Interviews with great people
I am lucky to have so many wonderful conversations with people almost every day. Because of this, I created this page to share my interviews with them here on the blog. I hope you’ll enjoy them as I have time to post them.
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An Interview with A.M. Hoch
On her installation Portrait of a Young Boat (“Metamorfosi di una barca”).
Popoli Pop Cult Festival (June 24, 25, and 26) - Bagnara di Romagna, Italy
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A short while ago, I had a conversation with my colleague and friend A. M. Hoch about her most recent installation in Bagnara di Romagna, Italy. To say I am a fan does not hit it: I am devoted to her — to this vision and work — and am thrilled to share it here with all of you. Her Portrait of a Young Boat (“Metamorfosi di una barca”) was originally conceived as an immersive installation combining painting, sculpture, and the fictional aural diary of a pubescent girl’s miraculous transformation into a boat. But in this site-specific installation (without sound) in the town’s ancient tower, the winding staircase and four circular floors provided an astonishing embodiment of the girl’s metamorphosis. Using painted mirrors, wires, strings, stones and everyday objects, the artist leads the viewer through a spatial narrative — transforming the 14th-century castle fortress into a contemporary Theater of Memory.
(All photos by Manuel Montanari — www.miacarabufera.it — unless indicated otherwise by an asterisk.)
SK: Tell me about the inception of this piece; where does the name come from?
AH: Back in the mid-80′s I did a number of installations called “Self-portrait as a Young Boat” — though calling them “installations” seems kind of a pretentious since they were only up in my studio — just me and some of my friends saw them. I had been working as a boat painter for a year or so, in a very desolate — dismal really — boatyard in Staten Island when I began remembering big chunks of my childhood that I’d completely disassociated myself from. While I was sanding and painting, sanding and painting — surrounded by the water and a cast of seedy characters who lived in their boats — this alternate reality, this parallel narrative of my past, began surfacing, bubbling up from my unconscious very uncontrollably. I actually felt like I was coming completely undone.
Eventually I started doing these installations in my studio that combined oddly shaped, unstretched, painted canvas with wires and sticks and various objects, along with text that I scrawled on the walls. I was pawing around, trying to express this tenuous rigging of memory and language that was just barely holding my life together — but this idea of creating a portrait of being, of a self, that didn’t have a contour in the way we are taught to think of ourselves — a portrait in which the body isn’t defined by a mass with a distinct beginning and end, but rather as a very delicate, precariously balanced system of memory and perception and imagination — was deeply soothing and comforting when the rest of my life was in tatters. Those were incredibly meaningful pieces to me but they were never exhibited and I always thought I wanted to return to them.
After I moved to Italy, those feelings of anomie — of feeling unmoored and unhinged — came back very intensely, so I thought, well maybe this is the time to go back to that series. But I didn’t have a studio at that time, so I started writing because I wanted the audio component to be central to this installation. So, it was very much a surprise when this installation finally materialized with no sound in this completely unexpected location.
SK: How did it come to be in this remarkable location?
AH: Very much out of nowhere, the director of Friends of the Johns Hopkins University (Associazione italo-americana Luciano Finelli) here in Bologna contacted me to ask if I’d be interested in doing an exhibition in a little town called Bagnara di Romagna (about 20 miles east of Bologna) as part of their 3rd annual “Popoli Pop Cult Festival.” I wasn’t very convinced it was something I wanted to do, but then I met with the director of the arts council there and he showed me this astonishing 14th-century castle that dominates the center of the town, and I started to get more interested. Then after I met with Lisa Emiliani, who supervises exhibitions in the castle tower, I started to become really excited: she seemed to intuitively understand what I could do there — just from a few shards I brought in to try out there and from photos of my previous work — and she did everything she could to make sure I could realize this installation the way I wanted to.
So, it was a kind of miraculous thing — in the way it’s miraculous when a painting suddenly starts to emerge out of chaos, out of a mess of shapes and colors — but once I was given permission and support to do what I wanted in there, I realized that the whole form of this ancient tower — this dark, snail-like structure that you almost have to crawl through because the spiral staircase is so narrow and worn … you have to use the banister to kind of hoist yourself from one level to the next — even the layout of the rooms, down to the centimeter, worked with pieces I’d been working on in my studio with really no idea how they would finally cohere. It was uncanny how perfectly the essence of the piece — the gradual metamorphosis of a pubescent girl into another form of being — blended with this physical structure. The tower added a whole other dimension I could never have imagined — this kinetic, physical involvement with the visual narrative that unfolds as you arduously climb from the bottom floor up to the top.
Actually, it was the floors covered with pebbles on the first and second levels of the tower that really got me going … and also the fact that someone was actually held prisoner for 60 days on the third floor. He carved this message into the wall that’s been preserved for hundreds of years.
SK: In fact, what is that word you spell out with pebbles on the floor in a couple of places?
AH: It’s the ancient Greek word: “μῆτις” – or metis — which is a sort of archetypal concept or energy that is translated very approximately in English as “cunning” or “craft.” It is the word used to describe Odysseus in The Odyssey — but it’s a word with an incredible power and history, and very important to this installation. In the mystical texts of Empedocles, Aphrodites’ metis is likened to that of a ship builder – the idea being that the bodies that she gives to us humans are the boats we need for crossing this illusory ocean of space and time.
The back story of “Portrait of a Young Boat” is the narrative of this 14-year-old girl who must use her metis to survive, to escape from the prison of her childhood — and she does so by turning herself into another shape, another form of being: a boat, metaphorically. I associate metis with that genius we all have inside us — the genius inside every human being that enables us to solve our deepest, most difficult problems, to find a way around the obstacles and tragedies that are placed in front of us. There’s this line from Rumi (a Sufi poet from the 13th century) that I really love: “From the moment you came into this world, a ladder was placed in front of you that you might escape.” In fact, ropes and ladders and stairways are recurring elements in this installation.
Previously I had thought metis was only a description of a quality possessed by certain gods and goddesses and heroes and heroines, but while doing this installation, I learned that Metis is a female character in Greek mythology, the child of Oceanus — she preceded Zeus and was his first spouse and considered his equal. I loved discovering this because I envision the character in the aural diary of the Young Boat to be this kind of primordial female energy that is able to subvert the patriarchal powers that imprison and abuse her.
SK: This is only one actualization of this piece, you have plans for it to be a radio play and also a barge, tell me more!
AH: When I first began developing this piece here in Italy, I started writing instead of painting, which is not the way I have normally worked. But, since I wanted the text — a recorded soundtrack — to be a key part of this piece, it actually felt right to approach it from that direction. When I started writing, I realized I wanted to write this as fiction — to create a completely fictional persona — a completely eccentric heroine with all kinds of bizarre personality quirks and surreal powers.
When I completed the text and showed it to some people, they felt it stood very well on its own and encouraged me to publish it — or have it produced as a radio play (The Diary of a Young Boat). There’s been real interest shown in the latter possibility, but that is still in the works. Ideally, I’d love to have the radio play embedded in a physical installation — you and I have discussed the idea of creating a kind of urban barge somewhere in order to do that, which I find to be a really thrilling idea.
SK: What is Theater of Memory as you have framed it and why is it important to your work?
That phrase “theater of memory” has been adopted by many people because it’s so evocative. My own interpretation of it is entirely personal and probably bears little resemblance to Giulio Camillo’s original concept of it in the 16th century. For me, it’s related to a childhood craving to actually walk into a picture — into a painting or into movie frame — to be physically immersed in an imaginary world instead of being kept on the outside of it. So, for better or worse, I’d say my artistic ambitions as an adult are very much connected to my earliest childhood obsessions. But I don’t envision a Theater of Memory at all like a cartoon or a science fiction fantasy—it is much more akin to how I experience music—that is, being completely immersed or engulfed in another state of consciousness.
Transforming a space in an installation — especially a space that has a real vitality, an energetic relationship to the external world (as opposed to galleries or museums that exist solely as receptacles for art and artifacts) — so that what exists in the imagination or memory is projected outward onto the walls and floors and ceiling, or into the objects or materials in a room, is an exquisitely creative and liberating act. When you’re able to turn a space inside out like that, you blur the usual boundaries between mind and memory and matter—and that feels like an act of alchemy. It’s liberating to be reminded that many of the boundaries in time and space, between the real and the imaginary — which we come to assume are immutable facts — exist only by consensus reality; we can transcend them.
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SK: Recently you were in the Italian newspapers – a photo of you holding a television monitor around your face with a sign above saying: “Liberiamo l’immagine della donna”(“Let’s liberate the image of woman”). What’s happening in Italy regarding women’s rights and roles, and how did this impact the creation of this piece? (Another link here – with some other great pictures of the rest of the march http://bit.ly/eQCXJ3 )
I participated in Italy’s million-woman march in February called “Se non ora, quando?” — “If not now, when?”— which I think is a great question for women in Italy to be asking at this time. I am an unabashed feminist — and find it amazing that any woman in the world isn’t. The fact that women have been kept on the margins of the arts and sciences — of just about every aspect of culture except child-rearing — for the vast majority of the history of civilization has warped our view of what it is to be human. How anyone — man or woman — can not be a feminist is mindboggling to me.
Anyway, in Italy most women want very much to distance themselves from the label “feminist” so I have found myself very motivated to challenge that way of thinking — or rather, that way of not thinking. Of course, at this point, the abuse of women in the media in Berlusconi’s Italy is the source of worldwide ignominy. As an outsider in this culture, I see the gross representation of women in the media here—and the absence of women in creative positions in art, industry and government—as the continuation of a tradition going back centuries, where the image of women was used primarily to disseminate the ideals and philosophy of a patriarchal and misogynist religion (and I would argue almost every organized religion on this planet is inherently misogynist). Just go into any one of the thousands of churches in Italy — most of which are teeming with some of the most splendid art ever made — and the chances of seeing a single piece of art made by a female artist is just about nil, and that is not because women are less capable of making great art than men. To me, that absence is symptomatic of a misogyny that is so endemic that it is virtually invisible.
Anyway, that lop-sided reality — and the collusion of many women in that reality — is a goad to me in my own work as an artist. After all, the situation for women here in Italy is just slightly more appalling than it is in many other so-called developed countries, including the U.S.
As far as how the situation of women in Italy affected this piece, I would say that my experience of sexism affects everything I do, because I think sexist attitudes and behaviors are terribly deeply ingrained in every human being—they are more primal and poisonous than racism, in my opinion—and affect everyone everyday. Those ideas affect the way one wakes up in the morning and the way one dreams at night, whether one is aware of them or not.
Note: All photos and materials on these pages are under copyright by A. M. Hoch
(*Credit photo to Antonello Iannaccone)
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A. M. Hoch (a.k.a. Amy Hotch) has exhibited her Theatres of Memory—installations that combine painting, sculpture, original text, and digital technologies—in museums and galleries in the United States and Europe, including “Mitosis: Formation of Daughter Cells,” a site-specific installation, commissioned and exhibited by the Beall Center for Art and Technology, in Irvine, California, and adapted for exhibition at the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna, Spoleto, Italy; “interstices,” a multimedia installation, exhibited at the Alice Austen House Museum, New York; “I keep forgetting … it’s not working,” exhibited at the Kunsthaus Tacheles, Berlin, Germany. Solo painting exhibitions include one-person shows at Deutsches Haus, Columbia University; and LaMama La Galleria, New York City.
Ms. Hoch has received numerous grants throughout her career, including an artist-in-residency from Altos De Chavon, in the Dominican Republic; a project grant from the State Senate in Berlin, Germany; and a Gottlieb Grant. She was a research artist at the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art, Snug Harbor Museum, New York. She received a large-scale commission from the Beall Center for Art and Technology to launch their 2004 season.
Born in New York City, Ms. Hoch currently lives and works in Bologna, Italy.
