There Are Real Artists Up Here

reading itself is an elitist act. I think this is an attitude that prevails not only at PSU but also in the country at large. American’s often seem more proud of idiocy than of intellect. The image is also funny to me because PSU is such a massive bureaucratic body, its always fun to imagine how you might go about approaching an institution like that - who would Ryan talk to in order to request compensation for the use of his image?

There Are Real Artists Up Here A Conversation with Anna Gray & Ryan Wilson Paulsen

Ryan Wilson Paulsen – Part of me wants to go storming in and make some claim about my right to privacy, or tell them I am in witness protection, or something. I would love to stir up some sort of controversy, to make PSU into a Clifford Irving character with me as the victimized Howard Hughes, just trying to live in peace and isolation. Irving went to jail after he took money for an exclusive autobiography of Hughes that he was supposedly writing. It was a hoax though; Irving was a notorious faker and he had never had any contact with Hughes. Who would go to jail at PSU, the graphic designer, the photographer? That’s the problem with bureaucracy I guess. No one can be fully accountable for anything.

by Paavo Völts

Paavo Völts – I recently noticed a sign advertising a newly designed area of the Portland State University campus. Actually, that sign sort of became the impetus for this interview. You have probably seen it by now. It shows what the area between two of the buildings will look like after structural upgrades and landscaping. They are calling it a ‘plaza’. It’s basically a few benches and some bike racks and large planters. Anyway, Ryan is dead center in the image, sitting on a bench reading. He seems really engrossed in the book, his body is almost completely bent over in concentration. I realized that’s how I imagine both of you in my head, quietly and intensely studying in preparation for your next project. Have you two seen the sign yet?

But, going back, I would like to add something to what Anna said about reading and research. I agree that there seems to be a general aversion to critical discourse here, but I think it’s often wellintentioned. There’s a desire to challenge typical methods of learning and teaching, to create a new kind of classroom experience that casts out the old stagnant standards and hierarchies. I think this is great in some ways, but it makes it too easy to forfeit a standard of academic criticality altogether. We want the criticality to stick around, in and outside of the university, but sometimes our efforts just end up seeming mean.

Anna Gray– Yeah, we both have seen it. I love that Ryan’s study habits are so central, mostly because it seems a little ironic at PSU where, in our experience, close reading and research aren’t exactly stressed. We have sometimes observed a fear of criticality or of intellectualism here, as if

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PV – That all being said, I really would like to know what you think about the sign itself as a visual object.

ing an art object that functions to protect the collector’s home, but also would work to make her question her presumptions about what protection actually is. The bar is there more to protect her from her own fears than to actually keep her safe from a physical threat. It also seems like it is more about keeping an inhabitant in, rather than keeping someone else out. In that way the safety device becomes a hindrance to the collector. We can think of it like we think of surveillance cameras—they are there to assure you, to impose a gaze that might make people police themselves. They are not there to actively intervene. Their effect is either preventative or retroactive.

RWP – Sorry, yeah, I’m not sure how I noticed the sign at first. I don’t normally look at signs like that. And the image is pretty normal, just what you would expect to see on a college campus, a bunch of ethnically diverse youngish people with bikes and backpacks. As an artist, I shouldn’t admit that I try my hardest to ignore vast portions of visual culture, but I do. I hate being told what is what.

Anyway, somehow that particular sign caught the corner of my eye while I was walking in the park blocks and I thought one of the figures sat a bit like me. At first I didn’t think it could possibly be me because I don’t remember being photographed, let alone being asked if using my image in a university ad was okay. I was sort of shocked by it when I went up close and really looked. I should say that ultimately I don’t really care that my image was used, it’s just interesting how badly it was done and also that the scene the sign depicts is nowhere I could have actually sat. It isn’t that they just used an image of me, they also manipulated it.

Ultimately, we have all resigned ourselves to live with surveillance, convinced ourselves that it is there for safety’s sake, but all that thinking gets kinda turned around when you suddenly see yourself in an ad, doing something you didn’t know you were doing in a place that doesn’t even exist. RWP – Yeah, the photoshopping on the sign is pretty brilliant, especially when comparing it with our Safe House proposal. I mean, look at how poorly my body was cut from the original photograph and placed within the new scene. I don’t even fit on the bench; the proportions are all wrong. I have a black outline around my whole body. On top of that it’s as if they didn’t even try to match the colors when meshing the computer-generated background and the overlaid photographic images. It’s a lot like the image we have been using for Safe House, where the metal brackets are way too bright and the color saturation of the wood bar makes it stand out and look

AG – I really like the crappy photoshopping job on the image, its like it is still in construction phase just as the site it’s advertising is. That’s what’s most visually interesting to me: the slapped-together aesthetic. It’s pretty evocative and sort of misplaced. It seems more bad DIY than professional architectural rendering. Also, it kinda reminds me of a piece we recently did called Safe House. It shows a safety bar installed via photoshop (and not very meticulously I might add,) across the front door of an art collector’s house. We were interested in creat-

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as if it’s not part of the room. We have always been interested in how proposal images are never really adequate representations of a project, but often times they are all that becomes of a particular idea. We were talking the other day about how so much conceptual art of the sixties and seventies and a fair amount of contemporary art just didn’t really need to get made. The proposal, in crudely constructed form or even in verbal form, is effective enough.

to make better ones in the future. As far as marriage goes, in some ways I think I would have been fine leaving our relationship in the proposal phase and never actually going through with the legal marriage, but I think there is something to be said for participating in some of the more traditional parts of culture and in the process making them your own.

PV – This ‘good enough in proposal form’ mentality can work brilliantly in art but it backfires in so many other areas of life and culture don’t you think? I am thinking specifically of bureaucratic institutions, architectural projects, politics, health care etc. You guys are married; did you think about leaving that in proposal form? Do you think you are good for each other or do you feel like you are just good enough? How do these do these concerns manifest in your art practice? When do you challenge one another to make better work or to carry something all the way out? When do you settle and trust the other person’s idea even if you aren’t that interested in it? RWP – That’s a lot of loaded questions. I don’t feel at any moment that I have settled as far as our relationship goes. Regarding our work, I do on occasion find myself saying yes to ideas that I don’t think are exceptional, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I believe in working through everything to a certain point. I have tons of bad ideas, and we follow through with a lot of them. It seems to me that keeping a consistent pattern of working is as important as having good ideas. So, you work through all of them and just throw out the ones that turn out to be sub-par. In many instances the idea doesn’t stand out as being bad until you are done carrying it out and then you realize what a weak idea it was to begin with.

RWP - Yeah, you also get a tax deduction and you can save money on your car insurance if you get married. PV - I’m sure that’s why you decided to actually tie the knot. So, going back to the work: do you guys fight over whose ideas take precedence or get carried out? AG – We never really fight over ideas. Neither one of us takes precedence, it really depends on the projects themselves. Certain projects take precedent over others because of many factors: deadlines, money, whether or not they are fun to carry out etc. Its not really about us. Plus, our ideas don’t really belong to either one of us more often than not they are devised collectively. RWP – It’s funny how people try to split up our work. There is no split, at least if there is, it doesn’t really matter. Neither one of us places much stock in our single authorship. PV – And yet you each keep your own separate names. AG - We like how they look together, and also, we aren’t denying that we are separate people with individual sets of ideas, we are just insisting that our process is fused and it would be a useless and nit-picky task to break it apart. PV - I can understand that, though sometimes it seems like an impossibility and perhaps just an unwillingness to be honest and transparent about your process.

AG –I think we rarely throw things out all together, that seems a bit strong and actually kind of impossible. I would say that we recycle bad ideas, even if it doesn’t seem like it at the time. The ideas circle back around. Often, what seems bad or irrelevant at one moment turns to genius later on when you have different tools or a new context. All of the bad projects hopefully roll up

AG - I would say that we care more about transparency than honesty. But claiming that our process is truly collaborative and wanting it to be regarded as such is us being transparent. We are asking for exactly what we want.

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PV - Huh...I remember at a talk you gave last year, you talked about things you haven’t actually produced as part of your body of work, how much of your work exists in non-existent form? For example, have you installed Safe House in any homes yet?

they will find themselves walking into a Narcotics Anonymous meeting. Although, you get the idea with what I just told you, it has no impact. If we compare No One Ends Up Here by Accident to Brad Adkins’ performance Black Paintings, where he led a group of people on a long city bus ride only to leave them outside of his ex-girlfriends house in the rain, we can see how much more potent an end is when there is an actual audience present to experience it.

RWP – No, there is no physical installment of Safe House. We will install it as soon as customer demand makes it possible. Again though, I’m not sure how important it is for a piece like Safe House to actually be made. One can still present it as a concept to an audience and I think it works. I love the idea of making it and installing it, I think we both do, but art costs quite a bit of money to make so unless someone’s paying for it our work doesn’t get made. AG – That’s not completely true, we do make a lot of work that we don’t or can’t sell. I think it really depends on the particular project. Some work is made to be bought and sold, and some doesn’t enter into that economic structure at all. We make stuff all the time that we have to pay for out of our own pocket, like the book we selfpublished last winter called Integrating a Burning House. In a way we had to make that work and produce it out of pocket, partly for our own sanity, (we needed to do it quickly and not wait for funding,) and partly because it would have been a completely different thing if there had been other people - designers, distributors, publishers - involved in the process. We also have been working on a series of posters that aren’t necessarily for sale. In the end we do like to produce some salable product, a book or a collection of works, so that we might recoup some costs, but the marketability of the objects in these cases didn’t come into play at the time of their conception.

PV – If your project doesn’t rely on an audience’s reaction as its moment of revelation, like the works you just described, do you give much thought to your audience? I’ll add that it seems to me like audiences are growing narrower and narrower these days. Do you see your work or parts of your work appealing to a specific subgroup of art-goers or do you cater to a particular audience? AG – I would say we always think about having an audience. We wouldn’t be making art if we didn’t want people to come look at it, but I think you are right about narrow audiences. As we define ourselves by smaller and more obscure pieces of culture, it seems like there is less of an audience for any one thing. I know I have a very small slice of art that I like to look at. Ryan’s slice is even smaller. As far as our work and audience goes, I think that we are often surprised by who responds to specific works. You can think about an audience in a general way or in a specific way. We do both. We make some work for the benefit of individual people - fellow artists, curators, parents, - but then other times we think about our viewers much more generally as people who look at things.

RWP – You’re right, you’re right. Talking about what gets made and what doesn’t makes me think about another piece, a performance called No One Ends Up Here by Accident that we haven’t gotten around to executing yet. I bring it up because it is one of those projects where talking about the idea is no substitute for performing it. The idea was to pass out a postcard with the words “no one ends up here by accident” on one side and a date, time, and address on the other. If a viewer decides to come to the performance

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RWP – I would take that thought a bit further and say that what we do wouldn’t be art at all unless it was exposed to the public, even if that exposure is one conversation or the public is one singular person. Art is, and should be, inherently social, it is just another form of communication. This is why I’m so troubled by the term ‘social practice.’ I don’t have a problem with the ideas of interactivity or collaboration in art; I have a problem with the connotations of the phrase ‘social practice.’ It implies that other art practices are not social, or that socialness in art is a new history-less invention, which is just not true.

PV – You two made a poster where you are standing atop a brick building, holding a sign that reads ‘there are real artists up here,’ which seems to be making fun of just this type of labeling. AG – Yeah, we threw around a number of different ways to word that. We decided in the end that ‘there are real artists up here’ embodied a certain amount of defiance toward the idea of self-naming, and also draws attention to the insecurities that make people want to name themselves in the first place. For those who knew, the image also became a comment on the site itself as we are standing on the roof of the building that houses the graduate studios. It is in a ramshackle and neglected building on the PSU campus; so, it is also a statement about our own presence as students in a corner of the university that has been forgotten in many ways.

I remember having a debate about the social role of art in undergrad. When a fellow student started talking about art as a way to gain personal insight I challenged his assumptions. He claimed that he made art only for himself and it didn’t matter whether or not anyone else ever saw it. He got really worked up when I told him I thought that he was making sketches and not art. I guess it comes down to what you call yourself and what you call art. And, maybe we should break the cycle of naming ourselves at all. I was recently reading an interview with Martin Kersels and he talks about how confusing labels are, how they are stumbling blocks for an artist who wants to work in diverse ways. People get stuck if they claim themselves as conceptual artists or painters. When later they want to write poetry or make sculpture a certain amount of the ‘painter’ or ‘the conceptual artist’ remains and has to be dealt with. We all pretend to accept people who change their name, but let’s just admit that we secretly think they are fools. You can call yourself anything you want but that doesn’t mean people will think of you that way. It just seems better to not name yourself at all, or at least to label yourself in the general rather than the specific.

RWP - It seemed funny to refer to ourselves as real artists, because we are also implying that there are fake ones out there. I also think that this image demonstrates the position we often take with regards to audience. It says “recognize me” or “include me,” a request that (whether or not we want to admit it) is there when anyone produces art and puts it out into the world. We all want some form of credit. A lot of times, instead of waiting for someone else to include us or give us recognition, we just go ahead do it ourselves.

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