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Artist Martine Syms “has mastered the Martine Syms leads a real discussion on art of looking at being looked at,” says representation, perception and MoMA’s Chief Curator of Media and Performance, Stuart Comer. self-determination through a shadow-self avatar in her interactive video installations. WRITTEN & PRODUCED BY ISAAC JOSEPH PHOTOGRAPHY BY GABRIELLE DATAU AIN’T NOTHING LIKE THE REAL THING 118 LALAmag.com 119 LALAmag.com CATCHING UP WITH ALTADENA NATIVE Martine Syms in her sprawling MacArthur Park studio, I find the multi- culture,” plus a passion for music and what Syms describes as an “OG hyphenate 2019 Whitney Biennial artist relaxed and confident as ever. background” in media studies. On the heels of last year’s Art Basel Switzerland Unlimited exhibition In her multifaceted pursuits, Syms examines reoccurring themes of her Lessons I-CLXXX (2014-2018), which was acquired by MoMA, including representations of blackness, queer theory, feminism, Syms has had a string of impressive shows: “Grand Calme” at Sadie language and identity, always remaining true to herself and extremely Coles HQ in London (2018); “Big Surprise” at Bridget Donahue in focused. She keeps meticulous records; reflection and commitment New York (2018); “Shame Space” at the Institute of Contemporary Art are integral to her practice. Mythiccbeing (pronounced “my thick at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond (2019)—part of being”), the blockbuster opus she debuted at Sadie Coles during last the inaugural exhibition of the Institute’s annual Dialogues series; and fall’s Frieze London and has iterated across multiple shows, leans on “BOON” at the Secession in Vienna (2019). This is her first summer 12 years of journal entries, in LA in four years, and after that whirlwind she says she is “so happy compared and analyzed Syms keeps meticulous records; to be home.” reflection and commitment are from year to year in an effort Working in video and performance art, writing, publishing and integral to her practice. These to create an alter ego in the other media, Syms is at the forefront of a movement that harnesses pages are from the notebook form of the artist’s avatar. she kept while developing her art and technology to address race, politics, social change and Mythiccbeing (2018) project, This character, “a black, entertainment on an international platform. At 31 years old, she which leans on 12 years of upwardly mobile, violent, has already exhibited and lectured at some of the world’s leading journal entries. solipsistic, sociopathic, institutions, including Yale University, the Hammer Museum, ICA gender-neutral femme” London and Johns Hopkins University. Laughing, she credits “lack appears on video monitors of sleep” for what would seem an impossible production schedule: in the interactive installation surrounded by walls of photographs and There’s the new screenplay she is writing for a film set in a future texts. Viewers are invited to converse with a chatbot, programmed with LA; ongoing research on robotics and artificial intelligence as part the artist’s voice, that responds with images, animations and messages. of a working group of artists, engineers and philosophers studying AI As in Mythiccbeing, there is a playfulness prevalent in much of through the Berggruen Institute; her publishing imprint, Dominica Syms’s work that allows her to approach such serious topics as identity Publishing, which is dedicated to “exploring blackness in visual and race with the intelligence and humor inherent in her personality. 120 LALAmag.com 87 LALAmag.com “I’M USUALLY SHOOTING WITH AT LEAST THREE CAMERAS BECAUSE EACH ONE HAS A TIMESTAMP TO A DEGREE. EVEN WHEN I’M WORKING WITH THE LATEST TECHNOLOGY, I KNOW THAT IT IS REFLECTIVE OF MY TIME PERIOD.” -MARTINE SYMS 122 LALAmag.com 123 LALAmag.com What look like YouTube clips in so many of her video installations look at diaries and other forms of writing that weren’t academic or are meant to be viewed as art, but also as entertainment. Much of even fiction to figure out what was going on with groups of people Syms’s inspiration comes from film, a topic she studied—both in who weren’t part of a historical record.” Syms uses her own voice undergrad and graduate school at the School of the Art Institute and likeness to navigate the terrain between history, fiction and of Chicago (SAIC) and Bard College respectively—and currently technology, exploring the idea of self-determination and filling in teaches as a faculty member at the California Institute of the Arts. for her audience the missing pieces of the narrative. She says, “It’s Using references from the impact of The Cosby Show in the ‘80s to definitely me, but a shadow version, specifically a shadow self—like today’s YouTube videos as a way of communicating “in some ways is the way K-pop stars are manufactured. But I want my art to be real. like a kind of ‘80s or early ‘90s media studies,” Syms says. “I have tried I don’t want it to feel like I’m manufacturing something; I want to to take on how something can have a theoretical rigor but be funny or actually manufacture that real feeling.” She succeeds in this goal entertaining at the same time.” according to MoMA’s Chief Curator of Media and Performance, Syms continues to explore context and diversity in her art. Citing Stuart Comer, who says, “Martine Syms has mastered the art of works like Rebecca Walker’s anthology Black Cool: One Thousand looking at being looked at.” Streams of Blackness and the poet Kevin Young’s The Grey Album: Syms considers the duality of lived experience and representation On the Blackness of Blackness, she talks about “art being at the center in her video project Lessons I-CLXXX, an extended poem made up of black culture and black culture being at the center of America.” of a series of found and original footage—including homemade Regarding Young’s work, Syms says, “He was articulating a lot of movies, ‘90s talk show clips and Vines—that Comer describes as thoughts around media and popular culture and how that relates “a contemporary codex, an elastic archive of 30-second clips that to a broader tradition or canon. I have always been really interested wrests back a sense of black subjectivity and agency by turning our in how the constraints of a certain format produce its qualities or algorithmic media culture against itself.” An early iteration of the characteristics.” Just as songs are a certain length because of the project was presented at ICA London in 2016 as an immersive floor- technological limitations of records and 100-foot and 500-foot to-ceiling collage. “I wanted to make 180 30-second videos, so it film cans dictated shot length, Syms understands her own work— would be this 90-minute feature. To have it blown up to that scale is sometimes shot on an iPhone—is shaped by the time and context in also a big part of what I was interested in,” says Syms. “I’ve shown it in which it is created. “I’m interested in working with every technology different ways, but blowing up the scale was a way to play with context that’s available up to this point. Whenever I’m working, I’m usually and texture—being dwarfed by an image that typically would only be shooting with at least three cameras because each one has a timestamp one-to-one with the viewer in another presentation or format.” to a degree. Even when I’m working with the latest technology, I know When Syms showed Lessons in London, she first heard the that it is reflective of my time period.” word BAME, a term long used in the UK to refer to black, Asian and Through this lens, one can begin to understand the world of minority ethnic people. “There is a contest of political blackness in Syms. “If you look at certain Kodak or Polaroid images you have this London that I wasn’t familiar with,” says Syms. “Putting myself in sense that it’s from this decade or that decade, but when you look at a that context shows me that my interests read not only in American photo from 2005, you can almost exactly tell it’s from 2005. Especially history or an American context, but in a larger historical economic as your device becomes a tool—like a photographic technique—it’s frame. I started to learn all about that and what shows made it to even more specific,” she says. “I’m interested in that kind of specificity America.” Similarly, through her passion for Motown and Northern of the image and that kind of material.” In terms of material, Syms soul, Syms became interested in cultural capital. “I learned a lot often combines photographs, text, animation and video, utilizing a about how through war, effectively, that music came to Japan and collage-like approach. “As a foundation, the way I start working is then Korea and how something can still translate even in various contexts and forms,” she says. “These conversations are still really usually from writing. This relationship between text and image and “As a foundation, the way I start working is usually from writing,” Syms says. trying to make it extremely precise is almost like making my own salient—if not more so now because of how seamless and efficient Some of the artist’s journal pages have appeared in various publications, stock footage,” she adds. everything is. It’s being used in even crazier ways in the context of including in the Whitney Biennial 2019 catalog.

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