So when did you graduate from college, Lawrence?
(Lawrence)
2004, 5 years ago. I went to another college after that.
(Daniel)
So 5 years ago you left MECA, and then... where did you go?
(Lawrence)
SUNY Stonybrook.
(Daniel)
And you studied art history there?
(Lawrence)
Yes and criticism. I don't believe I studied criticism there at all, but I have a degree in it.
(Daniel)
You stayed in New York and you're now at Issue Project Room, which is... if you could give me the “elevator speech?”
(Lawrence)
The elevator speech... its on the third floor down the hall to the right (laughter in
background)... its a small non profit performing arts venue, in the Gowanus area. We present mainly experimental music, some film and performance. Its about to expand into some sort of large-scale organization.
(Daniel)
Which is facilitated by a big grant, right?
(Lawrence)
Yeah.
(Daniel)
And it’s a grant from the city?
(Lawrence)
Some...we just received money from Marty Markowitz, Brooklyn borough president, in order to renovate the new space. He seems to have 32 million dollars and he gave us about a million, a little more. The new space is an old theater building at 110 Livingston and it was awarded to us for 20 years, rent free… the catch being we have to renovate it which will in the end cost 3 million.
(Daniel)
So that's great. What do you think you'll be able to do with the money?
(Lawrence)
What, me personally or the organization?
(Daniel)
How will the organization getting the money help you make the world a better place?
(Lawrence)
It won’t.
(Daniel)
But don't you think that it will enliven something? Aren't you glad that you're getting it?
(Lawrence)
I felt sort of like... opposed to it at first, because I like the idea of remaining in a small space, hosting small performances.
(Daniel)
So you had this suspicion that maybe its better kept small.
(Lawrence)
We do shows with something like five people in the audience and we're going to double our size by moving into this new space. I mean it’s a rare occurrence that we get more than fifty people there for a performance. But at the same time its important work and it should be shown on a larger scale, maybe. That said, I think we will be able to start producing very interesting stuff, like we're working with Arup in the new space. It’s going to be a completely unique sonic environment once it’s all renovated. We’ll also have the speaker system that Stephan Moore designed, which we have in our space currently.
(Daniel)
That's the first thing that really struck me about Issue... these weird, hexagonal custom speakers hanging from the ceiling.
(Lawrence)
They're nice. The whole month right now is called “Floating Points”, its a month-long
festival co-curated by Suzanne (Fiol, the Artistic Director) and Stephan (Moore). The
whole month is dedicated to the exploration of the versatility of the speaker system.
(Daniel)
That's cool.
You and I went to a very small art school. Do you think that there's some connection
there? I work for a small fashion company- so do you think there's something about
coming from a small art school that makes you want to keep things small?
(Lawrence)
Well I came from a small town, and a small house...
(Daniel)
...so you went to a small school...
(Lawrence)
I went to a small school and had a small group of friends. I like to keep things central, within my immediate range
(Daniel)
There is another question I wanted to ask you, Who do you keep in touch with besides me from college? Or were there people there that you still reference, or are there still people there that are on your kind of personal “board of directors” in your head?
(Lawrence)
Well I think that Phillip (Armstrong) and Chris (Thompson) were really important for me when I went there, and Laura (Lisbon).
(Daniel)
I think Chris might still teach a class or two
(Lawrence)
That's good, he should... I think the most significant statement I ever heard probably came from Philip, and you know... he would always ask right when you were writing or articulating something about a piece of work or anything in general... he'd always ask “Why does it matter? What is at stake in it?”
“Why does it matter?” How does one imbue significance into a thing or rather how does one begin to speak about a thing. There’s this great Blanchot quote that sort of relates to this idea. That roughly goes something along the way of, ‘seeing is not speaking but thinking is the thing that brings the two together.’ So the question was always, during that time, directed towards the question of painting (or art in general). Like why is a Jackson Pollock painting important, because it does certain things. It contributes something new, it does something that can't be spoken, it has sort of a very specific requirement to it, a very specific sort of visual conditions within the work itself that can't be articulated, that can't be like any other medium... and in turn it demands to be seen… and then the question is how can thinking bring out these qualities.. how can we now do something with this object that is a proposition…?
(Daniel)
It has to exist in that form that it is, because if it could be written down or said, and you can say all the same stuff, then why bother making the painting? [Lawrence-yeah.] So these performances have to be experienced as they are... and you could write about them….
(Lawrence)
Yeah you could write about them but writing itself is something different, and then the writing says something (itself) but the actual event, that is really important and I think that's something... Chris too, was always talking about ‘the event’, he was very much focused on Beuys and Fluxus and what the event is, and I think those two concepts and ideas... I definitely thought about this a lot when I was in grad school... those are sort of the two essential things things for me... I think about the event and what is at stake at the event.
(Daniel)
I noticed that it's very fluxus.
(Lawrence)
Yeah.
(Daniel)
Tell us about the projects that you're working on.
(Lawrence)
I’m working on a couple projects right now… I'm curating a film series on Situationist film and post-Situationist film and some other interesting avant-garde groups that explore notions of the everyday. Again, the focus is sort of on the notion of the event and micro-political form of social change, so it starts of with some early Guy Debord films and looks at the concept of détournement and why Debord worked with the medium of cinema. Then there’s some other films by Lettrist filmmakers like Gil Wolman and some newer films by Craig Baldwin, who’s just a fantastic filmmaker. He worked with Bruce Conner and came out of the Situationist tradition. His newest film “Muck up on Mu” which is part of the series, is this amazing detourned exploration of the esoteric roots of the space race. And then to set it all off there’s some Otto Muehl documents in there which I think are really important in relation to these other films because they’re not only interesting films in themselves but they document a practice which really pushes the understanding of the body and the self to a different place. “Sweet Movie” is also included in the series and in this film there is a large piece dominated by some of the practices that Muehl developed in his artist commune.
(Daniel)
It sounds great, the Situationist thing became really important to me in art school, and it also came through Chris Thompson.
(Lawrence)
Yeah yeah, definitely.
(Daniel)
He turned me onto the whole thing and I felt like “Wow, this is something that is really relatable.”
(Lawrence)
I think it’s... I mean the thing that's really relatable with in the Situationist practice (as well as some of the practices of these other groups… lets say Fluxus) is that it allowed them to sort of fluctuate between making visual work and allowed them a space for writing and created a process where thinking wasn't necessarily specific to the notion of any type of medium per se, sort of those curatorial acts …. A series of framings…. rather than just making visual artwork, which I tend to find sort of tiresome and boring now because I don't want to sit at home by myself for 12 hours a day at a table drawing. But when they did work within a specific medium they considered the limitations and structures of that medium….. Film was important for Debord because in a way it was the enemies’ home ground… his intervention was an act of terrorism
(Daniel)
I think when I learned about that stuff was when I realized that it's really about the idea, and whatever medium, whatever mode of making captures the idea is the way to go... it was less about honing technical abilities.
(Lawrence)
Its also about integration into your everyday life which is really sort of essential, because I feel like drawing and making work leads to manic depressiveness and you know... insanity, and you can restructure your life in a way that allows you to act creatively in that everyday sphere...you can not kill yourself.
(David)
So that sounds pretty great. So you just did the event with Exact Change, which I missed, but sounded pretty amazing.
(Lawrence)
That was a good one, and before that there was a fantastic event with Grey Room … that was awesome, and we had some people from LTTR do a reading from the “Lesbian Her Story” tee shirt archives... and Petite Maul which is sort of this Kraftwerk-esque Brittish pop band who write pop songs about economic crisis... and XXX Macarena which is John Miller and Tony Conrad, Jutta Kother which is a really cool project, sort of like sci-fi... trash rock... then this Exact Change event was really interesting, and the thing that I really enjoyed about it was how it became this process of re-invigorating these texts through the intervention of these interesting artists. You really get to see how the performers are thinking about these texts…..how they relate them back to their own projects and in the process breathe new life into them. Its not about talking about a text and analyzing a text, more so using a text which I think is really important... It's like... What do you do with something? It's sort of like that same question of “what is at stake” but like... what can you do with it? Deleuze has this great thing where he says something to the effect of ‘we don't know what a body is until we see what a body can do.’
(Daniel)
Yeah, it’s interesting... Like the notion of making... like being a maker... feeling like you have to make but where does it go and what does it do. How does it function... because even like a painting, for a bad example, just doesn't sit on a wall.
(Lawrence)
No, it doesn't. It’s all about how it sits in the world and the idea of a gallery space is just a complete pretension and a false notion of how something goes. It's all about how
something sits in your mind.
(Daniel)
Well what else do you want to say?
(Lawrence)
Nothing. Go Cougars!
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