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Courtesy of the artist
Chemical Scratch for Frankfurt, 2005/7, 3 16mm film on loop, sound installation view
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She paints, writes and makes monographs, but the core of Amy Granat’s artistic practice is film. Sometimes it’s narrative; T.S.O.Y.W., a collaboration with artist Drew Weitzler, follows a modern version of Goethe’s Young Werther as he crosses America by motorcycle and disappears into the desert. But Granat’s best known for her 16-mm “scratch films,” which White Flag Projects director Matt Strauss describes as expressionist paintings that move. “They’re incredibly graphic and retinally powerful,” he says. “They are very high-contrast, flickering images…they don’t have the stability of a painting, but they have a kind of gestural action that a lot of those painters aspired to.” Granat grew up in St. Louis, and now lives in New York. Her work is in MoMA and the Whitney (T.S.O.Y.W. was part of the 2008 Whitney Biennial), she’s represented by one of the finest galleries in Europe, Eva Presenhuber, and FlashArt named her as eighth on its list of “top emerging artists in the world.” Though Granat curated a group show for White Flag in 2008, bendover/hangover (which included work by STL-expats Williams S. Burroughs and Charles Eames), she has never shown here. She has also never had a career retrospective. This show remedies both things.
Amy Granat opens at White Flag Projects (4568 Manchester) September 8 and runs through October 22. We talked to Granat this summer in anticipation of this fall’s show; here are some outtakes from our talk with her.
For me, I’m really excited [about the show in St. Louis] because my career really started with exhibits in France and Switzerland, really coming out of a community of friends I had in New York that were more well-known in Europe. So my career went this backwards route, rather than doing a gallery show in the town where I lived and then grow, grow, grow; it went the other way. My work is kind of difficult to place in people’s homes, because it’s complicated. I showed first in Europe, and then New York, and then the west coast, and then I did something in Chicago and Minneapolis and Ohio, but this is the first time I’m doing something in Missouri, which is where I’m from.
Growing up in St. Louis, I didn’t really have much of a connection to contemporary art as a teenager. The music world of the early ’90s was my culture here. It really introduced me to a DIY spirit, and an idea of experimentation that I then carried on to filmmaking when I really started to get into that. So coming out of high school and this music scene, I just started when I was in college, I went to Bard College in upstate New York, I started singing in a band and then singing and playing bass in a band, then playing bass and drums and keyboards in a band. It was always a noise or punk style of music… It’s very much about a community, people working together.
I left 18 years ago. It’s changed a lot. I also think people of my generation who are artistically inclined have left the city. But I also think there is a lot of really young, fresh talent that comes for a few years and then moves on, because it’s a great city to have a lot of impact and influence and build yourself up before moving on. I think that is to its benefit. To get young people at that stage leads to a lot of experimentation and can be very cool, but can also be very isolating. I like the trees, I love the sky and the sunsets and the air. It has a good light to it. And the way it’s changed and become maybe more conservative or mainstream, I don’t have to let it bother me because I am just in and out. The people dedicated to culture in this city are champions.
I’m very much an artist’s artist, so I support artist-run spaces, and people who do things out of a sincere desire to share ideas. With that said, I’ve also done projects, and I really like doing projects, with larger institutions. In Switzerland I have a gallery, a very big gallery that shows a lot of artists that are in a different place in their career than me—Richard Prince shows there. But for a really small gallery that is run by a woman who’s just started, so it’s a combination.
The major installation that will be the focus point of the show is taking off of a project I started in 2005 called “Stars Way Out.” This refers to the early film installation that I presented at a place called Galerie Kamm in Neuchatel Swiss, and PS1 in New York. And it’s kind of a combination of not just film, but has a sound element to it as well. It’s also very much about the sculpture of the machine. So it’s all of these things combined. It’s all 16mm projectors that have film loops running through them that are usually installed in a very sculptural manner. A film strip, in contrast to video, is actually this material that you can hold and feel. So I create loops that will run the path, with the architecture of the space….it’s kind of like building a roller coaster. The interest I had in scratching the films was not just about this physical or visual gesture, but also an audio one as well. When the films run through the 16mm projector, they have an optical sound head. They read light as noise. I came into the art world through the underground music world. I don’t have an MFA. I didn’t take the traditional route that an artist goes through.
So I met Steven [Parrino] in New York, primarily through the music world. He’s passed away. He was a painter primarily, but also a musician. He put me in my first show. Going back to the 16mm installation that I’m doing at White Flag, it has these loops, but it also has guitar amplifiers hooked up to the projectors. When you put the optical head on high, the image actually registers as a sound. So I like to combine three or four projectors at once. And it becomes this sublime moment, really, that is so physically and practically happening right in front of you that it’s like complete chaos and control at the same time. And in a way this cycle of order and chaos mimics a larger and more universal view, which is kind of how I got the title “Stars Way Out.”
I like to play with architecture and ideas of darkened spaces, because this sort of standard black box that happens with film and video, I like to break and experiment with as much as I can. I like the idea of instead of just projecting right on the wall, to project on a scrim so that when you walk in the equipment would then be hidden, and you would just see the image and hear the sounds, but then you could walk to the other side of it and see this Frankenstein that is creating these images. The images themselves are very simple and minimal; it’s just a black and white series of moving lines.
[My process] is pretty performative and physical. I think that’s why I gravitated towards dancers, because I think of it sometimes as a dance. It’s a quick action. Or like Cy Twombly, it’s sort of this automatic thing. Something that’s really nice about that gesture, it’s part of the magic connected to the technology and the projection. So it takes a little pressure off of the actual mark making. Because I originally started as a painter, the pressure of making a final mark was difficult for me. But because it’s connected to this machine, and this other thing, I know that it’s going to morph or move or change, in that flow. It’s like music as well. The studio itself works like a lot of old projectors, a lot of rolls of black leader and clear leader, and some films that are already made. And some weird tools. I like to improvise. So it’s not as though I have this really clear stocked range of tools. I have some tools that I know work well, but I like to surprise myself.
I want to include it in the show if I can—right now, there are two things I’m working on. One is not just the camera-less, but the projector-less film, and playing with this idea of architecture. I’m coming from a site visit that I did in Athens, Greece, I was shown this site that had this really intense window and I wanted to try, basically by building walls slash screens, in relationship to shadows that would be cast at different times of the day. It was kind of pushing this idea of the universal cycle, and the ultimate film being the sun, and the clouds (laughs). So I’ve been thinking in more universal terms. And aside from that, I wanted to … that in a way would be like presenting a sculpture. But I wanted to set up camp in a studio. I was actually given use of a studio in Venice, California. And I wanted to set up this sculpture, sort of like a test for the Athens project and film the shadows over the course of 14 days. But just to remove the camera and the projector and just do a shadow piece. And then do some testing with the camera again, and do some filming of the tests. And I call them flowers… they are films of shadows, and would be projected. And these sky tests would be blue or shades of gray, the film itself would be blue or gray.
I want to also show a video I made in Zurich of a friend of mine who dances. That’s another collaboration I do, I’ve worked with dancers, with musicians, with other artists…I want to show this film of Felicia in Zurich, because she’s also from St. Louis, Felicia Ballos. We met when we were waiting tables in Brooklyn like 10 years ago. I invited her to be part of the thing I curated at White Flag. Because I’ve worked with her so often, I’d love to have a video that represents her.
Lastly, and this is another thing I’d like to include...it started with a collaboration I did with Olivier Mosset, actually, making wallpaper out of the filmstrips. It translates so well into this … when you have to stop the image from moving, and you freeze it, there’s something about it taking over an entire wall. In the past I’ve blown up these films that started at 16mm, and they’re blown up to be maybe a foot wide. And then the just ffft, fffft, it becomes this really graphic funky thing. But it isn’t all abstract, because there are sprocket marks, which make it regular, and then I’ve got my messy little scribbles in there, but then the sprocket holes create order and make it uniform. It might be pink or yellow or some other bold color. I wanted to create like a little installation in that side room, I wanted to wallpaper it, because the wallpaper I made was pink, which is really kind of weird. Though I really do like black and white.
“Stars Way Out” was actually the name of a diner 29 Palms in California, that was closed, we took this long journey and couldn’t get in. “Stars Way Out” was made on this road trip to Utah. As we were traveling with the camera, I just started scratching, scratching, scratching. And so kind of that winding, the mental state of that road trip, it was like unspooling film, happening at the same time. It is going to be part of this show. What happens with that film, it takes many lives. I wanted to call this “Stars Way Out: White Star,” for White Flag, because I really think of all the scratch films as a star way out, but it changes. It’s so closely related to architecture. Which is why the wallpaper’s so important, in that it’s something that sticks right to the wall…The projection is completely variable. Everything changes according to the environment. It’s always a different experience. I feel like I’ll probably always make a star way out. I’ll never stop. And it’ll always be different every place we do it.
