in and out. That’s why sometimes you see an actor in one show, and then in the next show there’s no actor - because they had to go away and do things they needed to do, and then in the next show the actor is there again.
Jemma: In terms of early collaborators, Justin Bond was in our first show. I had met Justin out in San Francisco actually. I was working at a very early gay quarterly called Outlook magazine. It was a fantastic journal that had queer writing and stories about the queer community before there was Out and before there was national gay media. I knew him from those days, and we both moved to New York around the same time. We were friends, and we were doing Squeezebox together at the same time he was launching Kiki and Herb. He has come and gone in several productions - he’s always around to consult.
That’s one of the things that we love about New York and why we want to be here because there’s this fantastic community of artists. There’s this informal community of downtown performers with people constantly doing their thing and sometimes a performance is just someone walking down the street. That’s something that we constantly draw inspiration from and draw talent from.
Caden: Over the last ten years we’ve been invited to move to Europe many times, but we can’t make our work in Europe. We made Deadset II in Europe, and I hated it. It didn’t work. It didn’t have that…
Jemma: It didn’t have the urgency.
Caden: It didn’t have the bile and the mucous and the excrement of New York. You don’t have this kind of seething American-ness that our work draws from, and you don’t have that constraint of “I’ve got to haul all this shit out of this room and pile it into my car and go store it someplace because I only have this place for two days.” It’s really a pressure-cooker. I have to give a shout out to Abrons Arts Center because Abrons is amazing. Jay [Wegman] is amazing… that he could give us this space to work in, and he’s so supportive. The work that’s going on here is just - it’s phenomenal. Just thinking about the artists who have come through this space in the last year, it’s mind-boggling. No other space is like it, and it’s also still so underground… which is maybe a good thing, maybe a bad thing.
Earl: In terms of the queerness of New York and your own backgrounds, what do you draw from?
Jemma: Now we’re very much making work about American situations. New York has a unique perspective on America. There’s a - well, perhaps it’s not so true anymore, but there used to be this feeling that you were removed from mid-America. Do you think that’s still true?
Caden: I think people escape America and come to New York. I know I did. I escaped Texas. It’s not escape from New York, it’s escape to New York. Even though everyone has their issues with New York - anyone who has been here longer than 45 minutes - but you’re still escaping to New York. At some point maybe you escape from New York, but for a long time you’re escaping to it.
Earl: Could you tell me about your ‘actions?’ How did those come about?
Caden: We are always working in different ways. S.O.S. was very much about celebration. We were coming out of the Bush years, but we were coming out of the Bush years to what? That’s a lot of this idea of nothingness and wishing to go to a clean slate but how dangerous the idea of a clean slate is. That work is about that, so in rehearsing the pieces we began to do a thing called ‘actions’ which was, literally, we threw a party and invited our friends who are performers to come and perform at the party. For a month we did that.
Jemma: We were rehearsing text…
Caden: We were rehearsing in the context of a party. It was weird because it just kind of blew up. There isn’t a lot of that kind of performance, party, bar, dancing, DJ thing going on. You’re doing it and have been doing it, but where else is that happening? It was very lighthearted. It wasn’t thematic. It was political. It was, “I’m performing for you, in this space which isn’t quite legal and is highly flammable.” And cheap.” I think we were doing like, a five dollar donation at the door. We just wanted to have party and rehearse and rehearse in the context of the people we admire and that inspire us. It sort of blew up, and then when we were touring the presenters were like, “Can you do that party thing?” We were also working with SPANK at the time. I had never done that, and I had wanted to. I admire so many people in nightlife, so we did that for about two years. Once they started doing ‘actions’, we changed.
I had been wanting to do this Cinema Fury thing which we did at [New York City’s] New Museum, which is like a mash-up of all of our old work and what we’re currently working on. It was kind of like a continuation of the ‘actions’, but not really. It was more of an installation thing.
Earl: Why do you think that that is less prevalent today that it was, say, back in the days of MUDD Club - this mix of DJs, performance, video installation, a mix of high art and low art…?
Jemma: There’s a commercial pressure, but I think it’s also the responsibility of artists to keep themselves open. That’s one of the great things I admire about Deborah Harry. She would come down and perform at Squeezebox. She would just get in there and perform with everyone. Why aren’t more artists doing that?
Earl: That’s what I love about Justin Bond, too. He’ll perform at The Cock and then two weeks later be at Carnegie Hall. I don’t think there are many artists who are willing to do that. They think they’ll tarnish their image.
Caden: That’s why Justin is radical. Really. He doesn’t give a shit.
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