For 3rd Language’s final issue, we approached five different Chicago based artists, and asked them to talk to us about their work. 3rd Language members Allie Shyer, Joel Mercedes and Emily Schulert got to slow down and take some time with these artists, which resulted in rich conversation and reflection on the many modes of practice within an artist’s world. This is an issue more integrated between the “publisher” and “publish-ee” than any of our previous publications. There are just three pieces in this issue, yet each one explores in-depth varying types of collaboration and artistic practice. Mouthy Women sit down with Emily Schulert and she photographs the parts of their studio and home that resonate with what they tell her about their work. We witness three artists get excited as they unpack the intersections between labor, capitalism and mental illness. In Motherfield, we look into the process of Justin Chance and Hunter Foster working together towards a two person show. We get the rare pleasure to read an interview reflecting on the stressful process of installation, as well as the outcomes and what’s left behind after something like that has been completed. Joel Mercedes and Frederic Moffet unearth the history of The Magic Hedge, with erotic and sentimental photographs and poetry. We are thrilled to present the final 3rd Language publication celebrating queer artists, and we thank you for your support. —Emily Schulert & Ashley McClenon 3rdlanguage.com 3rdlanguageinfo@gmail.com Publication layout & design by Molly Berkson.
A conversation with Magritte Nankin & Olive Stefanski
Introdcution, interview & photos by Emily Schulert. Mouthy Women are beautifully peculiar performers, material laborers and collaborators operating as the duo “Little Plates and Only Friend”. They’ve had several performances (Olive as Little Plates, Magritte as Only Friend) which pick up along a journey’s different moments, with no clear beginning or end. Little Plates and Only Friend can be found interrupting an institutional setting creating dischord, or bringing us into their own space. This is a beautiful and manic place filled with paper mache clouds, darned socks, collections, bells, and whispers. The places they conjure are fantastical and magical, but pointedly rooted in real life issues. In this way it is clear to me that they are distilling questions and concerns that impact them deeply in their daily life. They describe themselves as “investigating issues of care, disability, trauma, mental illness and political depression” and convey these important issues with a soft power. I was excited to be able to talk to them more about these things that occupy my mind and art as well. After seeing the performance “Little Plates and Only Friend Prepare For the Worst” I sat down with them in their studio/apartment to reminisce. Emily: I have some questions about your work together. Pretty much everything you’ve done is as [the performance duo] “Little Plates and Only Friend”, right? Magritte: Yeah Olive: Yeah, except for one piece which was “523 Years Of Golden Medallions” (separate from the duo) which we’ve done like twice.
E: I think that having collaborators is really interesting to talk about in terms of practice. The subject matter [in your work] is really interesting to me as well—the material intention, and the materially extensive performances. Your materials have so much value in the work. And in a subtle way it’s like a protest that has a kind of power that I am way into. O: Yeah, sure, definitely. E: Like, repetitive action and its labor...I don’t know if you guys wanna jump off of that and talk about that a little bit? O: Sure M: I think labor is a good place to start. The idea of work or energy or making is really important to the materials. And I guess labor is so cathartic for ourselves because I feel like it comes from a lot of really deep places. A lot of the performances that we’ve done are incredibly personal. So, it’s like choosing these techniques of making, like Olive making the socks, of weeks and weeks and weeks of repetitive embroidery— O: —But not embroidery that’s like, actually skilled. It’s not about making a perfect perfectionist design, the whole point of that embroidery is the fact that it’s really manic and doesn’t have a pattern. It’s just mending for the sake of mending, which I think is so much more emotionally relevant than sitting there being like “I’m going to make this thing well.” E: Like a sampler. O: Yeah, exactly.
M: I think it’s also deciding that we want the socks to be more manic and illustrate sort of that feeling (one of many feelings) in the piece and just pushing that into a specific object. Also taking that feeling and sort of pushing it and expanding it out into the space as well. It’s like talisman making. O: I think since a lot of our work is addressing ideas about emotional labor too, I think that it makes sense that each performances’ materials are all processed based, and then the performances themselves are usually process based. There’s usually not an “outcome.” There’s this person named Lauren Berlant, she’s a theorist , and she has a book called “Cruel Optimism.” She was one of the few people who I was reading who was talking about depression and depression as a political problem, and one of the things she talks about is characterizing life as not a magnificent swim towards the horizon but more like a desperate doggy paddle. I feel like that is a really relatable feeling for this [work’s] political context. I think that a lot of the materials and the things that Little Plates and Only Friend do are addressing that feeling. E:I think the attention to material and how things are made and the manner in which things are applied, like thread, really relates well to those ideas and even if I come into the piece not quite knowing that, I can ascertain that, which is pretty cool. I think that this bridges into another topic that I wanted to bring up. Something I think a lot about in the artistic realm of the world, especially in the creative arts, is this emphasis on creation, labor, work, and it’s almost like our one pastime is describing how busy we are and how much we have going and it’s almost like a bad habit to do that. It
“You can be productive in the way that serves other people, but maybe doesn’t really serve you.”
becomes more of a political act to do nothing and to make time to do nothing and the— M: (Laughs) O: That’s like, really relevant right now. E: This guilt about doing nothing.. It’s really radical to embrace it and talk about not doing things and that [doing things] is not sustainable for a lot of people. I think I can pick up on this in your work a little bit--especially seeing you being at the stations writing on the wall [In Little Plates and Only Friend Prepare for the Worst performance] M & O: Mhmm E: And I don’t know if that’s what you meant but it kind of connected with those ideas that I think about a lot. High production, and the refusal of that, is also in a way a refusal against the capitalist model that I think artist’s don’t push up against enough.
O: Well, so Emily was bringing up artists and work, and Little Plates and Only Friend in some ways could maybe be described as not much of anything, which is true. They sort of just like circulate and they’re obviously very nonproductive members of society. That is a part of the discussion of ableism, is the fact that they don’t function and they can’t function and so it’s demonstrating their worth and value purely through their presence and existence. And what they choose to do and how they choose to solve problems and how they... circulate through space and time in a way that i think more room could be made for. Part Two O: Off the record we were talking about the problem of disability and productivity and how part of the logic of eugenics I think is around disposability and the value of bodies, particularly bodies in capitalism. A lot of conversations about wellness are so you can get back to work, or be more functional in a way that makes sense to people. E: Like, that’s how the medical community talks about it.
O: Yeah that’s— M: —like super, super relevant because we have, as of yesterday, decided to stop working for the rest of summer and maybe a little bit into fall. There will be no more Little Plates And Only Friends performances for the rest of summer because [of] the amount of the emotional labor that we put into each piece, like the one we did at SAIC for Olive’s thesis.
O: Yeah, you can be productive in the way that serves other people but maybe doesn’t really serve you. And there’s this sort of strange irony in our work too because we do a lot of work to get to the point of Little Plates and Only Friend doing what some people consider to be nothing. But in reality I think what a lot of it is is invisible labor and that we’re highlighting care, emotional labor, social labor, presence...
M: Like not feeling well about what’s going on. I think Little Plates and Only Friend are also sort of this, like a siren. Not like a mermaid but like a siren on a car. O: The coal canaries. M: Yeah they’re like coal canaries because that’s exactly what that bird is [points to taxidermied bird in studio] We really connected to that history of those birds, those little canaries that were taken down into mines if there was a gas rupture and the mine filled with toxic gas. Because the canaries would sing all the time, [in the mines] they’d stop singing, because they were dead and if they were silent the miners would know— O: —that it was time to get the fuck out. M: And also the birds would die before the people did so the people would know something was bad. And so of course also people who have disabilities of a lot of different kinds are the ones who are most affected by systems of power and oppression and so these people in that way are like coal canaries, they (Little Plates and Only Friend) are like social sirens, community sirens. O: You can like tell a lot about a society by the way it treats its weakest members and I feel like Little Plates and Only Friend are really an intentional embodiment of weakness. How people respond to them tells you a lot about how people respond to others who they consider to be failing or non-productive or non-functional or weak. M: Yeah. E: Yeah. Do you want to talk a little bit about the age thing you touched upon? M: Yeah and speaking of that, based on systems, which I guess is sort of like the idea of what a society is, it’s a system of people that have sort of regulations or there’s some sort of aspects of systems that are embedded into a lifestyle. But because of the system that we live in, or aspects of the system like capitalism, the ages that are most affected by that or who have the least amount of agency are young people usually under the age of 18 or people who are considered to be senior citizens. So Little Plates and Only Friend are these embodiments of these two groups, they’re both incredi-
bly young and incredibly old at the same time and that has a lot to do with the decisions they make and the realities they live in and and also the appropriateness of realities. Youth, or kids, often will say “Oh I think that sky is pink” and people are like, “Ohh that’s so silly you have such a vivid imagination.” Then an older person will be like “Oh, the sky is pink.” And someone will be like “Oh you’re just old and stuff.” But if you say the sky is pink when you’re our age they say, “You’re wrong and there’s something wrong with your perception of reality.” I actually talked to my grandfather about this, of the sacredness of his reality changing as he’s getting older, like there’s something really special about him losing his memory or something—it’s not just a negative thing. E: I think it would be good to also talk about “Tooth Fairy status.” M: Yes! Tooth Fairy status. We’re trying to get “Little Plates and Only Friend” to this phrase we say “the Tooth Fairy status,” but it’s not exactly that... I guess it has to do with capitalism and cultural assimilation. Like most people in the US know who the Tooth Fairy is, a lot of people do, and the Tooth Fairy is an idea that is celebrated and used in many places. I’m not saying it’s specific to the US, I’m not sure about that or it’s origins. But a lot of holidays or ideas of spirits have gone through the capitalist view, like Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny that sort of thing, i would like Little Plates and Only Friend to be ingratiated into... O: A mass consciousness? M: Yeah, a mass consciousness. Because where people are emotionally, and how discontent people are with the state of things, and how that’s affecting their own emotional landscapes. We can create figures that help us and I feel like we’ve sort of started doing that with the emotional solidarity pins, which we sold at “Nesting In Each Other’s Skulls (a past performance). They would say things like “In Sadness with Little Plates and Only Friend” or “In Therapy with Little Plates and Only Friend”, but like, therapy would be spelled wrong. That’s because I don’t know how to spell therapy, which is part of the history of Little Plates and Only Friend, of my personal experience with the education system. We actually want to make a children’s story using our non linear narrative style. I feel like young people and seniors are feeling a lot of the intensity
“...I feel like Little Plates and Only Friend are really an intentional embodiment of weakness.�
“...just being an emotional person is considered non-productive.”
of the political situation right now but they have the least amount of outlets to talk about it. Also, amorphous thinking about emotions, and articulating emotion for young folks earlier on is really important. Young people have a lot of depression and trauma on a day to day basis.
known and fantastical. There can be these things that come out of it that is more indicative of their existence than Little Plates and Only Friend verbally speaking a message or doing something that has a clear “This is the thing and we know what the thing represents.”
E: Uh huh.
E: And this practice involves this world building so that each part together is what makes it powerful. I think that’s really cool and that’s why I immediately picked up on talking about the material aspects of the work, and time, and that got us on the whole topic of labor...
M: But yeah, I feel like all of what we do is to create a sense of understanding between people, that our depression does not have to be shameful, and it’s a really powerful time and place to be. It’s not something you have to hide, and it can be used as a tool. It’s like “ok this means a lot, this is a really powerful feeling and it can be moved in a way.” The shame that a lot of people feel about not being productive or feeling upset about a lot of things isn’t their fault. Or they’re just emotional, and of course being emotional is looked down upon, just being an emotional person is considered nonproductive. O: I appreciate you considering the form that the politics take [Emily], because I feel a lot of the time political art happens in a very specific kind of way and it’s not that I don’t think that’s a good way or wrong. I don’t really care if things are didactic, I think sometimes that’s really important. I don’t think it’s an automatic no no but I think a thing we realized when addressing Little Plates and Only Friend is that they don’t have the option to speak in a way that people normally understand, so their way of communicating a message happens in much more unusual ways and for that reason, they must use poetry because their options are limited otherwise. The fact that they must use poetry means that they can explore a lot more ideas related to darkness, wonder, fear, pain and the un-
M: Yeah ‘cus we recycle a lot of the objects from performance to performance so they kind of carry things with them. Also if you see more than one performance, like different ones, their logic and the way they are becomes more clear. They move in a different time than us because they’re not us, but they’re made of all of our emotions and just exist in a different time than the rest of us. O: In that way you’re rewarded if you care about them, like if you come to multiple performances it becomes easier and easier for things to, not like, make sense (because I think all of the performances make sense), but the symbolism and the ways they communicate become more clear to you, so you can grow in intimacy and depth with your connection to them. Its rewarding in the sense of the relationship between the audience and Little Plates and Only Friend, the more you see them, the more you can get from them. I think that’s kind of cool, the relationship of things coming back from past performances and being narrative and self referential, but also at the same time, getting the sense that you’re picking up in the middle of something when you watch an individual performance.
E: Yeah that speaks to the mythology you’re creating, the narrative is nonlinear but not really so that you can’t understand it. O&M: Yeah O: Did we cover everything? E:Yeah I think we did, that was a really awesome conversation thank you! O: Yeah absolutely! E: Let’s all high five! [High Fives All Around]
A film by Frederic Moffet
The Magic Hedge investigates a specific site, its history, and its diverse, sometimes clashing, populations. Located at Montrose Point in Lincoln Park on Chicago’s lakefront, the Magic Hedge is now a bird sanctuary that attracts hundreds of species on their migratory journey. In the fifties and sixties, the same site was home to a Nike missile control facility; the missile and warheads were kept underground at Belmont Harbor. The hedge originally grew around the army barracks, shielding it from sight. In 1971, when the government dismantled the project, Native-American activists occupied the site and asked the city to build affordable lodging for them on the lakeside. In June of the same year, they were violently evicted by police force. A tension has been growing between two of the present occupants of the park: the birders and the cruisers. Located in the city, the sanctuary offers bird watchers an exceptional opportunity to admire and photograph a wide range of birds. The Park District, along with many devoted volunteers, has created and preserved an ecological environment that provides a safe haven for birds, a place to rest and feed. But the sanctuary is also popular with men looking to hook up anonymously with other men amidst the trees and shrubberies. Bird watchers and ecology lovers are complaining that the gay men using the park are careless in their behaviors, destroying the environment by walking and lying on plants as well as leaving condoms and other types of litter in the park. They are also concerned by the disruption that they create in a space that is conceived for the appreciation of birds and nature, not of male anatomy. The fact that many schools use the park for educational purposes makes matters even more problematic for them. On the other hand, the cruisers, often closeted men, are simply looking for a space in the city to have fleeting sexual encounters in a public site outside the confine of the home. The video project I am proposing takes this reality as a starting point but then moves on to propose the Magic Hedge as a utopian site where men from across the world, newly arrived in Chicago as queer immigrants, find solace in each other’s arms. But unexpected police raids soon interrupt their temporary comfort. Though the subject matter is political, the images and soundscape will be, for the most part, contemplative, wistful, and sensuous. The majority of the footage will be observational, long takes exploring the landscape of the park. Images of men will be interspersed within this landscape. The “actors” will either be posing while looking directly in the camera, walking in the park, executing simple actions, or sleeping in the grass. The soundtrack will mainly be composed of the intense sound of birds chirping in the park peppered by narration. By Frederic Moffet
vacant reflective bodies adorn in tall grass, lit under a red tint, thirsty pronounce in vowels fenced and feathered smoked in peach birds on top of harps claiming to exist grow amaryllis slide softly into the vase transverse towards the belly button measure the sweat and the hot air coming from their mouths the older folks left the heartbeat armpit in a jar the younger folks ate it pressured by the currents to take it easy licking each other’s palms and nails and knees then rinsing in cloves, to blend with the earth a partial gesture
Joel Mercedes, in response to The Magic Hedge
A conversation with Justin Chance & Hunter Foster
Interview and introduction by Allie Shyer. Photos provided by Justin Chance & Hunter Foster. Justin Chance and Hunter Foster debuted Motherfield in December of 2015 at the May 2000 gallery. The show exhibited a keen eye for metaphor, along with playfulness and a curiosity about the intersection of material and concept. I talked to Hunter and Justin about their collaborative curatorial process, and how working together helped them to stretch their practices and create new work. We also talked about some of the poetic and philosophical underpinnings of their work. Allie: (In Motherfield) the pieces seem to really resonate against each other and I could see your joint brain space working on it together so I was wondering, how did you work together to pick out the pieces for the show? and how much of the work in the show had you already made vs. work that was specifically made for the show? Hunter: I think a lot of it had to do with working within the constraints of the show itself and the time that we had. Most of the work that we both made was made for the show, I had two photographs that were made already that I just printed and I guess most of it was made pretty separately too. We both had studios that we were working in, conversations just kind of happened mostly at home after coming back from the studio. We were kind of making work and thinking about the concept of the show and the title and the kind of conceptual or poetic frameworks all came at the same time.
Justin: the show kind of happened first when we were offered the space as a duo, so the majority of the questions came out of (this feeling of) oh wow we don’t have to apply for a space this was just given to us, what can we do to make sure that we take the best advantage of this opportunity, so we used that as a way to make sure we had all new work, even though we only had a month. H: I think it’s kind of important to add too that the work that we made was pretty different from the work that we already make. J: I think the majority of the work, even the work that was made before hand, was all conversation driven in terms of (examining questions like) what are our interests? what do we want to be interested in? in what capacity do we think it would be nice to attach some context to work we have already done before? Conversations happened pretty organically, organically has a connotation of being fun, but we were making work in a pretty disciplined way. If I told Hunter I was making something, he would be working in response to the piece I was supposed to make, so I was being held to that thing I said I was going to make, and he’s being held to the things he said he was going to make. Sometimes those things weren’t actually made, but instead it lead to conversations about what was actually there, so it was really tricky, we had plans for work that never got made.
“...Motherhood has this connotation of this mythological figure, but what happens when this figure gets fucked up?” H: it definitely wasn’t all easy or pleasant. A: So what were some of the harder aspects for you? J: I think first things first there was the difference between curatorial expectations and reality, sure there’s this language, sure there’s this framework with text, but what does this object actually do? How responsible are we for possible connotations of the language itself of the show? Like cruelty and motherhood, I’m a boy and I am in a position where I don’t want to mythologize or do some fucked up shit to mothers in general. I came at it more in terms of, motherhood has this connotation of this mythological figure, but what happens when this figure gets fucked up? What happens after the storm? Also the colonial aspect of it. I am interested in situations where the relationship isn’t just one to one. H: one of the hardest parts was just time, we were both making work until the day of install, up until the day of the show. We were making drawings on the way to the opening. And the time to work and the time to think and reflect on it just totally collapsed, there was no space for reflection really except in the moment. J: When does a thought or concept end, does it begin with it’s conception? Is the show the end of those thoughts? H: Another kind of thing that was hard for me to metabolize about the show was how fast and experimentally the work was made, and how the work was curated, and the space between the work. There were really formal gestures made, (for example) the elephant and the cow photographs, the show felt distilled and settled a little bit where in my mind the work was still tromping around and alive. J: I think where the show was successful for me in ways I didn’t expect is how reliant it is upon modes of metaphor, Motherfield can mean anything really, its something I am really attracted to, mothership, motherland, mother language, the idea of the origin of the landscape. But there’s this elephant and the cows, you think of the elephant in the room kind of, and paper chain is massive and erect, this strange snake like thing.
A: But (the paper chain) is super fragile too; J: yeah super fragile, it worked for me in a way that was more symbolic than metaphorical, that’s something that I thought was interesting. The elephant on the floor which is kind of gnarly, and kind of looks a little infected or something like that, but when you peer in there it’s a really beautiful chamomile. Where as the paper chain requires the act of looking up, ascendance, about posturing your body. What was the role of us (as artists)? Are we instructing you on how to move your body throughout the show? The word search puzzles are giving you all sorts of instructions and words that lead you nowhere, your eyes are quietly looking for things. H: the rose quilt and the plungers kind of do a similar thing, because you have to peer in to see them and the space is kind of deep, but it also ascends too.
J: with the plungers, I like them because it is what it is, it’s beeswax, and that’s it. And even though the quilt on the wall has gone through so many materials it ends up looking like one whole piece. And its deep and red and kind of stale but also meaty in the corner. H: It also operates a bit as a sign too cause it’s just one flat gesture against the wall a red sign is kind of like stop, a seductive sign. But it’s also telling you to take caution, and it’s the color of blood. J: one more comment about that rose quilt, I always thought about it as poetically like a rose, but also in reality like a rose, but also freshness combined with a sense of mortality, through abstraction to gut out the essence of that thing (a rose) to get something that is kind of alive and meaty but at the same time kind of dying.
“[The rose quilt is] kind of bountiful in its own sentiment, in its own flower-like-ness.�
H: it kind of harkens back to the long history of still life paintings. J: kind of bountiful in its own sentiment, in it’s own flower-likeness. A: I am interested in it as a marker in a lifecycle, figuring out how to convey that idea. Like “this is how far I am between life and death.” J: that’s why the plungers are so weird, the way the situate themselves materially, it’s not lively at all but it references the idea of life.
kind of high as fuck and sleepy. It’s kind of sad but also he’s been the agent of his own intoxication. It took me Motherfield to realize that that’s what I want.
H: and there are dead roses embedded in the beeswax, which is a kind of preservative too. Those happened so linearly, starting off with actual plungers and controlling color and surface and texture. I started off by making cast concrete ones in South Bend (during a residency.) Those were the bones of them and these are the most alive kind of fleshy ones. Also the color really changed during the install, they definitely have their own kind of life.
H: I think the paper chain I had a similar experience with. I worked so hard to get it to stand and be erect on it’s own, it was kind of about origin stories in terms of the garden of Eden and the story of Eve. Eve was kind of the first mother, also thinking about the fall of man. But there’s the concept and the poetics, and how much of the intention can be retained in the object. There’s the object descending and the fall of man, and the original mother being an originator of that fall. The title was called Often a Witness so there’s this thing as a stand in and witness of the first great tragedy. It also represents the skeleton of a snake. But it’s like how much can you load on an object that’s made with two materials?
A: do you think there’s anything else that you wanted to touch on about the show? J: the elephant. I put a lot of stake in that object, I am very interested in it looking more like an elephant structurally. Linking that with the entire show. It’s a really sad elephant that has a belly full of chamomile who is knocked out on the floor cause he’s so sleepy. That is a gesture I see myself as being in line with, not just sad, but has in it’s own Eros, its overindulged, and
A: It’s talking about the impossible too, of this object that doesn’t want to ascend to heaven, that wants to descend and crumble to it’s natural state. H: whenever I do an artist talk I start with this quote from a Christian Mystic in the 1900’s named Simone Weil: “Beauty does what gravity does out of love,” so I use that as a guiding principle and I try to keep that very near everything I do. That guides my attraction to Morris Lewis’s paintings, he was a color field painter and he made these kind of stained washes of color that fall down the painting. The photo of the cows was a response to that idea as well. The plungers and the Cow photograph also explore the poetics of the downward spiral.
thank you!   3rd Language would like to extend a heartfelt thanks and gratitude to all who have supported us over these past few years. Thank you so much for all forms of support we have received. Thank you to all who have participated with us in the past in some capacity, whether that be past collective members, transportation in a pinch or lending your collective skills or labor in whatever form.