Nick Mauss for DOUBLE 47
If you look close at the works in Close-fitting Night, Nick Mauss’s new exhibition at Chantal Crousel in Paris, you see a lot of bodies. Most of the figures are in pairs, either leaning on or holding onto each other, but there might also be a lot of figures sitting, sketching or painting other figures—reflections. In the abundant show, every type of surface is accompanied by every type of mark. Some pieces of ceramic on satin achieve the luminosity of a screen; a moire effect of the glazing and scoring suggests the backlit crystal of a phone. Don't we also scribble all day on tablets?
Mauss excels at detailing the richness of gestural histories. The multidisciplinarity of the works in the show echo the broad reach of his practice, which encompasses curating, writing, sculpture, painting, and performance. In his new book, Body Language: The Queer Staged Photographs of George Platt Lynes and PaJaMa, written with the art historian Angela Miller, Mauss explores the legacy of George Platt Lynes, a photographer famous during his life for his celebrity and fashion work, and known today for his queer nudes. Complicating the various flattenings of Platt Lynes artistic output, Mauss likewise elaborates on a historical scene, pre-Stonewall queer culture whose ideas and expectations about identity and expression were different from how we might sometimes conceive of them today.
While installing Close-fitting Night, his first solo exhibition with the gallery, Mauss was gracious enough to answer some questions about all these things.
Graham Hamilton: We've met before, at a dinner party at Matthew Lutz-Kinoy’s studio. You recommended I go see Trajal Harrell’s “Koln Concert,” which I think was premiering in Paris. I did, I loved it. I cried. It began a relationship I have with Trajal’s work where I try to go see it whenever and wherever I can. He’s wonderful. This was just a friendly recommendation I'm sure, but it really gave me something. How much does your research practice have to do with pedagogy?
Nick Mauss: Of course, I remember that evening, was that last fall? I'd recently arrived in Paris and was taking in as much of the Festival d'Automne as I could–you asked me if I'd seen anything good. And like you now, I try to see Trajal whenever I can, ever since I first saw his "In the Mood for Frankie" performed late at night at MoMA in a corridor next to the escalators in 2016. It was so unlike anything I had seen. He'd deliberately selected an awkward space, a strange hour to be in the museum, a very intimate audience, and together with Thibault Lac and Ondrej Vidlar, he created this incredibly emotional theater out of almost nothing: some improvised gowns, a little water, music. Since then, I was lucky enough to participate in an exhibition with Trajal at Museum Ludwig where he premiered the "Köln Concert" as a solo work, which transformed into something else over the years, so what you saw in Paris was the ensemble version. I'm glad to hear that you were so moved by his work, by how much he gives, and I think your question is about generosity. I always strain against the term research because it implies a kind of separateness. We're all looking for things, we all have our distinct methods. I love working with other artists—collaboratively and in educational situations—but I don't assume that I have anything to teach. The best teachers I had drew me out of myself and pointed me towards practices that could potentially create an opening or a rupture for me.
GH: I remember seeing your show Transmissions in 2018 at the Whitney Museum, but missing the performance. The whole thing felt a bit OFF, vacated. I was disappointed, I had missed it, something about the exhibit was and would remain incomplete to me. I am interested in how art works—especially performative ones, but also sculpture—are not always ON. What do you think of as the difference between art and performance art?
NM: That exhibition was built around the presence and absence of the performers, so in a way I like your response, that feeling of coming too late. I don't know if you noticed, but I included the poster for Sturtevant's Rêlache (1967), which conjures the earlier instance of Picabia/Satie's canceled 1924 ballet. I intentionally wanted there to be an "on" / "off" because we've become so used to everything, including performance, being permanently "on," so there is no more sense of labor, everything is just available to us all the time, but perhaps that sense of vacancy that you talk about could suggest how artworks also perform, viewers perform...
All the photographs, paintings, sculptures in Transmissions were the index of performances and spectatorial experiences we can no longer reconstruct. The movement sequences the dancers performed were created collaboratively in response to these artworks and documents, so there was a strong, but often almost subliminal relation between everything in the space, particularly between the still and animated languages of pose, the behavior of the audience. When I was working on Transmissions I learned that Shirley Clarke, the director who made Portrait of Jason, had also made dance films in the 1950s (weirdly enough, there's really not that much moving image documentation of dance before the 1960s, most of what we have is photographs and dance criticism). Clarke said something so incredible: "Dance is what happens between the poses." And we used that as a way to take disparate images—paintings, sculptures, photographs—and bind them together through various dance idioms. Later I learned that a similar collage-to-movement technique was used by many of the Judson choreographers. For me the whole point of the exhibition was to level a distinction between art histories and performance histories, to show them as enmeshed, to take art objects from the Whitney's storage and re-situate them in the performance context that was intrinsic to them, even though it had been repressed by "official" art history.
GH: Is there a difference between “your work” and the work you do organizing, curating, or writing about other people's work? I would imagine that you wouldn’t separate the two.
NM: You're right, I don't want to separate, or tidy up what I do, it would feel like a justification. I want to protect this space where I can follow the work as it happens, as it goes in and out of focus. This can cause problems for me, and I'm sure people would prefer a more medium-specific, dutiful practice. But so many others have given me license to fold multiple, even contradictory roles into an expansive idea of what it means to be an artist—Renee Greene, Cosima von Bonin, Louise Lawler, Ian White, Fred Wilson, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster… This might come back to your earlier question about pedagogy, but a lot of what I'm doing is almost a form of learning in public that carries new knowledges with it, at least I hope so. No one's work exists in a vacuum, and it's important to me, this insistent uncertainty of where my work ends and the work of another begins, anything else feels disingenuous.
GH: I find drawing difficult. Honestly, I find it difficult in whatever medium I’m working in not to imagine a disapproving audience. Drawing is especially like this for me, because it feels so much like visualizing or externalizing thinking. Is drawing performative? Or what's performative about drawing?
NM: The image of a disapproving audience monitoring you as you work makes me think of an Ad Reinhardt cartoon—do you find that it animates what you do? Somehow I can read drawings very directly. I think it's their haptic dimension that transmits feeling, hesitation, an element of the unconscious, no matter how controlled they are. My gateway drug was Warhol. When I started looking at his commercial drawings I felt like I could understand what he was doing, where he came from. Your question about the performativity of drawing is beautiful, and it certainly applies to him: i.e. the blotted line technique he developed to interfere with the elegance of his own hand. There was another important moment of discovery for me, not unrelated to Warhol, when I first saw Joseph Albers' photo collages—portraits of the same person, taken at intervals during a single sitting and then pasted on the same board, so the only thing that really makes it collage is the element of time creating difference. I discovered Watteau's drawings shortly after, and these often feature the same head or hand in different dispositions on a single sheet, sometimes there's a little dog or a study of drapery thrown in that may have come much later. That's when I realized I could use time to compose a drawing, to alienate myself in this process by making multiple drawings on the same plane over time, to do something like Sherrie Levine's "First Statement," a kind of gentle interaction of all these texts and citations, with the sense that they are both familiar, latent, and utterly new.
GH: Your use of mirrors as surfaces seems like a way to insinuate the viewer into the work, to remind them of their involvement—in art, in looking, in being present. When and how did that begin for you? What's it like working so much in your own reflection?
NM: I've worked with reactive image supports for a long time, surfaces that incite some kind of awareness of the act of "regarding" on the part of the viewer, but I first made works on glass in 2014 when I was invited to participate in the Florine Stettheimer survey at the Lenbachhaus in Munich by curators Karin Althaus and Matthias Mühling. Stettheimer is a key figure for me, but I wasn't sure how I wanted to be present in an historical survey of an artist who means so much to me; I felt that I had to find a way to address what happens in her work, to spatialize it. Something we haven't talked about is my tendency to lean very heavily into the kinds of aesthetics and techniques that might be decried as "decorative"— gravitating towards and even prioritizing the decorative arts has been a way for me to undermine certain rigidities, and this work comes out of a particular lineage of icon painting that was important to the German Expressionists but eventually found another application in Art Deco. You're absolutely right that this work is about the viewer, and the space of viewing collapsing into the work. It also comes out of the way mirrors are deployed in the history of painting and cinema—you know, angry proclamations written in lipstick on a mirror, mirrors as messengers of suspense and oblique subtext.
But to clarify, while I'm painting I'm not painting on mirrored glass, I don't have to confront my own reflection, luckily. I'm working on transparent glass that is mirrored later on in the process. This means that I have to paint in reverse, and also reverse color layers because I'm building up towards the underside of the glass, so to speak, because the painting is not on the mirror, but inside of it.
GH: Where and when does the mirroring happen? I find it so nice how mirrors and photography are linked through the chemical silver nitrate, which was originally used in both processes.
NM: I work with a glass artisan here in Paris who does all the mirroring. He creates unexpected effects with the silver nitrate, mysterious deposits and flares that remind me very much of photographic processes. A lot of my work happens in these half-invented processes that allude to image processing or "developing", overexposing, or after-image—even my approach to ceramics has a photographic dimension. The question I keep returning to is: where does the image exist?
GH: You said this amazing thing in your talk with Angela Miller at the Whitney about y’all’s new book Body Language, dispelling the notion that “aesthetic experience is connected to sexual object choice.” Can you elaborate on that? What is aesthetic experience outside of a type of libidinal desire or orientation,or desire in general?
NM: Amazing that you picked up on that! I did not mean to deny the erotic dimension of aesthetic experience. If anything, I think the core of my work has to do with what Susan Sontag termed "the erotics of art." What I was responding to was how bizarre it is that there can be a category such as the "homoerotic" that might pre-determine a viewing audience - I wanted to state that it's a historically specific term that may no longer be useful with regard to a broader conception of art. This became obvious to me when I visited the collections of the Kinsey Institute, a sex research institute in Bloomington, Indiana founded in 1947 that has a wild art collection including works by Kenneth Anger, Jack Smith, pictures of Nijinsky and many other documents that don't necessarily represent sex acts. I was reminded that everything has erotic potential, including the dynamics of fascination, perversion, and curiosity that are so crucial to aesthetic experience.
GH: I was speaking with a friend and she suggested that interdisciplinary practices are particularly occupied with Modernism. How do you understand a continued involvement with Modernism, living and working there? Is it an object, or…?
NM: Henrik Olesen once told me I was a truly postmodern artist, which I didn't fully understand, as I don't know how any of us can live outside of our historic moment. I was educated in a theoretical structure that was very post-1960s, so I turned to modernism as a way to uncover what had come before, and to steer against the dogmas I was being immersed in—I looked for tools in earlier practices and ways of being. Modernism is where so many of our assumptions and prohibitions originate, that's why I think I keep returning to it. In an exhibition like Transmissions, as well as in others, I have tried to show modernism as intrinsically queer, ornamental, and problematic. More recently my view of modernism—or I should say "modernisms"—has been informed by the work of Tirza T. Latimer, whose incredible book Eccentric Modernisms is vitally eye-opening, arguing for modernisms that are not built on notions of purity or orthodoxy.