August 2021
LISA HUTTON
Kit:
Would you trace the evolution of your work in words?
Lisa:
”The mature work, from the 90’s to the present, looks like a group show!
That said, the through line of my work has been informed by the legacies of institutional critique, conceptual art, painting and drawing in the expanded field, new media and handmade hybrids, the contemporary heroic landscape, social and cultural effects of technology, and the screen as locus for self-presentation and the consumption of resources.
I am interested in the way consumer driven economies create unexpected consequences; in interior space, land use, and climate change. In this way, my work w eighs personal and collective histories and memory against the sensibilities of the present—with results both humorous and ironic.
Kit:
What is your present go-to medium and why?
Lisa:
It depends on the idea of the work. You have to decide what medium best fits the argument you want the work to make so that the work can speak for itself. In the past I made a lot of digital art and some video.
These days I’m working mostly in graphite drawing. It’s anageable for me. It shows the artist’s hand.
Link to REMIX
The Remix is a visual and aural comparison between unloading vehicles at the Miramar landfill and loading vehicles at the shopping mall. The comparison is by its nature highly structural and the piece illuminates this fact with deep focus telephoto shots. The comparison invokes destruction, creation, loss and acquisition, by appropriating the two extremes of the consumer chain.
The genesis of the Remix is a more straightforward narrative. I filmed at Miramar a number of times; then went to IKEA and saw that it was at the opposite end of the consumption process. We buy to create more homey, more decorative environments, but these things end up in the landfill. The way the video is shot is similar in both places.
I showed this to my students as an example of using a random process to create their own. We can surrender the creative activity to a process; doesn’t have to be all about you. By allowing the random process to drive the construction of the work; often the result is much more fun.
Comes out of a game of poetry-making from Dada artists in which they put random words into a paper bag. They’d stick their hands into the bag and the poem would be the result of what came out.
Kit:
The piece and the artist are in a dance?
Lisa:
Yes. In the art of the art assignment, good ones are the result when instructions laid out. The art assignment is its own craft. There are certain things I’ve used since the 90s still work; it never gets old.
Kit:
Are you speaking to any audience in particular?
Lisa:
No. Maybe? Yes? It’s not commercial. I had a very long period where I worked in digitalwhich wasn’t even considered, “art,” and certainly not “Art.” But I date myself!
Kit:
What triggers a piece these days?
Lisa:
In the covid time I made some works that were really unencumbered by the thought process, but I was still thinking about screens, where there is a glitch and the picture becomes scrambled. We’ve all had plenty of this in the past year right? The glitch has always been a native part of digital media that artists used as a form unique to the media. Technology is great but it always breaks right?
These, manifested with weaving painted paper. I like the white space and the grid and the abstraction in this group. I ended up titling them after the feelings and words of the year.
Kit:
What is the intention of interplaying language and imagery?
Lisa:
Way too much fun not to use!
The intention is to make something where the viewer has to associate more than one semiotic system.
In the case of the series “I’m Gorgeous Inside” I was thinking about the language of real estate advertising. The language entices the consumer but is often at odds with reality. When we see a property described as “charming,” it really means “small.” Or when a property is described as “rustic,” it really means “termite-ridden.” Here I wanted to juxtapose these words with scenery from the natural world which, all these houses, and sub-divisions, are displacing.
Kit:
There is a lot of restraint and understatement juxtaposed with images of energy, power and motion in your 2D work. Are you out to deliberately create tension?
Lisa:
Yes. I think a lot of my work has a droll side where the potential seriousness of the argument is presented in a facetious way. I like to crack myself up--so if I think something is funny maybe other people will think so too. I’m working from a particular set of modern and postmodern conceptual concerns and some of that has to do with not taking one’s art--and Art generally--too seriously.
In the series I’m calling “Unnatural Disasters,” I was thinking about the landscape and how to update it to show climate change. I started with the idea of computer wallpaper—those perfect landscapes people use on their desktops—and I inserted events either man made or climate related.
Kit:
Can you articulate the modern and post-modern conceptual concerns you refer to?
Lisa:
The through line is based in 20 century avant garde; Sol Lewitt, Alan Kaprow, Kurt Schwitters, John Baldessari. At the time I was at UCSD, I was interested in digital work, which wasn’t considered art. Artists are the first to get into it, explore and break it, have fun with it.
Lewitt made instructions where the manufacture was turned over to the museum workers. Because they’re instructions, they can be interpreted in many different ways. Space for interpretation is not only allowed but built into the conceptualization of the work process.
Kit:
Very intriguing to begin with the reference to computer wallpaper, almost mundane but very personal as well. Nice entry into a ubiquitous environment with a startling twist.
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