Martine Syms, Portrait, 2016. Photo by Hendrik Schneider
In Martine Syms work, the archive of African American culture is visible, present and relevant rather than something that belongs to the past. Take for example her video series, “Lessons”, on show at “Fact & Trouble” hosted by ICA, London.
A film-poem reminiscent of Sergei Eisenstein’s montages, “Lessons”, is composed of 180 meditations on black radicalism structured as TV commercials, each 30 seconds long. In one, a girl kisses a poster of Jesse McCartney as Smokey Robinson’s “You’ve Really Got a Hold On Me” plays in the background; in another, surveillance footage shows a high school brawl in a bowling alley involving basketball player Allen Iverson. Here the public merges with the private, and the old is indistinguishable from the new. Yet this is more than just another hazy postmodern statement. Indeed, it seems like a visualisation of the sociologist W.E.B Du Bois’s thoughts on the experience of African-Americans in the 20th century, which he compared to “looking at one’s self through the eyes of others… measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity”.
Staged as the centrepiece to her first European solo show, “Lessons” exemplifies Syms’s multitalented skill set and breadth of experience. Born in LA in 1988, she moved to Chicago in 2007 where she studied art and later ran the Golden Age gallery. Since then she’s lectured at Yale, CalArts and MoMA; published formative essays on race and gender; exhibited at LA’s Karma International and New York’s Bridget Donahue galleries; experimented with comedy in “She Mad” (2014); started publishing imprint, Dominica, and returned to the West coast. Having landed in London ahead of her debut, Syms spoke to SLEEK about identity, nostalgia, cable TV and cultural innovation.
“Notes on Gesture”, 2015. Image Courtesy of the Artist and Bridget Donahue, New York
Your work often draws on American TV. What is it about it that interests you?
My work is more specifically about the sitcom than television in general. Scholar Matthew Daube has written about stand up as “comedic performance structure inextricably linked to issues of race, ethnicity and the production of identity.” The sitcom coalesced into a dramatisation of the star comedian’s act. I find it’s tied to the same issues.
This quote from Paul Beatty’s 2008 novel “Slumberland” is central to my thinking about TV in American culture. I told her I once heard a comedian say that if you put an apple on television everyday for six months, and then placed that apple in a glass case and put that on display at the mall, people would go up to it and say, Oooh, look, there’s that apple that’s on television. America’s a lot like that apple.
That’s very funny.
I’m jetlagged so using other people’s words seems smart.
Television structures American ideology, identity and discourse. I think it’s silly to think that TV’s dominance has subsided. Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, and Vine are all based on it. Television used to “deliver” people, now it also serves them to advertisers.
Do you have a favourite TV show?
I go through many different feelings while watching “Scandal” — a political thriller about a crisis management firm in Washington DC. The season finale ends with a character bashing someone’s head in with a steel chair. I was into it. I hate reality television. I love melodrama. Lately, I find myself drawn to the black female anti-hero, and I’ve been known to quote profusely from those shows.
“Fact & Trouble”, 2016, ICA, London. Photo by Mark Blower
You also have your own take on the sitcom format, “She Mad”. I hear you’re going to be showing a new episode of that at the Hammer Museum’s biennale ‘Made in L.A. 2016: a, the, though, only’.
“She Mad” is an episodic project that I began in 2014 with a 25 minute video titled “A Pilot For A Show About Nowhere” that was commissioned by the New Museum and featured in “Triennial: Surround Audience”, 2015. It’s a way to think about surveillance, visibility, and the gulf between reality and its representation, and uses fragments of the sitcom format to produce an ‘identity’ named Martine. Martine is a graphic designer who wants to be an important artist. She is equal parts overachiever and stoner. She lives in Koreatown, Los Angeles, USA. The character Martine is not me, but a way of “offering up my experience and performing my particular manner of thinking” to borrow some words from American author Maggie Nelson.
For “Made in L.A.”, 2016 I’m working on a new episode called “Laughing Gas”, in which Martine tries to get her wisdom teeth removed. After she is given nitrous oxide, her insurance is declined and she has to leave. Martine then continues through different public spaces, causing hysteria. It’s inspired by the 1907 Edwin Porter film of the same name. The video will be presented as an endless loop for a four-channel monitor installation.
In your new show at the ICA, you’re talking in part about the connection between heritage and inheritance with regard to the black radical tradition, and how things are passed down both on a personal and collective level, too.
The cornerstone of the exhibition is a series of videos entitled “Lessons”, that I’ve been working on since 2014. I was inspired by Kevin Young’s book “The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness”. The book is split into two halves. The first half is about literature and the second half is about music, and he articulates five lessons of the traditions that are threaded throughout. Lesson one is “What You Claim You Are”. Lesson three is “Struggle”. I wanted to make commercials for each lesson. I decided they would be 30 seconds long, and I followed a set of rules on how to film and edit them. Once I finished the first five, I decided there had to be more and it continued from there. I was thinking about the advertising commercial as a break. How can I extend that break like it’s done in music? The first time I screened them I saw how they began to accumulate meaning. They are overwhelming. I also showed them to a friend who mentioned “The Cantos” by Ezra Pound. I still haven’t read all of the cantos, but the idea of creating a larger narrative through small stories appealed to me.
“The Queen’s English”, 2014, ICA, London.
There are also some photographs by your Dad, right?
The other works in the show build on this idea of a tradition; I’d already been working with my father’s images for a few years. He’s a Sunday photographer. I don’t know if that’s a term since it would apply to everyone. Anyways, he always had cameras and lenses around, he was a major influence in terms of my own image making. I hadn’t been consciously thinking about them as his work until I started putting together this show.
Your 2015 collaboration with actor Kahlil Joseph, “Memory Palace”, created a narrative using pictures and record sleeves from your Aunt’s boarding house as well as Joseph’s own collection. Are you nostalgic?
I’m not nostalgic about anything. I’m more intrigued by the way we construct ourselves for the camera. I’m obsessed with conventions and it’s strange to me how formal techniques, i.e. the rule of thirds, or centred composition, are made and unmade in amateur photography and other “orphaned” media. You can see trends in poses, in facial expressions and in settings. Sometimes I wonder why take any pictures since there’s probably one like the one you took out there somewhere. I think the function of the photo has changed. People used to carry them around. My dad still has thousands of prints. I used to be into Polaroids and Lomography, and my friend — artist David Horvitz — used to make prints of shows in Los Angeles, so the tactility isn’t foreign to me either, but things have changed. That’s a real understatement, huh?
What sorts of things have typified these changes?
I think Vine is the best example right now. It makes me very hopeful. I met one of the founders about a year ago and I was like freaking out: “I love vine it’s the greatest medium of our time,” I said, and proceeded to talk about my favourite videos; all of which were made by black teenagers. He had such a different vision of the service. You can see it when you go on the app and look at which videos they promote. They are horrible. These rad kids however, keep using it against the way it was intended. I think that’s always happening though. Look at any cultural innovation and it starts by someone doing it “wrong.” It’s always a million times more interesting. When shit is too neat and buttoned up it bores me. I pretend I know what I’m doing for the sake of interviews, but I’m just trying things out. That’s what makes it fun.
“Sometimes I wonder why take any pictures since there’s probably one like the one you took out there somewhere.”
Martine Syms at Karma International, 2016. Photo by Jeff McLane
Portrait by Hendrik Schneider
Originally published in Sleek 50 – order here
“Laughing Gas” by Martine Syms is currently on display at the Hammer Museum’s biennale “Made in L.A. 2016: a, the, though, only” until 28 August