Idiom: So, tell me about this upcoming show.

Julia Weist: Guilty Feet, as its called, will take place at 179 Canal on February 5. I wouldn’t call it a show, though. I’d say one of my sculptures was performing that night. Tova Carlin and Colby Bird, who organized the event, imagined that if they played an artist-curated soundtrack of songs that signify connectivity, installed the work based on chromatic associations, and programmed intelligently changing lighting conditions, they could illuminate social contingencies between the objects and artists. When the two songs I chose — Saltwater by Beach House and a 1981 bootleg of Stevie Nicks singing Wild Heart in her dressingroom–begin to play, my piece (After the Personal Collection of Florent Hardy: State Archivist of Louisiana, 2008-9) will be subtly spotlit, taking the stage and doing its sculpture thing. In this instance Wild Heart represents connectivity in several ways: youtube facilitating access to the audio asset through its long tail, the data mining that occurs when youtube records my interest in Stevie Nicks, and the mashup between the song and the live feed of tonight’s State of the Union speech which I have open in another tab. Mashups are certainly the future of connectivity, at least within the world of digital libraries; take for example partnerships between New York Public Library and group-video remix sites such as Kaltura.

ID: Can you talk a little bit about how performance has figured into your previous work? Was there a performative element in the library project? In the book that followed?

JW: In the past, I’ve chosen to develop performances in relationship to artworks when the larger narrative of a project exceeds the story-telling potential of an object. For my library project that you mention, The Public Library of Public Library Deaccession, there was no performative element, because in a way the book that grew out of the work satisfied that need. And yet, once the book was published there were these gems related to its distribution that I had to give voice to, such as when I was outed on a chicklit book forum pretending to be a fan of the book and concealing my role as author. The forum administrator who suspended me was named FunkyTown, and the exchange became one of the vignettes performed in relation to the work. Another centered around an Amazon user named “soulnourisher” who identified Sexy Librarian as number 3 on his list “Ultimate Guide to Literary Soul Nourishment for Librarians” (other compendiums included “Ultimate Guide to New Modern Day Female Clerical Sleuths,” and “Ultimate Guide to Faith Based Scrapbooking”).

ID: That’s fascinating. How did your giving voice to these remainders practically manifest itself? On stage? Open-mic nights? Wherever the piece was shown?

JW: It was manifested as a performance event at Sara Meltzer Gallery. Each vignette was read by a different invited performer who’s biography represented a element of the project: Sharon Gallagher (Founder/Director of D.A.P.) presented anecdotes related to sales, Ken Soehner (Chief Librarian of the Watson Library, Metropolitan Museum) read the top 50 keyword searches that lead traffic to the Sexy Librarian website (#43 my + sexy + room).

ID: Bringing those thoughts to bear on the project/object at hand, then – how would you describe the story-telling potential of After the personal collection… ? Will it’s performance be supplementary in a similar way? Or will it be performing the completeness of its own narrative, in that respect ?

JW: The story related to After the Person Collection… takes the form a slide lecture called Personal Histrory [Not a Typo], which I last performed at P.S.1. Soon a video of that lecture will be airing on a cable access TV show, and come to think of it, maybe I’ll also upload it to youtube and try to get some Stevie Nicks fans to watch it.

ID: Talk about Stevie Nicks.

JW: Ha. That was a joke. But you know, after the Personal History project I have thought a lot about my apathy for souvenirship, for things like Stevie Nicks merch. For that project I interviewed 15 of the 50 U.S. State Archivists about what they collect personally and often compulsively. In nearly every conversation these prestigious object historians openly embraced being “the paperclip guy”, the “Beatles wallpaper fanatic” or the dude you always bought refrigerator magnets of international cities for. I, on the other hand, produce a lot of objects but I rarely keep them.

ID: I know, but you’ve mentioned an interest in her earlier. There is a pretty strong tradition connecting music and autobiography, one that our generation, I think, inhabits quite easily. The casual question of musical taste, or the social networking list of favorite bands quickly becomes an exercise in self-portraiture. You mentioned two songs, but I didn’t ask about Beach House, nor did you expand on the significance of that choice, the way you did about the youtube dressingroom Stevie Nicks. Beach House is self-evident, in a way, it seems, for both of us. We might both love Stevie Nicks, too, but that affection somehow requires a conceptual or narrative supplement as justification. For example, you remark on your apathy towards Stevie Nicks souvenirs, something that goes without saying in the case of Beach House. (I would imagine, maybe you have a room full of Beach House merch, for all I know) I guess what I am asking after then is precisely this distinction, between our attachments for which souvenirship is nonsensical, and those for which it is more of a possibility, even if, as in the case of you and Ms. Nicks, it is unrealized. Who is Stevie Nicks for you that your absent collection bears noticing? Or, to put it another way, what is it we are doing, exactly, when we collect?

JW: Certainly cultural references have a long standing tradition of becoming self-portraits and even pop-quizzes for potential friends and lovers. Last week’s emergence of the iPad, a tablet for media consumption and digital social networking and little else, has quite eloquently affirmed that the old litmus test–the Indie Band Awareness Quiz–is now in full-quality portable version 3.0. Where Beach House and Stevie Nicks come into this is again with the Long Tail. Souvenirs used to represent a pilgrimage or sacrifice, a four hour drive to the nearest college town to see Beach House or a hundred dollar ticket to see Fleetwood, but now it can mean five minutes on eBay. I purchased all the refrigerator magnets I re-cast after Florent Hardy on eBay because I had no plans to go to St. Petersburg. I think that in light of this development, all these developments, the reason I mention Stevie and not Beach House is because at one time, fans of hers had no digital alternatives. In 1981, I wasn’t even born, and neither was Macintosh. We’ve always known souvenirship and collecting was about nostalgia, about history. We still know that, but now we feel it, too.

Interview with Julia Weist

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