Colette LaBouff & Joshua Hagler in Conversation

Colette LaBouff and Joshua Hagler begin their conversation by discussing the video series titled Epistles

Colette LaBouff: 

It’s hard to believe you made these videos in one day. (Interested to know at some point how it was dangerous). I’m also interested in the geography of where you were in the videos. Did you map these places in terms of the work you wanted to install in those places? Having spent time “around” these “buildings” and others like them, I wonder whether what they were is important to this. I understand better now the language and the work together as central.

Joshua Hagler: 

I didn’t really map it out or create much of a plan. I did explore ghost towns and abandoned buildings throughout the state, which, as you know, are ubiquitous. But although there are so many of them, few could really work, in terms of space, privacy, structural condition, and so on. 

Roswell Boy | Ink, Oil On Polyester Film Mounted On Wood Panel | 16 x 12 in. | 2019

In the end, I landed on two abandoned schools in Cedarvale (near Corona) and Acme, just northeast of Roswell. I was directed to the Cedarvale school by a friend, who knew I was looking at abandoned buildings, but I simply stumbled on the Frazier Schoolhouse just a few minutes up the road from home. I never knew it was there. And it turns out that it’s just up the road from Berrendo Middle School where there was a shooting in 2014. It was only coincidence that I had already made a portrait of the boy who carried out the shooting at that school, and it felt right to hang his portrait there. It was really rather stunning to learn that a single road formed a more-or-less straight line between the boy’s family’s house, my house, the middle school, and Frazier. I was only informed afterward that he had lived a mile west of me on the very same road. The whole project came together this way, piece by piece, with its moments of synchronicity. It was never my intention to look specifically for schools; I had hoped to find churches, but none would work. I was also racing the clock because we had a baby due so I didn’t have time to make sure everything was just right.

CL: 

The juxtaposition of birth and the buildings—abandoned – where other works are coming into being up against a narrative that, at its core, runs against all that: a violence as a through line in every place we inhabit or violence’s nearness to all our lives.

You talk about the sense of memory not working well (abandoned space = like a brother). I’m interested in this not because it’s personal -- or it’s also personal -- but because it gets at, cuts at, how memory works with loss. Artists are often asked if they are writing or creating “in response” to something. The answer is no, right? But it’s also yes. How, as an artist, do you see your work working with the “narrative” of your life?

JH: 

It’s all very instinctual. Paradoxical too, I think. Actually, I often do believe I’m responding to something when I make the work—school shootings, an encounter with a barn owl, our daughter on the way—but it seems impossible to grasp. To make the work is to try to understand the subject, but, in approaching whatever I think the subject is, it slips away. 

Something gives itself up to the process of making a painting, something I recognize but struggle to name, which I suppose is the true subject. 

It’s true that an abandoned space feels like a brother to me, but only because I can barely remember the brother I had. The space feels absolutely pregnant with a past yearning to be exhumed from the floors and walls and almost seems to contain time itself. I think that’s why installing the paintings in these spaces feels like a return of some kind: what contains the work is also contained within the work. 

The relation of the work to the space, as well as the intrinsic qualities of the space itself, for me, have to do with the way in which trauma is carried in a family or a body, on one hand, but is also to do with something generative, as in a wilderness of a kind, where creation is made possible again. 

From the time I was very small until today, my imagination has felt intrinsically tied to my brother, or to his absence. I’ve only come to understand in the past few years that to make art at all is my attempt at reclaiming lost memory. 

In some sense, it always fails, but in another, it calls attention to the fallibility of memory in general. It makes plain that to describe is necessarily to create, and there is no pillar of absolute truth to be found in it. There’s no stability in the remembered image, but the unstable image somehow seems to allow us closer contact with memory than the imposition of a more stable one would.

A Door in the Darkness | Mixed Media On Burlap | 120 x 72 in. | 2020

CL: 

This gets me to intention. The “where do I send my letter” question and the thought that those who arrive came from being gone reminds me that whatever compels/drives “making” is something that we all have trouble not diminishing by asking this stupid question (I’ll ask it anyway): where does the work begin for you?

JH: 

The Time Given VI | Ink, oil on polyester film mounted on wood panel | 8 x 10 in | 2019

Guston would often talk about his work coming out of an argument he’d have with himself. I relate to that. 

There’s always something unresolved about what I did before. 

From year to year, this is true, but there is also the long slow arc of simply learning, and sometimes being shocked by, all the little ways in which the work has undermined itself. There is the shock of understanding, for the first time, what you did ten years ago, which is an opportunity to extricate from it what you now know how to name. So, in those times when it feels as if I’m onto something new, that newness comes out of failure, I think it’s fair to say. It’s not as lugubrious as feeling as if I am a terrible failure in general; I feel endeared to the work I made in my own confusion. 

We can’t really know all about what we’re doing as painters, I think, anymore than the brain can be aware of its own design. So it’s really a lifetime of call and response (distorted as it might be), and it’s hard to say exactly where it started. I’m being too abstract here, I think.

More specific: I remember when I started out, I was too consciously aware of my position, living in liberal San Francisco at the time, as someone who could speak to conservative Christianity in my art and to engage in a kind of critical discourse with it because of my formative experiences. The trouble, I later came to understand, was that it was polemical, and therefore, in its way, asking for some kind of special treatment, or maybe even sympathy. I would get bent out of shape about the many kinds of misunderstandings that would occur; it was sometimes thought I was myself a Christian fundamentalist painter or something. 

It did put me on a path to get more interested in the history and philosophy of religion, and, incidentally, art as it related to the history of religion. Over time, I came to understand that religion is far more rich and complex than my little experience of it, and that, if I was critiquing anything at all, it wasn’t religion, but politics. Put more simply, I was angry with certain individuals, and art was my adolescent form of revenge, which of course, didn’t work because the paintings were basically invisible to the eyes I’d like to poke. I think there is some youthful and audacious energy in that early work, but the aspects of it that succeeded did so in spite of my intentions and not because of them. Eventually, I learned that, taking the pieces of religion apart and examining them, there really is no uniform definition for religion. Its pieces however, are ubiquitous, and intrinsically human. 

In other words, to my way of thinking, we are all religious, intentionally or not. 

As someone who is consciously religious, in a sense, that changes how I think about and make my work going forward. It’s an awareness of the incompleteness of what came before. Where I’m at now is to accept the futility of making my practice, or even individual paintings, say, symbolic of a time or place. That means, letting go of mediated reference points: pop culture, politics, academic frameworks, etc.

CL: 

I love that you talk about Allison Benis White’s work in one of the videos. In a radio interview (which is really to say a wonderful conversation) I did with Allison Benis White recently, she and I talked about her most recent book, The Wendys.

JH: 

Yes! I have my own copy of The Wendys! Some of her work will appear in this book, actually. I don’t know if I told you. When I think about The Wendys, what I remember is that each “Wendy” really has her own form, her own voice. There might be a kind of Superexposure Wendy (Wendy Torrance could lend to that kind of thinking) comprised by the individual Wendys—I don’t know—but if there is, I’d have to imagine it sort of whispered its intentions along the way, piece by piece. If it had announced everything in advance, I’d imagine it would have defeated itself. That is to say, it wouldn’t have really needed to exist if its eventual form were known in advance.

CL: 

Absolutely each Wendy has her own form. One of the amazing things about that book for me is the way that form meets content; it is simply that what must be said has a “how” its said too. And Allison knows her way around poetic form. I’m glad to know her poems are here, too, and I can see the connections between what I think both of you are “after” in your work.I asked Allison if she ever writes a single poem that stands alone anymore or if it’s always the part of a larger manuscript. I loved her answer. She said she doesn’t write the poem that stands alone anymore, that the hope is that, what she’s working on is always part of the larger work or body or manuscript. But she went further to explain (and I’m paraphrasing) that working that way means she gets to be inside that space. I so understood that! A place one can live for a bit (sometimes longer). The sense I had was that it was the space/time of being within a project that was itself compelling. Does any of this ring true for you? And if there is a “body,” how does that come to be in a project for you?

JH: 

I don’t know if what I’m saying is true or not about her work, but I imagine it that way because I can’t imagine it otherwise. It’s only been since 2018 that I stopped thinking about my work as tethered to some theme or conceptual underpinning which would make it a body. It took me years to accept that it didn’t make me care more about the work, nor did I care about painting, contemporary art, or art history because of bodies of work. It always comes back to the individual work for me. Of course, I come to see how one painting might relate to another, say, and hopefully if I’m having an exhibition there is some sense of specificity about it, something which, if nothing else, is accurate unto itself.

Holy Mother | Mixed Media on Canvas | 102 x 96 in. | 2020

CL: 

I found your work in these videos absolutely gorgeous and evocative. “My god,” “Holy Mother” and “A Door in the Darkness” are so powerful. And, “Self-Portrait as Someone Unseen” is incredibly affecting. I meet it with a kind of searching that feels like “locating,” and the sense of the self within it, just gliding under my radar. Thinking of being a person in the world as this kind of face-to-face experience with others feels genuine.I’m interested in the work focused on shootings and victims as well as perpetrators. What is it like for you as a visual artist to work with these histories that are outside the self-history? “Roswell Boy” and “Nathaniel” are powerful because they get at the horror of the shooting, survival, and also the complexity of both. 

Where are you in the story of victims and perpetrators? Or what in this too-familiar narrative is compelling for you beyond the real time taken to look at those affected in a way that magnifies into something larger? 

JH: 

This is such a great question because I’ve never really tried to articulate it in a way that actually gets into the heart of what you’re asking.

I might start with saying something that, in the current political moment of the contemporary art world, might come off as provocative, but hopefully that’s not all the answer is. I want to say that, with regard to the suffering of others (thinking of Sontag), I don’t understand pain as something that is proprietary. I don’t understand my own pain that way, first and foremost. I don’t say this to excuse instances in the art world in which someone was opportunistic in using someone else’s pain self-importantly. If the artist doesn’t recognize themselves in someone else’s pain, and yet chooses to make art about a “timely” or “relevant” topic then that insincerity is to be met with skepticism.

For me, making work with the aim of thinking through mass shootings happened because the shootings themselves brought about in me a familiar response to pain that I recognized as something which extends into my own past. I didn’t read about and listen to the victims of these atrocities in some state of cool remove. It would be too much to go into detail, but I think it’s enough to say that I was affected.

Mother | Found Feed Chute, Bones, Plaster, Led Bars, Mirror | 2018

… In 2018, I made a sculptural installation called “Mother,” which you probably remember, also thinking through mass shootings. It was installed at the Brand Library in L.A. and consisted of an antiquated feed chute perforated with bullet holes and, beneath it, white plaster child-sized Moon Boots surrounded by bones of horses and cattle. I was thinking of my own mother and the trauma of losing her infant son. I’ve always been vague about how he died because I’m protecting the privacy of individuals I care about, but it’s enough to say the circumstances—the experience of having your child essentially stolen away because of something someone else did—for my mother were not unlike someone’s child being shot at their school. And so I have to imagine that the kind of trauma a parent lives with in that situation is not unlike hers. The way that I carry that trauma, as I experienced it directly and through the effects it had on my mother, is probably not unlike that of a sibling of a kid who, one day, just simply never came home from school.

But maybe the more provocative part of what I want to say about this is that I also think I see something of myself in the shooters themselves. Having researched their lives, one has to realize that, in most cases, they themselves experienced trauma early in life. The recent portraits I made for the project at the abandoned schools were of those that elicit certain connections between myself and them. “Nathaniel,” referring to Nathaniel Berhow, who carried out a school shooting in Santa Clarita, refers also to my middle name. As a boy his age, my Physics class traveled to Magic Mountain on a field trip, which is in Santa Clarita. I lived in the Los Angeles area for four years. “Roswell Boy” refers to a boy I won’t name because of how young he was and the fact that his shooting didn’t result in any deaths. I’d hope not to see his name in print too much and that he might be able to have a normal life at some point. But he did live a mile down the road from us and his school was on the same road, and just beyond it, is the abandoned Frazier Schoolhouse where I installed the portrait. The third painting “Self-Portrait as Someone Unseen” layers those at a larger scale. I made all of these at the same time I was making portraits of victims of the Walmart shooting in El Paso.

Self-Portrait as Someone Unseen | Mixed Media on Canvas | 72 x 66 in. | 2012 - 2019

CL: 

How much of what New Mexico is feels central to what you’re making now? Do you feel place matters in this making at this moment or is it just being in a place that’s not a metropolis that matters? Because the particular New Mexico where you are is not the other New Mexico.

JH: 

New Mexico, at this point, almost is the work. I know what you mean by your question because it’s a very different New Mexico than Georgia O’Keeffe’s New Mexico, for example. It can’t be half as envied. 

CL: 

I see that. So, how much of the narrative of the New Mexico you inhabit is related to your process and particular works?

JH: 

Shore (Underfoot) | Mixed Media On Wood Panel | 16 x 12 in. | 2020

What’s happened over time is that I’ve allowed myself to ease into this New Mexico’s discreet kind of consciousness, the poverty and neglect really, and to start letting go of other kinds of mediated forms of information as a reference point for the work. And actually, quite recently, I’ve become very conscious and intentional about that. What I mean is, I find myself in a new kind of contract or dogma, I guess you could say, in which I no longer want to make paintings based on stuff I encounter in mass media, pop culture, art history, political theater, or any kind of academic framework I can think of. What this looks like in real world terms is that I’m wandering through areas I either feel called into or simply stumble upon by chance. The things I find on the landscape have recently started becoming my substrates: old aluminum railroad signs, shot and flattened tin pails, pieces of toilet seat, car wreckage, the back of a chair. All the attraction I once had to the frantic activity that goes on in the political fight for the survival of a society has been traded in for walking on a neglected landscape where society has already failed. There is a peaceable kind of heartbreak about this New Mexico. I have to say, I have no problem accepting its terms as I understand them: Expect no one to care about what you find here but take all you need. The resources are abundant to anyone who recognizes them as such.

CL: 

I get this. I knew Roswell in somewhat similar ways, felt strongly that the space where you now live is where one can absolutely hear differently than she can in a city. Which is to say hear. Which is to say feel. But is that only because I came from Orange County, California before I arrived there? 

And what a difficult in between! Take all you need; yes, but some people born here may sometimes feel like there’s nothing here for them. And I always wonder if that’s part of just being born somewhere you want to leave. And somewhere to which you might eventually want to return. Because you can find without anyone caring. Because you can take all you need.

JH: 

This makes me want to tell a story. This past December, in the days leading up to the solstice, and therefore, the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, I went out each night into some of my favorite areas just west of here. I began a new habit of drawing in the dark. Just quick blind contour drawings of stuff I tried to see as well as I could as the light faded and the two stars set.

On the night of the conjunction, December 21st, I was in Lincoln, that old west village where Billy the Kid was once arrested. It’s a special spot for me. As it got late, I wandered behind the old mission church there, drawing the landscape between two peaks. Above one peak were the two planets. Above the other was a lighted cross for Christmas. I admired the symmetry and walked out near the tree line to draw the scene. I made several drawings over the course of perhaps fifteen minutes or so. The more I drew, the more I tried to look into the blackness of the brush and trees and so on. It took quite a while for my eyes to adjust. Only after all this time did I come to notice two deer not more than twenty feet away, standing totally still and silent, staring directly at me. In my excitement, I tried to draw them as quickly as I could, thinking they might bolt at any minute, and only as I’m drawing them do I notice the entire herd just a short distance behind them. There were at least a dozen and probably more, every one of them staring at me.

I tell this story because my large landscape “Between Earth and Here” was made with only these drawings for reference.  

Between Earth and Here | 106 x 182 in | Mixed Media | 2021

CL: 

Can you talk about how the drawings functioned for you in the process of making “Between Earth and Here”?

JH: 

The painting began very simply, the recreation of an individual drawing which might have only taken ten or twenty seconds to make, and then to simply fill in areas with flat color; it didn’t matter to me which color. Then I’d recreate the next drawing on top of that one and so on. Each drawing would be from a subsequent night. So it would start with December 17th, 18th, 19th, etc. until I arrived at the solstice. When I did, I drew in the deer, except that the deer I drew didn’t look like deer because I was drawing so fast and I couldn’t see my paper! So they look like animals of some sort, but it’s difficult to tell. So what’s most surprising about the painting, in the end, is its accuracy to the event of seeing. The two peaks look about the same distance apart as if you had been standing there that night. There are the two stars near each other on the left, and the cross on the right. A person can stare and stare at this painting and never see the three animals, front and center. In fact, it might require someone pointing them out. But they’re there camouflaged in all the mark-making resulting from these layered drawings. And what I love about that is how accurate it is to the experience of being near an animal in the dark and not be able to see it until you’re slow and patient enough to adjust to what’s right in front of you.None of this was really available to the work before moving here and until I was ready to give up on all these other things I was pursuing, my preoccupation with ideas of relevance and so on, which eventually just came to feel futile. It’s as if the ground takes notice of you standing on it when you’re ready. It rewards the work by transforming it. Other concerns sort of just evaporate as they become unnecessary to the process. 

CL: 

I’m thinking of Clarice Lispector line about making that resonates; she writes in Agua Viva, “I write to you because I don’t understand myself.” How do you read that?

JH: 

Well, I think you find out what you know by writing, wouldn’t you say? I think I plagiarized that, but I can’t remember who said it. I couldn’t help but look up the quote to see what else she might have said in the same space.

Darkness is my hothouse. Enchanted darkness. I’ll keep talking to you and taking the risk of disconnection: I am subterraneously unreachable by my knowledge. I write to you because I don’t understand myself.

Maybe she intuits that the contact she seeks to make through

writing is what will make the self not just knowable, but, in the first place, possible. But there’s a paradox here because she’s subterranean. So she intuits a self that extends into places even she can’t imagine, that it can melt away and become so diffuse that the distinction between self and other, at least in those heightened states of creative aliveness, are indistinguishable. What she infers, to my mind, is that there might be no fixed self. That’s why, I suppose, self is always speculative.

I should read Agua Viva, huh? 

CL: 

I think you’d like it. And I think you’d like it the way that the art of others who are interested in making as a practice, with seriousness and curiosity, is something we want to search after, get a glimpse of, be let in on.