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REFRAMED POSITIONS Reframed Positions I began referring to all art as “critique Back in ‘86, the NEA was in trouble Terre Thaemlitz in conversation with affirming its object,” because no matter for some federal funding having trickled Lawrence English how precise and harshly critical one’s down to Robert Mapplethorpe, and analysis may be, when it is funded by Andres Serrano’s “Immersion (Piss the same corporate or federal agencies Christ).” I don’t think either of them one is criticizing, it all goes to show the were actually directly funded, but they LE Thanks for agreeing to this TT It’s all really cliché, actually. benevolence and open-mindedness of got some funds from an exhibition that conversation Terre, I appreciate the time. Fagbashed queer from the American the sponsors. was partly supported by NEA funds, or I thought, in the context of this survey Midwest who grew up being told he You know, one more way for rich something random like that. But I mean, of your work, Reframed Positions, it’d was good at drawing - while also being assholes to feel good about themselves despite all the uproar about injustice, I make sense to flesh out the themes and simultaneously told never to pursue and convince others that they give a was like, why the fuck is anyone surprised questions that comprise your artworks it, and that she should be a doctor or shit, because they paid some artist that our right-wing government run by to date. I also felt it’d be useful for helping lawyer or whatever conservative parents to say bad things about them. The religious zealots doesn’t want to fund this people visiting the exhibition to connect considered good husband material back artist is nothing but a court jester in stuff? with the pieces and understand how it is in the day - finagles his way into a New this scenario. I couldn’t see us as being I realize the hypocrisy of saying this your practice has travelled structurally, York art college as a means of escape. anything else - and I still can’t. Of course, while currently getting a chunk of my if in no other way, in parallel with these This was back in 1986, after just turning this also shows my “American-ness” in annual income from EU-funded events, themes. 18. that a more European model of federal but I still am not naïve enough to think any I’m interested to trace how you arrived As a child I only had exposure to the art funding was utterly foreign to me. of this money business is on the level, nor at producing the kinds of audio-visual most general and watered-down notions And as a result, I never grew up with to confuse my employment in “creative pieces that have come to define your of “Fine Art,” so at age 18 I started with the sense of entitlement that one’s industries” as something other than just work over the past two decades. I’m painting as a goal. Cooper Union was critique of a government or agency a job. To the contrary, when I look at the especially interested to understand how a good place for that. It was intensely should be funded by them. I mean, I can EU arts, I see how it mostly operates in a experiences you had early on, during Modernist, with most of the studio understand the right to federal funding as very insular sphere of pseudo-political your time studying at Cooper Union, work coming out of it still trapped in a utopian democratic concept, but it also rhetoric, and becomes a kind of reified and before too, shaped your interests. expressionism, with an occasional tinge strikes me as a position of tremendous arena of faux social organizing. You know, Moreover, how the experiences of of early minimalism. I think the most compromise. that great populist myth that art and creating the earliest works included in conceptual full-time faculty was Hans I just never understood how anyone music change the world, which is a huge this exhibition were responsible for you Haacke, but I wouldn’t have access to one could actually be surprised when, say, means of distracting people from actually moving away from fine arts in its most of his classes until my third year, by which the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts helpful and necessary forms of social conventional sense. Back then, how is it time I had already outgrown the artist [NEA] refused to fund anything but the organizing. exactly you arrived at painting? Is it fair to fantasy enough to just see him as another most vanilla projects or artists. ...But what was that you asked about say that was the first significant, publicly high-budget corporate artist, “critical” or painting being my first publicly visible visible investigation into creativity for not. investigation into creativity? I’m a you? And more importantly how it was bit thrown by your accusation that I you came to depart from painting? am interested in “investigations into creativity,” let alone significant ones. [Laughs] REFRAMED POSITIONS LE Well, lets not call it an accusation as much as a provocation. [Laughs] And certainly by age 15 I was actively This positioning of language might be doing things that represented my body something I return to as we speak, as I as a living middle-finger to the rednecks know how important language and its around me - gender fuck clothes, extreme capacity to construct discourses (thanks, hair, make-up, etc. Foucault) and identities is, within your So if I think back to those days, and work. that mindset, if there was a first “serious TT You know I’m not interested investigation” for me at Cooper Union in creativity, authorship, authenticity, it wasn’t about painting. It was about Terre Thaemlitz senior originality, or any of that stuff, precisely finally gaining access to texts and other high school yearbook because the ideological functions of those media that provided me with language photo proof (1986) terms is so entrenched in patriarchal myth for thinking about the social functions building about men giving birth to the of power, and the social construction of world - which in its crudest form is literally identities. Language for that gut feeling the Judeo-Christian god myth that weirdly some of the social problems I had continues to frame our notions of secular experienced came from without, and how society. In particular, I want to keep in mind that informed things within. I’m talking investigation in most of my work how we have arrived at the traditional about really basic things like a concept notion of men giving birth to the world - be of historical materialism from The LE Consider me itching then. it an old patriarchal deity in the sky, or the Communist Manifesto, Juliet Mitchell’s Humanist male artist as progenitor of his Psychoanalysis and Feminism, Michel TT With regard to how I stopped painting, there actually was a specific moment that I can own work through which culture is birthed, Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, John recount - it was either the final crit of my second year, or end of the first semester of my third etc. So let’s put all of that kind of “creative” Berger’s Ways of Seeing, George Grosz’ year. To set the stage, I had been focussing on doing minimalist drawings and paintings for about language to the side, if we can. Instead, The Art Scab, Constructivist manifestos, a year, and getting a lot of flack about it from both my instructors and other students. This went let’s look at my interest in painting as a etc. These were not the things students as far as students “keying” my paintings with scratch marks and things like that. Their logic, youth in relation to the social conditions were supposed to focus on when studying as students duly instructed in the teleological western art canon - from realism to pointillism of a queer outcast with no real cultural at Cooper, but they were the things to abstraction to minimalism and so-forth - was that a young person such as myself at that education of any depth, whose rejection of that caught my attention and helped time could never have accumulated the self-knowledge and understanding required to make conservatism in her upbringing was more deprogram a lot of deeply engrained minimalist work of any depth. Minimalism was something that had to be arrived at, and evolved educated by a kind of Midwestern Punk bullshit. Most importantly, learning what into ever so gradually, like mastering classical piano before attempting improvisational jazz. So and New Wave mentality - simply because “essentialism” is, and moving away from it they felt I had to be put back in my place. Sometimes real life is cheesier than the worst teen that was about as complicated as critical as far as possible! [Laughs] movie, isn’t it? So with that context in mind, it was during a final crit at the end of the semester. thinking was allowed to get in those regions. (For those unfamiliar with art-speak, a ‘crit’ is when you present your work to a professor and Clearly, that theme of anti-essentialism Like most young queers at the time, I classmates for their ‘critique.’). has continued over the decades. If you blamed myself for my own ostracism. You need to satisfy the curatorial itch to plot I was presenting two very minimalist paintings that were made with industrial lacquers on wood.

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