Interview: João Ribas

Kirstine Roepstorff: It's Not the Eye of the Needle That Changed - The Time at The Drawing Center

What is The Drawing Center of New York, and what is its mission?

As part of the history of the alternative arts movement in New York, we’re dedicated to the significance and diversity of drawing throughout history, and so focused on exploring and furthering discourse on the medium of drawing in its contemporary, historical, and interdisciplinary dimensions.

Do all of the exhibitions at The Drawing Center have something to do with exploring the idea of what drawing is?

Not only in terms of drawing within the visual arts—in an art historical and cultural sense---but also in terms of how the medium, and its material, thematic, and ideational aspects intersect with other disciplines. Our programming revolves around drawing as a multivalent discipline, whether as process, as a heuristic for understanding, as a way of seeing, as a trace or as a mark on a surface of inscription, or the way drawing can often reflect the communicative potential of ideas, acting as an instantiation or metaphor for them---a certain intimacy and fidelity to thought. We are interested in this whole spectrum of what drawing can be... which varies greatly from period to period, from one historical moment to the next, and from discipline to discipline. The role of drawing in modern architecture, in terms of its central role in architectural ideation, is different than say the character of drawing in Romantic landscape.

Kirstine Roepstorff: It's Not the Eye of the Needle That Changed–The Time (installationview), 2007.

When did you first become familiar with Kirstine Roepstorff’s work?

I had seen some work in several shows, and a book she did called Who Decides, Who Decides? which I thought was just fantastic. I was immediately drawn to the rhetorical, political, and formal nature of the work, to its decidedly confrontational and problematic assimilation of post-feminist practice and post-68 politics---this dialectic between beauty and ethics, or terror and decoration. The insistent, almost self-critical sense of questioning and ambiguity about the failure of collective social projects, like the social democratic model... I thought this was a potent metaphor for the politics the work was invested in. But I was also really interested in the formal aspects of it — in how the character of the work, the inherent social contradictions it was assessing or rejecting, was made literal through collage.

Kirstine Roepstorff: It's Not the Eye of the Needle That Changed - The Time (Installationview), 2007.		Kirstine Roepstorff: It's Not the Eye of the Needle That Changed - The Time (Installationview), 2007.
Kirstine Roepstorff: It's Not the Eye of the Needle That Changed - The Time (Installationview), 2007.		Kirstine Roepstorff: It's Not the Eye of the Needle That Changed - The Time (Installationview), 2007.

Kirstine calls the works in this show “collages.” Are they both collages and drawings?

Your question implies some sort of inimical relationship or polarity between the two, which I don’t agree with or accept, or think is relevant. Collage as a form, or rather as more of an operation, is readily assimilated within the history of drawing; Robert Rauschenberg has this lovely quote: “Collage is the drawing of the 20th century.” And I think there are a couple of reasons for that. What I mean by the operation of collage is that its fundamental basis is an integral part of the language of the historical avant-garde, part of a very particular strategy within it. It has to do partly with taking already-existing representations of the social world in mass media and manipulating, reverting, or reconfiguring them, turn their ideological ‘unconscious’ inside out, and then putting them back out into the world again, but again as images. Think of the beginnings of finance capitalism and the stylized images that represent it, images of decadence and anxiety caused by new abstracted rights of profit---these are turned into images of social liberation. There is a sort of ‘immanent criticism’, to use the philosophical language of the time, inherent in this process. I think that this is what Rauschenberg was alluding to, but it’s also what the politics that Roepstorff addresses is engaging: notions of power and repression, of collective social problems and individual desire, and how representations mediate between these two poles. For one, the aesthetics of revolutionary politics have outlived their ideologies. But I do think collage has been marginalized historically... as much of drawing has been... even though you can see how its influence has fully permeated contemporary art. Part of the problem is that the link to these modernist avant-garde practices has been replaced with more of a Pop-derived sense of quotation, decoration or banal re-presentation... almost a sense of recuperating critical projects as mass media, rather than the other way around. So part of the process that defined collage needs to be reclaimed and reassessed.

Kirstine Roepstorff: One Dictator (from the series “It's Not the Eye of the Needle That Changed–The Time), 2007. 67 x 43 inches. Mixed-media collage–fabric, paper, and foil mounted on cardboard.		Kirstine Roepstorff: Nine Hunters (from the series “It's Not the Eye of the Needle That Changed–The Time), 2007. 76 x 54 inches. Mixed-media collage–fabric, paper, and foil mounted on cardboard.
Kirstine Roepstorff: Eleven Excluded (from the series “It's Not the Eye of the Needle That Changed–The Time), 2007. 16 x 29 inches. Mixed-media collage–fabric, paper, and foil mounted on cardboard.		Kirstine Roepstorff: Six Who Observe and One Who Suffers (from the series “It's Not the Eye of the Needle That Changed–The Time), 2007. 38 x 21 1/2 inches. Mixed-media collage–fabric, paper, and foil mounted on cardboard.

The Show is called It's Not the Eyes of the Needle That Changed—the Time. Will you explain this title to me?

The central metaphor seems to me to be about displacement of social consciousness - about a shifting sense of context regarding collective social projects and of being disabused of notions of wanting to change the world. In a kind of post-1968 exhaustion, there is a sense in the work, I think, that the utopian politics that still define us today—be it Third Way political ideas or social democratic states - may be inadequate, or untenable, in the way that old-style resistance, is untenable. But the fact that “it’s not the eyes of the needle that changed,” suggests that it is us who have changed instead - or have failed to change perhaps. In the way that the radical left turns inward in the 1970s and 1980s, reverting to what has been called ‘socialism in one person’ and ideologies of self-realization rather than class struggle for example. There is a sense in the show of shifting ideas of acceptability and resistance, of things that were acceptable and are now barbaric — like lynching — and how these contexts subtly shift. I take the show to reflect a process of questioning what is acceptable in a society where we all want, or are forced, to exercise the freedom to realize ourselves, and are seduced to consume that realization.

Kirstine Roepstorff: Seven Who Rest (from the series “It's Not the Eye of the Needle That Changed–The Time), 2007. 38 1/2 x 43 inches. Mixed-media collage–fabric, paper, and foil mounted on cardboard.

Do Kirstine’s works suggest solutions to the problems that she sees in the world?

Why should an artist have to answer what hundreds of economists, central planners, diplomats, theorists, ideologues, bankers, free-market advocates, ministers, NGOs, or The Rand Corporation can’t answer? I think the point might be that the work brings clarity to something that we often don’t bother to question, through precisely the same kind of experience that keeps us from questioning in the first place... that’s better than any answer.

Thank you.