OPEN SPACE

………………………………. "Only dull and powerless artists defend their art by reference to sincerity" —Kazimir Malevich……………………………………..

Mai-Thu Perret, Borogrovess, 2008; MDF Ultra Light, synthetic foam, plastic mirror; courtesy of Timothy Taylor Gallery, London; photo: James Lander; © 2008 Mai-Thu Perret

“The Swiss artist Mai-Thu Perret produces multidisciplinary, installation-based work that integrates socialist subject matter, feminist politics, and classic modernist themes. Her protean artistic practice flows from a utopian narrative titled The Crystal Frontier that she has been writing for nearly a decade, and comprised of a series of discrete fictional texts that take various forms (including diary entries, letters, daily schedules, and song lyrics).” Apsara DiQuinzio, SFMOMA assistant curator of painting and sculpture, in the exhibition brochure

“Laura Moriarty’s Ultravioleta is a novel about a spaceship named Ultravioleta, a spaceship that is made of paper, or more precisely, of ‘personal letters’ that are ‘passionate, desperate, and philosophical. As the reader soon realizes, the novel is itself the very spaceship described in its narrative…” Andrew Joron, in Rain Taxi.

I thought it might be interesting to put these two artists, from different generations, different countries, and with very different practices, but with some shared concerns, in dialogue with each other. Bay Area poet and novelist Laura Moriarty interviews Mai-Thu Perret about The Crystal Frontier, and about M-TP’s New Work exhibition, on view through March 1. You can also hear Mai Thu in conversation with Apsara this Thursday evening in the Wattis theater.

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Laura Moriarty: That the location of the utopia in The Crystal Frontier is the American West is interesting to those of us who live here because we are aware of a local utopian impulse, sometimes in resistance to Western culture, sometimes in response to it. I wonder if the presence of such places as Soleri’s Arcosanti in Arizona or Old Oraibi, Taos (and other Hopi towns in New Mexico), or also Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning in Sedona contributed to your desire to locate the community in the Southwest? Or is it more the landscape itself?

Mai Thu Perret: Yes, these existing communities were very important for me, and to a large extent it’s because of these examples that I decided to locate the Crystal Frontier there. I first went to Arizona and New Mexico to see my friend the painter Olivier Mosset, and our visit to Arcosanti, for example, was a real eye opener in terms of the reality of a utopian commune. With a group of friends from Switzerland and New York, we took a tour of the place, led by a very enthusiastic volunteer, and after seeing their living quarters, the fields where they grew their crops and their constantly expanding buildings, we were led around to the metal studio. This is the place where they cast bronze bells that the community sells in crafts shops all over the world to raise money. There was only one bell shape, in different sizes, designed by Paolo Soleri. Since the metal shop had been touted by the volunteer as a place where people could unleash their creative energies, one of my friends asked him if they ever made anything else than bells. The volunteer looked puzzled, and as though he could not understand the intent of the question, quipped “We can make anything, as long as it’s a bell.” It was almost like a Zen koan come to life. Of course, I love the landscape too, it played an important role for all these forerunners and does so in my story too. On one level, it’s about a narrative blank slate, and the emptiness of the desert fits this idea perfectly.

New Work: Mai-Thu Perret (installation view); SFMOMA, November 21, 2008 – March 1, 2009. © Ian Reeves

How does symmetry function in your work? The symmetries that exist in the work at SFMOMA, as well in 2012, and in other works of yours findable on the internet, are compelling and seem to be thematic as well as visual. There is the repeated radial symmetry of the wallpaper which reflects wonderful textile and decorative traditions; the use of eggs, hair (wigs), and other objects which are naturally symmetrical; the mirror symmetry of the sculpture of the woman, the women in the story and yourself, and of your production as an artist and theirs; some of the movements of the dancers in An Evening of the Book (and of course the pattern overlaying them in the moving image); and, perhaps most intriguing, the expression of the story  –presented as something to be inferred and experienced rather than watched or read — in many parallel media.

Symmetry in some sense is a readymade form of composition, and I suspect that’s one of the main reasons I am so interested in it. It relieves me of the burden of more idiosyncratic, “creative”, or “personal” compositional choices. There is a parallel with the story, you’re right, in the sense that the story was also imagined, at the beginning, as a kind of machine that makes the art, a device to relieve me from the arbitrariness of picking this color rather than that one. In some way I am looking for a kind of automatic dimension to art making, and symmetry is a good shortcut for that. I enjoy a lot of the associations that come with symmetrical forms: naturally forms, patterns, repetition, outsider art. However, there are also many different instances in the work where symmetry is broken, offset.

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