Robert Leonard talks to Jim Speers about his shows United Foods (Waikato Museum of Art and History, Hamilton, 1999) and Tiffany’s Kyoto (Artspace, Auckland, 2000).
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Robert Leonard: How did United Foods come about?
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Jim Speers: Waikato Museum wanted me to redo my lightbox installation from the Sydney Biennale, which would have been easy. But I wanted to do something new, so I came back at them with a proposal in response to their big gallery. That space is really hangarlike and a lot of work struggles there or just dies in its microclimate. It’s one of those grand, overtly architectural spaces which supposedly offer maximum flexibility, like Te Papa. I call that style Tilt-Slab Baroque. Good, if you’re building a gymnasium that has to double as an opera house, I guess. That main gallery is so gratuitously epic you feel like you are still outside and I thought it would be funny to build a whole building within it. I wanted to do something that matched the museum’s capricious but apparently utilitarian architecture. I’m still a bit surprised they went for it. I was thinking about the places you find lightboxes, like malls, food halls, and airport corridors. Whether they’re photographic or just graphic, lightboxes tend to occupy constricted spaces. Their lights play off the shiny surfaces around them rather than dissipating, while suggesting openness—a beyond. And I got to thinking about the architecture of those places, how they’re constructed out of lightweight, synthetic, prefab materials, just like the lightboxes. So it’s the environment reflecting on itself, echoing itself. Then I thought it’d be interesting to bring the lightboxes into play within a structure that’s itself a kind of lightbox.
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When I look at your metal and acrylic building I think of the Philip Johnson Glass House, Japanese tea-houses with translucent screen walls, and Dan Graham pavilions. What were you thinking of?
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Actually, I was thinking of it being like the Monument to the Third International but for fish-factory workers, replacing height with width so Tatlin’s vertical swagger becomes horizontal stutter. Tatlin’s Monument was a revolutionary idea. It spoke to the future, to a brave new world, a realm of possibility. And it still does, because it was never built, it was only ever a model. So it remains utopian, a no-place. I wanted to pollute the Tatlin idea by conflating it with the banal architecture of malls, that kind of everyday modern architecture we don’t confront as a possibility but as an actuality, a bad actuality, one that needs to be filled with lightboxes, softened and opened up by them. Really, I like modernism gone wrong—I prefer it. Modernism in the hands of the trades, as Tatlin and Rodchenko imagined it: signwriters and engineers, builders’ housing rather than architects’ housing. I like foodhalls, because it’s like they have the Tatlin idea going but it’s no longer utopian, because there’s all this other stuff which seems to contradict Tatlin. For me the contradiction makes it richer, with a lightbox of a South Seas paradise punctuating some featureless corridor. Everything is in two minds.
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You worked with architect Chris Lapwood. Was it a collaboration? 
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Yes and no. I needed an architect. I wanted to incorporate an architectural language into my art, and I couldn’t do it on my own, I don’t know that language. I thought of Chris as an architectural adviser, giving me access to the code. I took him, his style, his approach, as a readymade. Obviously, United Foods does reflect Chris’s interests. Working with him made a huge difference, and I learnt a lot about architecture doing it. He challenged all my preconceptions about the language of building; architects know the rules so they can play with them. Chris got me thinking about how people move through space, the potential of space. The building was originally going to be an inclined ramp, but after we got together it became a stepped structure. The low-cost space-frame approach was another Chris thing. Initially, I was going to do the framing in wood, which I thought would be simple, but actually it would have been a nightmare. Chris’s way was easier, cheaper, faster. The thing was conceived within a pre-fab building system, with everything based on a standard sheet size, 1.2 by 2.4m units; then sent straight from auto-CAD to manufacture, with every piece computer cut to half-a-millimetre tolerances, the whole thing stamped out in four hours as a kitset.
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It’s modular. Why did you arrange it as you did? 
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We started with a model, with panels and framing components at 1:20 scale, and tried out different arrangements. The building retains a memory of being born through this process, it looks like the builder could return any minute and rearrange it, make something different from the same components. Some of the acrylic sheets are on the outside of the frame and some inside. So structural elements are visible here and there, accessible. In place of doors and windows, there are gaps to enter and exit and look through. It really looks like a house, but it lacks a continuous skin, and there’s no detailing. There are no steps to assist your transition to different levels. There are no features which might prevent the whole thing being rearranged. It’s just blocked out, a skin and bones home, waiting for customisation. The arbitrary nature of the structure makes you want to explore it, its possibilities.
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It’s clad in opal acrylic, which is neither wall nor window but a bit of both. 
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The opal is in between transparent and opaque, so you can see things happening behind it and movement reflected in it. I wanted to emphasise the skin as a membrane, a division that creates inside and outside, but also to complicate that, so notions of inside and outside become confused. I wanted to test people’s assumptions about what a house is and how it works. My building looks like a house. It encloses a volume, but this volume is not ‘insulated’—it’s permeable. So it’s like a drawing of a house, or a movie-set house. I remember someone once went to an architect friend with just fifty grand and a section and asked him to build her a house. And he said, ‘For that I can’t build you a house, but I can build you a dwelling.’ I’m interested in that distinction: when does a container become a dwelling, and a dwelling become a house? That’s about practicality and cultural values: building codes and budgets.
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Why did you call the show United Foods? 
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I was thinking of those big articulated trucks with their company names on their sides. They leave Auckland in convoy, head down through Tokoroa, then fan off down East and West Coasts, joining up at the ferry at 2am. The names are meaningless and meaningful at the same time. United Foods was my version, grand and simple at once. It’s authoritative, suggesting multinational omnipresence, but basic—‘Foods’. In my lifetime, ‘United’ has gone from implying cohesion (good) to signifying conglomerate (evil), while ‘Foods’ evokes basic, universal needs, plus nondescript brandpower.
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How does this relate to the show? 
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Well, with the title there’s a play going on in the space between the two words, a play that belies the kind of ‘identity’ that people supposedly seek with brand names. There’s also a play within the terms as individuals. I suppose I’m looking for that kind of generative disorder in the works, in the way their parts function in themselves and in relation to one another. The components are contradictory, they have these odd disconnected histories, having been indentured to different uses in different places, different times. And that really comes to the fore in Tiffany’s Kyoto. People think branding is about clear identities, but I think brands are more like about attracting dissonant meanings to the same point. Brand names are generators powered by absorbing contradiction.
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In Tiffany’s Kyoto, you replay elements from United Foods. There’s a glass wall, a house shape, a mirror wall, and a soundtrack. Let’s start with the house.
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With the house, I was thinking, at once, of paper cranes and of generic modern sculpture, like that Terry Stringer in Auckland’s Aotea Square. The shape came from playing with a square of paper, folding it into that shape, and imagining it up big. Scale’s interesting with origami, or irrelevant. In the origami world, a flower and an elephant end up the same size because you are restricted by these standard-size squares. As with the building at Waikato, I wanted to blow up my model to real scale, so again you relate to it in part as a model, and in a way that belies your relationship to it in real space; it’s like you’ve put it back into your head. The house is made of plywood. It’s an indoor thing, like wooden furniture, even though it feels like something you would do in Corten Steel and put out in some plaza. There’s a contradiction there. It’s meant to remind people of churches, you know that style of 1970s evangelical architecture, massive A frames, with Oregon beams and lined in plywood, match joined; kind of precious and kind of vernacular all at once. They build lots of churches like that in Tonga.
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The glass isn’t part of the house anymore. It’s become a stand-alone element, a glass wall. 
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I wanted it to split the space and make for this vitrine effect. Whichever side you’re on, the wall separates you from the other side; it makes distance without distance. And it works as an acoustic barrier too, which I wasn’t expecting. It’s the inside/outside thing that I was talking about with United Foods. The glass constrains your movement through the space in a completely arbitrary but also highly specific way, suggesting how people get partitioned off into glass-roomed work stations in offices. I was thinking a lot about the politics of space in sitcoms, where the tension and the fun comes from those constrained sets, people entering, exiting, forced together; people fighting the hierachies implicit in the space. The limitations of the set are crucial in making the chemistry of the comedy plausible. In Seinfeld or The Mary Tyler Moore Show, the laugh track is synchronised with the architecture. I wanted the show to be something you would move through and around, so you would have a different sense of it depending on where you were in it. You were part of it, and other people seeing the show were part of it with you. At the opening there was this lovely feeling because it became a space to linger in and socialise in, something incidental. I was reminded of Satie’s Furniture Music, which you weren’t really supposed to listen to. In fact Satie told people off for listening, for paying too much attention.
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The title—Tiffany’s Kyoto?
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There were these photo-essay books from my childhood, stories of a day in the life of someone ordinary in some other country, say a girl having breakfast and catching the bus to school. It was social studies, pop anthropology, a way of talking about other cultures, with the same things happening in other places in subtly different ways. So I imagined this character Tiffany who lived in Kyoto, and that the show might be her Kyoto.
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Tiffany isn’t a very Japanese name. 
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I was thinking of all those Japanese rockers dressed like Elvis—more Elvis than Elvis. I was thinking about how people adopt markers from other cultures, getting them through the media, especially off TV. People don’t go for the ordinary but for the memorable extreme, the distinctive. So you’re Japanese, right, and rather than calling your child Barbara, a more common American name, you call her Tiffany because of some soap opera. It’s like mangling the code. But these mistakes actually tell us who we are. With Tiffany’s Kyoto, there was also the thought of the New York jewelry store, as though it might be franchised into Japan; and the movie Breakfast at Tiffany’s with Audrey Hepburn living on a plane above her real situation as a call girl—more code mistakes. Tiffany’s has become a common image of the chic and classy. There’s also a great scene in Midnight Cowboy where John Voight tries to hustle a Fifth Avenue lady outside Tiffany’s. He’s heard about hustlers, and he’s come to New York and thinks he’ll make a living doing it. But he’s too much of a hayseed and he ends up hustling the men—he can’t get women. He dresses as a cowboy and doesn’t realise it’s not a look they’ll go for, he doesn’t realise that it actually makes him look like a gay icon. Another mistake. That idea of dislocation, things out of place, is reflected in the invitation card, where a Brancusi finds its way into a Tiffany’s Kyoto window display. Mistakes have an internal logic. They are kind of tragic but fruitful; they make our world habitable.
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Trees make our world habitable. Is that what your trees were doing in Tiffany’s? 
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I wanted the kind of trees they plant in our city plazas and down suburban pavements. They grow them in the nurseries until they’re five, and then plant them in the street, and they are always moving them and replacing them. They’re so generic you would hardly notice. I wanted my trees to be bigger than Christmas trees, but smaller than the trees you would find in a forest; small enough to soften an architectural landscape, to make you feel part of something humanly scaled.
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Your trees are dead, or perhaps just wintery. But the video recuts bits from the TV documentary, The Private Life of Plants, with lots of blooming. 
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The video was based on reports of the Japanese having scenes of nature playing on videos inserted into walls in malls and into lampposts, creating an artificial natural horizon to chill you out in their congested cities. Who knows if they really have them? The idea has entered our culture as apocrypha, as a legend of urban extremism. The people I know who have visited Japan never mention them.
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Let’s talk about the other room with the barrels. Barrels suggest pollution—oil and toxic waste—but you seem to be offering them as something sublime. 
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Oil barrels are generally dirty, and yet, by painting them white, I think I affirm that dirtiness. Their excessive sterility fails to convince. It’s oil barrels in denial, like Benetton is in denial. You know the Benetton advertising aesthetic, how they use ‘dirty’ subject matter, like refugee ships and prisoners on death row, as a mark of their concern, or their being above it all. But they make pullovers. With the barrels I was thinking of ice floes, that’s why they were strewn randomly. Actually, the delivery guys just left them lying on the floor like that, and I had no need to compose them any further. I always wanted to do a sculptural version of that Caspar David Friedrich painting Sea of Ice—which is actually strangely reminiscent of the Terry Stringer in Aotea Square—but this seemed a more concise way of getting the same effect. Sea of Ice suggests a natural disaster, but this is something more cultural. The barrels are blank, unbranded. They’re like display barrels, props. And the mirrors maybe recall department stores. We could even be in a Benetton shop. I like the way the mirrors double the size of the gallery and make viewers self-conscious. People see themselves as part of the installation, in their own clothes. Do they fit the advert, the scenario?
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The piped soundtrack was a looped sample from Dylan’s ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’. Sam Peckinpah used that song in his film Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. How did it find its way to Kyoto?
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That came about in an odd way. I was into that Gabrielle song ‘Rise’, which samples the opening bars from Dylan’s song. It struck me how compressed and processed the sample felt, how artificial, like there was no space left in it, like it hadn’t actually been played by hands on instruments. It’d got so far from the grittiness of the original. I wanted to reopen a space between then and now, between Dylan and Gabrielle, so I took the Dylan original and looped the opening bars like they are in Rise, but without the other things you get in Gabrielle’s song: none of her singing, none of the production gloss. I wanted to make an issue of the impulse behind sampling, when the people who do it want to leave the original so far behind.
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You seem fascinated by genre: categories and category mistakes. What is it about genre? 
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I’m interested in the space that genre provides for the repetition of structure or incident. Motifs are used again and again, and sometimes in contradictory ways, and they absorb the contradictions. Each time you reuse them, you dredge up the whole history of their prior use. It’s like in dreams where simple images stand in for these complex associative chains. And I like to think my work is sort of dreamlike. Not that I’m trying to mystify anything, the mystery is there already in the stuff. I like the idea that I’m working with the subconscious of our everyday world, of commerce culture, the idea that there’s a huge depth of association bubbling away under the surface that’s not quite gettable.
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I found the show quite religious, all about life and death: the house’s church shape, the dead winter trees, the opening buds in the video, and the religious implications of ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’. 
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Well, that’s your interpretation. I was interested in the variety of associations Tiffany’s drew out. With the house, some were reminded of a church but one woman recalled 1970s feminist imagery. Judy Chicago! Some of the interpretations were far fetched, but actually that’s not a problem.
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But Jim, surely it is a problem if people read any old thing into it. Where’s the art in that?
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It’s not a problem at all—it’s the point. It’s less about what you read, than how you read. Will-to-interpretation, that’s my subject. I offer an absence around which people can organise their memories, fantasies, knowledge, and then maybe catch themselves doing it. But in the end, it’s a sense of that crucial absence that I want to leave them with. I mean Tiffany’s Kyoto is informed by the lack of an idea about Kyoto, the space between me and the real Kyoto, and a Tiffany I never got to meet.
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[IMAGE: Jim Speers Tiffany’s Kyoto 2000]