Some of the Things by Kaity Tighe

SOME OF THE THINGS

T H E W OR K OF J E S S KIE L-WORNSO N

D ESIGNED BY KA I TY TI G HE | M A R CH 2 0 1 5 Fire Paintings. 2009–Ongoing, Polyurethane, Acrylic paint, All artwork copyright © 2009–2015 Jess Kiel-Wornson charcoal, casting sand, plastic wrap, mixed media, on canvas

WORNSON SOME OF TH E TH I N G S

Fire Paintings. 2009â&#x20AC;&#x201C;Ongoing, Polyurethane, Acrylic paint, charcoal, casting sand, plastic wrap, mixed media, on canvas

WORNSON SOME OF TH E TH I N G S

Fire Paintings. 2009â&#x20AC;&#x201C;Ongoing, Polyurethane, Acrylic paint, charcoal, casting sand, plastic wrap, mixed media, on canvas

WORNSON SOME OF TH E TH I N G S

Fire Paintings. 2009â&#x20AC;&#x201C;Ongoing, Polyurethane, Acrylic paint, charcoal, casting sand, plastic wrap, mixed media, on canvas

WORNSON SOME OF TH E TH I N G S

Fire Paintings. 2009â&#x20AC;&#x201C;Ongoing, Polyurethane, Acrylic paint, charcoal, casting sand, plastic wrap, mixed media, on canvas

WORNSON SOME OF TH E TH I N G S

SOME OF T H E S PA C E S These are some personal notes on workspaces. Work begins in some sort of reaction to my physical surroundings, so it seems appropriate to start there. Work changes significantly according to workspace. Spaces before the photos: Undergrad studio developed densely and quickly; always people around dropping off objects or clippings or photos I might like. Discarding their things with me. Vienna space: grey room that I painted this huge drippy mural that was sort of reminiscent of illustrated Grimm’s fairy tales — the room was filled with all things broken and useless but not discarded, a pile of shoes with the soles falling off, clothing covered in holes, a typewriter that didn’t work, a

broken umbrella, a broken fan, a desk missing a leg — so dense as to seem intentional, the work I did there made itself. John’s house I no longer had direct access to a woodshop. That, and looking at this little patch of peeling plaster from the wall in a friend’s house for years that finally got patched, led to working with drywall Des Moines workspace — fire paintings happened, partly because of the spaces I had just left in St. Louis, but also because the house didn’t have a fire alarm and I could start large fires in the basement without consequence. Easy access to water too. Virginia workspace — I decided to leave all my materials behind and see what happened. It was disastrous. I didn’t know what to do with myself. Not surrounded by my things, and without direction. I wanted to make big things but didn’t know which direction to go, I didn’t know what those “big things” were supposed to look like. I wanted to respond to all the Southern architecture but couldn’t find a starting point — which I imagine was due to the

AN INTRODUCTION | SOME SPACES

sort of paralysis being away from my “things” — there seemed to be nothing from which a conversation could begin. Times of discomfort or this sort of paralysis, the stairs come back. New York workspace (Eldert factory) — Here I unpacked really, I started to collect again. I was happy to buy materials because I was there indefinitely. I lived with other artists and packrats so acquiring discards was no trouble. The work had to be small, and contained — no fire paintings. It couldn’t need clean space because that was impossible in that space, or much light. Power tools were difficult because there was no ventilation. This is where I began to revisit wall-hanging works, collage and paintings. No space to build, but also no space to store. I was working in a woodshop so I didn’t much care to be doing any more carpentry upon leaving work. It was good to go small for a bit. Locations are specific to tasks. I’ve never worked well on the computer in my studio space. Computer work has to

be done elsewhere, generally home (when my studio was home it was in any room but my studio) or a coffee shop — libraries have never worked well. There has always been a very clear delineation of space and work. So it perhaps doesn’t make much sense to have my books in the studio — because I generally do research elsewhere. On the other hand, I pull them down for reference while working or during a break time so maybe they do live there. Not much research happens on the computer. I’m trying to get better about that but mostly the internet serves as a distraction, a power-off. I think about Facebook as a cigarette break, the point is to break from work, turn consciousness elsewhere for a while and sometimes that’s how it goes and sometimes I stumble on something that contributes to my research, much like a smoke break where you chat with someone and sometimes it’s just cigarette small talk and sometimes it’s amazing mind-stretching conversation that changes everything. Watching The New Girl or Foyle’s War are for distraction, they are for turning my brain away from work — and I specifically seek out

WORNSON SOME OF TH E TH I N G S

things that I are mind-numbing enough to turn me off. On the other hand, Some things overlap: Treme and The African Queen are both total enveloping entertainment and “research.” I don’t consider grocery shopping part of my work but I consider grocery stores part of my work as well as grocery lists. Meeting up with people at the bar is not work but the conversations that happen in the space, as well as the space itself, often contribute to my research. Going for walks is specifically to clear my head but again, walks often end up serving as research trips — looking at buildings in space or people in public. Nothing exists perfectly in one space, but find myself trying to keep things in particular places as much as possible. I try to keep studio work from homework, computer research from computer entertainment, etc. Nothing works out that way perfectly, but the effort is still useful, it makes me attend to clarity, to conflations, how spaces function for me in my practice.

Fragment of set from 2014 performance.

Fire Paintings. 2009â&#x20AC;&#x201C;Ongoing, Polyurethane, Acrylic paint, charcoal, casting sand, plastic wrap, mixed media, on canvas

WORNSON SOME OF TH E TH I N G S

Fire Paintings. 2009â&#x20AC;&#x201C;Ongoing, Polyurethane, Acrylic paint, charcoal, casting sand, plastic wrap, mixed media, on canvas

T H E S E W I L L PA I R W E L L W I T H A

PETITE SIRAH & SOME CHEDDAR. Fire Paintings. 2009â&#x20AC;&#x201C;Ongoing, Polyurethane, Acrylic paint, charcoal, casting sand, plastic wrap, mixed media, on canvas

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JESS KIEL-WORNSON S O M E O F T H E T H I N G S T H AT E X P L A I N M Y T H I N G S S O M E O F T H E T H I N G S T H AT M A D E M E W H O I A M S O M E O F T H E T H I N G S T H AT H AV E H E L P E D M E G R O W S O M E O F T H E T H I N G S T H AT E X C I T E M E T O D AY S O M E O F T H E T H I N G S T H AT I N F O R M O T H E R T H I N G S S O M E O F T H E T H I N G S T H AT I W I L L C A R R Y W I T H M E

WORNSON SOME OF TH E TH I N G S

SOME OF THE THINGS

T H AT E X P L A I N M Y T H I N G S

Fire Paintings. 2009â&#x20AC;&#x201C;Ongoing, Polyurethane, Acrylic paint, charcoal, casting sand, plastic wrap, mixed media, on canvas

C O N TA I N E R S FOR THE HUMAN CONDITION My work considers that with which we surround ourselves â&#x20AC;&#x201D; our temples, our art, our homes and grocery stores â&#x20AC;&#x201D; as containers for the human condition and evidence that this is a world we have built of and for one another.

WORNSON SSOME WORNSON O M E OF O F TH T HEETH T IHNI G NSG S

ARTIST S TAT E M E N T Jess Kiel-Wornson, 2014 Our human history is a collective one. Our shared physical spaces act as mirrors of this collective existence. We leave pieces of ourselves behind, scratched in walls, under chairs, in the air. Always our souls are chipping away at themselves while picking up foreign pieces, a constant cycle of breakage and patching. These pieces merge and morph within us, making us not singular beings moving isolated through the world but individual manifestations of each other and of our surroundings. My work considers that with which we surround ourselves — our temples, our art, our homes and our grocery stores — as containers for the human condition and evidence that this is a world we have

Fire Paintings. 2009–Ongoing, Polyurethane, Acrylic paint, charcoal, casting sand, plastic wrap, mixed media, on canvas

built of and for one another. I use traditional building materials, wood, drywall, plaster, etc., to construct architecturally-inspired installations that I build from some combination of actual and appropriated memory (all memory being fictive, I relish the breaking down of the false boundaries “real” and “imagined,” “mine” and “yours”). These installations take the form of ghostly, unsteady staircases, patched walls filled with disparate objects, rebuilt furniture bearing clear scars. I am interested in exposing and investigating these moments where an object, a place, or a person must be rebuilt and in so doing merges with its surroundings and becomes a new arrangement of old matter. These considerations translate into small works as well, collage and drawing on glass panes, parchment, or typewriter paper. The layering and altering, cutting apart and healing of these images is a further investigation of the ways in which the fragments of our memories and the physical evidence of our lives fit together to make up our understanding of the world. We can only know the room in which we stand through

THAT EXPLAIN MY THINGS | INTERVIEW

the lens of all the rooms that came before, and that remain, with or without us, integral and indifferent. My sculptures, drawings, and collections are assemblages of that inevitable connectivity. They are investigations of human empathy as well as knowingly inappreciable tributes to the indifferent universe that sustains it. I am interested in inhabited space containing its own memory and power. I am interested in inhabited space as the site for the accumulation of personal histories.

and scope right now; that is, the ways in which small, personal dramas become part of larger industrial, political and social shifts, and the potential to cause or contribute to great environmental changes. I am concerned with the interconnectedness of the world, its indifference, and the ways that seemingly contradictory stories, memories, and histories can and do exist simultaneously (â&#x20AC;&#x153;everything at onceâ&#x20AC;?).

Our public and private inhabited spaces hold our personal and collective histories differently â&#x20AC;&#x201D; I am interested in that translation and (shifty) distinction. Translation is bound up in this as well: we can only know the room in which we stand through the lens of all the rooms that came before. And that room, with or without us there to define it, is made up of the phenomena that has filled it. We translate experience, emotion, phenomena, and it becomes something other than its original form, the content changes through the act of changing form. I am also thinking about range

WORNSON SOME OF TH E TH I N G S

GOALS As for goals for the semester, I would like to work on figuring out the critical points of these considerations (the risks, what is at stake, why I care about these things, why I think other people should care about these things, how much it actually comes through in the work). I feel like I have had all the same problems for years and years of my art practice — the work feels like it is at a perpetual point of “almost” and I would like to figure out how to push it over the edge into an actuality. I feel that the work for the most part has a certain aesthetic sound (with varying levels of success) and an emotional hook, but that the viewer (and myself) are left with a “so what?,” a letdown. I would also like to just be making more work, small concept work or sketches, collage, etc. A smaller practice supporting a larger one. And lastly, I have the very beginnings of a larger scale multimedia project that I hope to complete by next fall and begin research and making now.

Fire Paintings. 2009â&#x20AC;&#x201C;Ongoing, Polyurethane, Acrylic paint, charcoal, casting sand, plastic wrap, mixed media, on canvas

WORNSON SOME OF TH E TH I N G S

SOME OF THE THINGS

T H AT M A D E M E W H O I A M

Fire Paintings. 2009â&#x20AC;&#x201C;Ongoing, Polyurethane, Acrylic paint, charcoal, casting sand, plastic wrap, mixed media, on canvas

THE NEW YORK STEREOTYPE I ended up leaving because I didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t feel like I was moving forward, I was working all day and all night and I ended up working in this little Albanian bar in my neighborhood in queens which, when I think of in hindsight, was really an amazing experience but at the time it was just working 12 hour days for no money and blah blah blah, you know, the New York stereotype.

WORNSON SOME OF TH E TH I N G S

I N T E R V I E W PA R T 1 Interview of Jess Kiel-Wornson taken January 27th, 2015 by Meme Betadam and Kaity Tighe. Where did you grow up? I went to school in St. Louis and grew up in Des Moines, Iowa. I went to Webster University for undergrad, which is a small liberal arts college, and I had a really good experience there. I can give you a trajectory: I grew up in Des Moines, my parents ran an outfitter, similar to Champaign Surplus. It was full of camping equipment and adventurer lifestyle clothing. It was a family business, and I’m not entirely sure why that’s relevant, but it feels important to me. I ended up going to school in St. Louis, so I was there for my four-year degree, where I got my degree in sculpture. I stayed in St. Louis for a year after I graduated, and I had my first solo show there at a little frame shop and gallery called Pace, downtown. Then I moved

Fire Paintings. 2009–Ongoing, Polyurethane, Acrylic paint, charcoal, casting sand, plastic wrap, mixed media, on canvas

home for nearly a year and lived with my sister is Des Moines in her house. I worked in a restaurant to save money, and then I moved to New York. I lived in New York for about 3 years, and then I left New York to come back to Des Moines to apply for grad school and to get out of New York. What was New York like? New York was a lot of things. New York was hard. I went there without a lot of direction. I moved and stayed with a friend of mine in Astoria for a couple of months. I got a job working as a maid in a hotel for a while and in that time I showed as part of an exhibition project in Brooklyn. A wonderful curator named Guillermo Cruise ran it. Anyway, I did a little show there in Brooklyn, which was very fun and exciting. I worked there and then I worked at Urban Outfitters as basically a carpenter for their displays. That was actually an awful experience. Ultimately I got a job working for Pablo Helguera, who is a

THAT MADE ME WHO I AM | INTERVIEW

really, really incredible multimedia, performance, social practice artist. I was his studio assistant for most of the time that I was there and then I got a number of other odd jobs freelancing. I ended up leaving because I didn’t feel like I was moving forward, I was working all day and all night. I ended up working in this little Albanian bar in my neighborhood in Queens which, when I think of in hindsight, was really an amazing experience. At the time it was just working 12-hour days for no money and blah blah blah, you know, the New York stereotype. I was tired, my self-confidence was drained, I was broke all the time. I couldn’t afford to go home for Christmas ever. To go anywhere really. I wanted to be in the studio. I left to come back to school and went home to live with my sister again and applied to grad school and came to UIUC. I started last September. That pretty much brings us up to date. At some point, I lived in Vienna for a little while.

The Epilogue. 2010, Drywall, lumber, mud, eggshells.

Is there a reason you wanted to come to UIUC? Part of it was wanting to study in the Midwest just for issues of space. There’s the song by Chelsea Wolfe called Flatlands. I think of that a lot when I think about why I moved. When I was working in New York, I got an apartment with my former partner. It was a beautiful apartment that was super bright and sunny. We got a great deal on it in a neighborhood called Ridgewood, which was a largely blue collar eastern European and Hispanic neighborhood. It had just been redone and had these great hardwood floors, but in order to have a studio in it I went and got the foam that you are supposed to line your cabinets with that you can get rolls and rolls of at the dollar store. So I lined the entire room with this foam, and then I put plastic tarping on top of it. So there really wasn’t a lot of space or a lot of freedom to work and make things. A large part of me moving to the Midwest was to have this space. I missed the flatlands. There was no room to do large scale

WORNSON SOME OF TH E TH I N G S

installations. I did some set building in New York, but when I asked these companies about space to do these projects, it was just impossible. Have you always had an interest in carpentry? No, I’m actually a really terrible carpenter. I was never trained in any carpentry so I’m really bad at it — getting better though. You just shim things together and learn as you go and I’ve had help. I’ve always been very good at barter, labor for labor, or six pack for labor. How did you start your artistic practice? I came into college as a painter. I painted people a lot. I painted people with objects a lot. I did a project in high school about the people in my life and the objects that they held dear to them and treasured. I think about that sometimes when I come back to this thread of how physical nonliving objects and

Fire Paintings. 2009–Ongoing, Polyurethane, Acrylic paint, charcoal, casting sand, plastic wrap, mixed media, on canvas

entities, surroundings, end up talking a lot about the people who are associated with them. So I came in as a painter, but in my program, I knew that I could work in any media that I wanted to. The sculpture professor, John Watson, gave the best critiques I thought. He had a lot of energy. I ended up switching to sculpture because I knew that he would work me the hardest and I would be the most challenged there. The switch was very difficult because I hadn’t worked in 3D before. I still have an interest in painting. There is a lot of collage work, things like that, and I think that, as you talk to contemporary artists, we don’t really define ourselves by media in a lot of ways. When I am working on a particular project, it’s always some combination of writing, reading, collage and material explorations, with painting and building — things like that.

Untitled. 2007, First Assemblage, Mixed Media

WORNSON SOME OF TH E TH I N G S

Is there anything you have read or taken inspiration in your work because it seems like you may have some ties into Buddhism or related philosophical thoughts. Where do your ideas come from? There are a ton of influences. I’m reading a book called Memory of Place: The Phenomenology of the Uncanny, by a scholar named Dylan Trigg. He actually spoke here last semester, and he deals with a lot of the same conceptual threads that I deal with in my work. So that’s been really wonderful. Poetics of Space by Bachellard — the definitive work on human nature of place — our connections as humans to our surroundings and our constructed surroundings and domestic space. That’s something that I am interested in. I’m reading about performance theory and history right now. One of the best has been Diana Taylor’s The Archive and the Repetoire. And novels, short stories, poetry.

Dream with Stairs #2: Summer in the South. 2009, Reclaimed wood, Hardware. 16' ˟ 10' ˟ 12'

Fire Paintings. 2009â&#x20AC;&#x201C;Ongoing, Polyurethane, Acrylic paint, charcoal, casting sand, plastic wrap, mixed media, on canvas

WORNSON SOME OF TH E TH I N G S

Fire Paintings. 2009â&#x20AC;&#x201C;Ongoing, Polyurethane, Acrylic paint, charcoal, casting sand, plastic wrap, mixed media, on canvas

SOME OF THE THINGS

T H AT H AV E H E L P E D M E G R O W

Fire Paintings. 2009â&#x20AC;&#x201C;Ongoing, Polyurethane, Acrylic paint, charcoal, casting sand, plastic wrap, mixed media, on canvas

IN A LOT O F W AY S I absolutely still have an interest in painting, and there is a lot of collage work and things like that; IÂ think that increasingly as you talk to contemporary artists, we donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t really define ourselves by media in a lot of ways.

WORNSON SOME OF TH E TH I N G S

I N T E R V I E W PA R T 2 Interview of Jess Kiel-Wornson taken January 27th, 2015 by Meme Betadam and Kaity Tighe. You talked a little in your artist statement about being interested in memory. Is that something that you read? I read a lot about memory. I think that I am turned off from talking about “memory” because I think it often has a very gendered connotation. As a woman it’s hard to talk about memory without someone thinking you are talking about nostalgia or sentimentality. I do a lot of work that is about memory. I think that memory and loss and the construction of place as an accumulation of all of the places we have ever been is very central to my work — The way that memory is held in space, how history accumulates, where memory turns into history, what is lost, what is added. Who gets to decide, etc.

Fire Paintings. 2009–Ongoing, Polyurethane, Acrylic paint, charcoal, casting sand, plastic wrap, mixed media, on canvas

Can you pinpoint a certain moment when you decided to explore these concepts? It was more moments where I discovered threads through everything that I was making. I remember in 2007 being in my apartment, a beautiful little duplex in St. Louis, and I was just terribly bored. I don’t remember what was going on but I pulled out this trunk of stuff that I had been collecting over the years and I started to glue it together and made three little assemblages. I think that that marked the start of the way that I work now. I just pulled out one of these little sculptures and I have it in my studio now. It’s beautiful and silly and just this associative exploration of these things that I have collected over the years with various levels of meaning, and at the time it was literally just sitting on the floor of my apartment spread eagle thinking, “I don’t know what to do,” and yeah, I don’t think it was a moment but I do definitely come back very regularly to specific themes.

THAT HAVE HELPED ME TO GROW | INTERVIEW

You have a lot of pieces that incorporate staircases. Can you explain the meaning behind that? Staircases are something that I always come back to. They are a place I go when I don’t know what else to do in my practice. I am realizing this anxiety cycle of making and making, believing that I am never going to make again and going through this visceral process where I really think that my art practice is completely over. I really think that I am not going to make again. The stairs are something that have really brought me out of that. I’m afraid of heights and I am specifically really scared of stairs. I have a lot of dreams about stairs and being stuck at the top of a staircase and not being able to get down. The first one I made was at a little gallery called Drive-By, in the Cherokee neighborhood in St. Louis. I had just had this beautiful frightening dream about stairs and that was Dream with Stairs #1. They have always been a good point to come back to and they have shown me other things that are happening, so it’s like I have this form or formula to come back to. It’s like I don’t know what else to do,

so I’ll just make some stairs, and when I make them it reveals a lot of other things that bring me out a little bit. Recently, it was suggested to me that I had been talking about stairs and roads. I am interested in hallways — and these are all transitional spaces, in between, which I like to think of when I think of the stairs now — the places where things collect incidentally while moving from one point to another. A lot of them are spread out, but there are two that are right next to each other, 3 and 4 I think. That was when I was living in Virginia and I was doing a workshop at Virginia Commonwealth University, just before New York City, and I did two similar projects right in a row. Still in the same vein as being lost and thinking about moving from one place to another, that transitional or disregarded spaces also collect, and bind. The second and third Dream with Stairs were in Virginia — fitting, as I was very much in transition in my life. Virginia was a pit stop between the Midwest and moving to New York. Dream with Stairs #3 was a funny one because the night before it opened (part of an exhibition Agent Form)

WORNSON SOME OF TH E TH I N G S

Fire Paintings. 2009â&#x20AC;&#x201C;Ongoing, Polyurethane, Acrylic paint, charcoal, casting sand, plastic wrap, mixed media, on canvas

THAT HAVE HELPED ME TO GROW | INTERVIEW

the Fire Marshal came in, shut me down telling me to take everything down because I had built everything in this tiny room and it was blocking the sprinkler system. So I had to tear the entire thing down the night before and start completely over. It ended up being better than it was the first time, but it was terrible, I was up all night. So many tears, so much working, but it ended up being really great. A friend of mine drove down from New York, he rented a car and drove down that night and helped create this piece, so that one is subtitled the Death of a Fire Marshal.

I called this one Don’t Worry I’ll Fix It and I think almost subconsciously it was a moment of trying to deal with all of these breakages. All of these things that you could feel and sense breaking down around you, trying to put something together and knowing that its not going to go to the door where it should go, it’s going to shift over and end up somewhere else.

The most recent one was outdoors at a residency in Maryland, just outside of Baltimore. The landlord at this residency that I was staying at came and tore the stairs down ages before so this door was leading out into the abyss on the second story. Just led out into nothing. It was also an interesting place to be in because the people who were running the residency, who are very dear to me, very wonderful people, they were having a hard time in the place that they were, and the work that they were doing. There was just a lot of tension in the space and

Dream with Stairs #4: Don't Worry, I'll Fix It. 2009, Reclaimed wood, Hardware. 12' ˟ 7' ˟ 8'

WORNSON SOME OF TH E TH I N G S

Do you have a plan when you begin to build or do you build as you go? I’m trying to get better about planning. It starts with some combination of writing nowadays, or some combination of text and drawings, and there are plans but it never ends up being exactly what it was intended to be. I don’t do well with the whole “I’m just gonna play and see what happens,” I do need to have some guideline to follow. Do you reuse pieces, or buy them specifically for projects? I cannibalize a lot. I’ve moved a lot in the last couple years, so I’ve gotten good at just tearing it down and just being done with it and letting it go. It’s hard to leave materials behind. I’m haunted by the things I’ve thrown out or left behind — materials, objects. I am generally pretty bad about documentation and need to improve.

Dream with Stairs #4: Don't Worry, I'll Fix It. 2009, Reclaimed wood, Hardware. 12' ˟ 7' ˟ 8'

JESS KIEL-WORNSON SOME OF THE THINGS

Fire Paintings. 2009â&#x20AC;&#x201C;Ongoing, Polyurethane, Acrylic paint, charcoal, casting sand, plastic wrap, mixed media, on canvas

WORNSON SOME OF TH E TH I N G S

SOME OF THE THINGS

T H AT E X C I T E M E T O D AY

Fire Paintings. 2009â&#x20AC;&#x201C;Ongoing, Polyurethane, Acrylic paint, charcoal, casting sand, plastic wrap, mixed media, on canvas

COLLECTING I N C I D E N T A L LY I did a piece about memory and how we move through space, and very much about these spaces where evidence about human interaction collects incidentally as opposed to how the living room is sort of set up with your collections, the things that you want to show about your life, whereas your hallways, stairs and basements and things like that end up being all of the things that you are not totally interested in so much, so it ends up just being a different story.

WORNSON SOME OF TH E TH I N G S

I N T E R V I E W PA R T 3 Interview of Jess Kiel-Wornson taken January 27th, 2015 by Meme Betadam and Kaity Tighe. What excites you right now? I did a project this last summer at St Louis at my old university; it was a really neat project. They had three of their alumni who were, at the time, chosen in their first year of their MFA programs. They were all asked to curate in another person from their program and so it was. It ended up being this collection of us who had gone through this program at totally different times. I did an installation for this project called Building Home. I built a wall in the gallery, making the space look about 8 ft narrower, with a door that took the viewer into a series of two rooms. The first room was a sort of formal and narrative accumulation of all the places I had ever thought of as “home,” then the viewer walks through that to another door. It was high off the ground, sort of

Fire Paintings. 2009–Ongoing, Polyurethane, Acrylic paint, charcoal, casting sand, plastic wrap, mixed media, on canvas

surreal, and walks through it into another room where they are prompted to describe a place they “knew well” — a home. The idea was that all these stories and memories stack on top of one another, that their descriptions would be influenced by the room they had just passed through that was made up of my homes. Accumulation. That was interesting, though I’m still grappling with it. The most recent project I did was a series of corridors I built called Ruin and Trace: Stranger’s Stories, and that was a lot of thinking about narrative and the way that place and choices can be made physical. It was about memory and how we move through space and very much about these spaces where evidence about human interaction collects incidentally — as opposed to how the living room is set up with your collections, the things that you want to show about your life. Your hallways, stairs and basements end up being all of the things that you are not totally interested in, or even are hiding, storing away, so those spaces tell a different story.

THAT EXCITE ME TODAY | INTERVIEW

That piece is entered through a busted out hole in the wall — a doorway that has been dry walled over and broken through. You walk in through this corridor and there is an old slide projector on a shelf. It makes a very visceral sound for me, and gives off heat, and then the images are projected onto the wall but they are all blurred and distorted. You have the image that you are walking down this very narrow hallway and there is a heater, so at this point you turn and look back out the other direction. You reach an area where you must turn and if you turn to your right you come to a ladder where a plum line hangs. If you climb the ladder, you kick the plumb line with your foot and it makes this great resonant dong. At the top there is a set of keys on a ribbon and a note that you can’t read from below. You can see that there is one and there is also a deck of cards, so in theory it baits you to climb up this ladder. And you climb up and there is a lock through the ceiling and you look through these cards and there are these notes and one reads," one of these is yours, you should take it with you.” The cards are playing cards that have old snapshots glued to the back of them. So you

come back down the ladder with your card and you come back out the hallway. You go to the right again and there is a third hallway. You can pull your way through all of these curtains and it will lead you outside, a process of revealing until you get to the end of the hallway — outside. You go through this whole labyrinth only to end up in a cold, grey, parking lot. I did a few iterations of this; in one I took the curtains out and replaced them with doors. There was a music box in one. The more that I think about it, the more it becomes a fairly simple metaphor. Is the narrowness of the hallways meant to make you feel trapped? It ended up being a claustrophobic experience when I was in critique with it. There was an enormous number of people who came, but when I first built it I thought of it as a solitary experience. I thought of it as people coming in one at a time, or two or three at a time, and I thought about making the narrowness not as much claustrophobic, but to make you very aware of the physical space that you

WORNSON SOME OF TH E TH I N G S

were in. You couldn’t see quite where you were going when you would make these turns, that was a big part of it. I was thinking about ways to make narrative physical, thinking about when you tell a story and the person starts out on this path, point A to point B, and either point B shifts to somewhere else or something happens where the character has to veer off course and go somewhere else. It’s another piece I continue to grapple with. Did you take the idea of moving from point A to point B from anything in your life? Yeah, I guess that is part of it. When I left New York I had a fiancé, and that relationship ended shortly after I left. After I had gotten into graduate school, it felt like it very much changed the course of my life. So I don’t know if that was a direct response to that but it is something that I had been thinking about in terms of the way that we set up and plan out our lives, and the different directions we take and the places we end up in unexpectedly.

The Living (Room). 2014, Dimensions variable.

Fire Paintings. 2009â&#x20AC;&#x201C;Ongoing, Polyurethane, Acrylic paint, charcoal, casting sand, plastic wrap, mixed media, on canvas

WORNSON SOME OF TH E TH I N G S

Do you have any work directly influenced by the break up? Yeah, the big break up piece was Everything Until Then. It is something that I am most interested in: seeing how it would be taken apart. This project started because I just had this big collection of stuff, and it wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t stuff that was necessarily associated with this relationship. It was just stuff that I had been collecting my whole life. Little trash and knick-knacks and everything else, and when this split happened with me and my partner, it felt like I had lost this future entirely. That all of the things that I had been building and moving toward suddenly seemed very far away and adrift. That they were in my way and I had to get rid of them, but I had to come to terms with the idea of throwing them away or burying them. So I sent out an email, and at the time I was also thinking about distance and what it meant to be distant to people and to have connections with people, and he and I had had all of these phone conversations that felt far away and I felt like every time I got off the phone I felt further away from him.

So I was thinking about the ways that we try to connect with people over great physical distance, and the way that technology plays a part in that. I sent out an email to anyone that I had ever had any internet correspondence with. We had to have stood in the same room before, not necessarily that we had to have been in the room together, but we had been in the same place before. Mostly that ended up being friends and Facebook friends and people I had gone to school with. The most distant people I sent it to were people that I had worked with, but there was an artist named Kate Casanova â&#x20AC;&#x201D; she was a graduate student at the University of Minnesota. I sent her an email asking her about the program, so I had an internet correspondence set up, and had never met her, but I knew that I had been in that university and that gallery, so I knew we had been in the same room. I sent this email out very vaguely asking people to take part in this process, I then set up a constant live feed that showed a room where I was building all of these objects up into a wall (the objects I was trying to get rid of) and everyone that had been invited by email could visit this live feed whenever

THAT EXCITE ME TODAY | INTERVIEW

they wanted, day or night, and they could see what was going on with it — with the process, with the objects. I wanted us all to have the opportunity to virtually share a space. I did this for 10 days and it ended on a specific day but not a particularly specific time. I was interested in the shiftiness of the way that our memories capture moments: “This happened on this day, but was it a Monday or a Tuesday, or was it a day” because you remember parts of things but often not the expected parts. During the live feed, the invited people were asked to leave a physical address, somewhere I could send them a “piece of these converging and diverging histories.” Ultimately out of nearly 500 people, 97 responded with addresses. So after the live feed I divided the objects up into 97 collections and built a box for each collection. The boxes were built out of fragments of the wall that I just built and broken into on the live feed. I then made a book, archiving the process, the responses, the collections, and the boxes, and each box was delivered to its new address. About half the boxes I had delivered and half I sent through USPS. Two boxes went overseas; one was lost on delivery. A few people

responded with concern (having forgotten about the whole thing), and all with surprise. Some with delight. There were so many different parts and it happened so fast and with so much crazy going on that I am still clearly having a hard time talking about it in a sensible progression. Did the process help you at all? I don’t think about art as therapy, but I guess it is and has to be to an extent. I think that it was something that I needed to do, but, I don’t know that it helped. I didn’t make it to help. It may be disingenuous to say that I didn’t make it as therapy, because part of me just needed to have these objects out of my life. I was just looking through a bunch of notes that I was taking at the very beginning of this, when I was first thinking of this process, and in the notes there were all of these moments where I said how do I make this something more than “I need to get rid of this shit, will you take it from me?” and “will you take this piece of my sad sack past,” “take my broken heart.” My sister didn’t want a box because she knew too much about it; she brought me

WORNSON SOME OF TH E TH I N G S

through the whole thing. She ended up signing up for one anyway. It became about connection and about empathy and about transferring objects through space and the way that memory and hope move through place and time. There is a video associated with it, taken from footage from the live feed. It’s music and a story about leaving New York, mailing my stuff out of the city trying to package up my stuff and my life and love and move it across the country. Like that ever works. The piece felt huge, ultimately, it still feels huge. I think it’s the best thing I’ve ever made. I hope that doesn’t remain true for very long. What is something that you are working on now? I am at the very beginning of a project right now that is a piece based on a ghost town in Indiana. There is a restoration project there in an old oak savannah that is part of a greater prairie restoration project through The Nature Conservancy. One of these woods has the remains of a town that was built up at the turn of the century, early 1900s, by a woman named Jenny Conrad. She had all of

What might have happened in the basement, the place where a tree stands that used to be a dresser, what a local historian and a fashion photographer share, how a town is also a ghost 2015. Inkjet print of xerox collage. 24" ˟ 32"

these bizarre little soap opera-like dramas with her family and her neighbors, apparently. The writing on it is pretty strange — local histories usually are. I am interested in the way that this town was built up by this one woman in order to support her hog farm — the railroad was going through the area so she convinced them to pass it near her farm if she built a train depot. So she started a town to support her business — a brick factory, train depot, school, processing facilities, a hotel for folks doing business with her… So anyway, she builds this town and it crumbles after she dies, and I am interested in the way that these very small personal relationships and personal feuds and transgressions and dramas had this effect on the social and political and industrial and economic development of the area. But also it is hugely environmentally degrading. They dammed up the river and all of this wildlife that used to be there is no longer there, so it had this enormous in environmental impact on the area, and it seems so silly, but I’m interested in that scope and the way that we remember it and the way that we think about it. And that investment as a woman in that time was very strong and now there

WORNSON SOME OF TH E TH I N G S

Fire Paintings. 2009â&#x20AC;&#x201C;Ongoing, Polyurethane, Acrylic paint, charcoal, casting sand, plastic wrap, mixed media, on canvas

THAT EXCITE ME TODAY | INTERVIEW

is this other reinvestment by this small group of people who are also really interested in that area, and in restoring it and all of these histories. I’m working on the research portion of that right now, and will be working hopefully with some dancers, and musicians, and hopefully make it into this combination performance theater thing too. These dancers that I’m hoping to work with are also visual artists and conceptual artists and really wonderful thinkers. I am really interested in these immersive experiences. At some point my installations turned into areas where I wanted people to be able to interact with the space and that leads quickly into performance work, and making things happen in space. I’ve done a couple performance pieces in the past; I took a performance art class with Deke Weaver, an absolutely phenomenal performance artist, and an incredible person. I would encourage anyone to take it if you have the opportunity to do so, so I did some performance in there, and the video and live stream from “Everything Until Then” was a very performative piece, even though I didn’t think of it as such at the time. But it certainly was. Knowing that you are on a live camera…

Collage research for Conrad Savannah ghost town project.

There was an interesting moment where my dad went to visit it and was very confused about the internet part of it — I was using JTV to host it and he saw all of these comments from like internet trollers, and my poor father was just standing there being horrified at the things that people say about videos on the internet, and yeah, if you put something like this out there into the world there are going to be guys who say stupid shit. It was interesting to see how it fed into these audiences that I had not intended initially. I’m newly interested in that stuff. Are you more interested in installation work than painting at this point? Yeah, I am doing some collage work right now that I am really excited about, but I think about it as part of the research for this larger project. Increasingly it becomes, not necessarily, but it could be. I guess I think of them as the same body of work, but not necessarily the same piece.

WORNSON SOME OF TH E TH I N G S

EVERYTHING UNTIL THEN Humanity as it is held within place, constructed spaces specifically, we understand ourselves and our surroundings in relation to one another. The understanding of that connectivity, myself standing on this balcony, across the street from that bar, looking through this window into this home, inside which all of these things happen that make me me, and these other people them, and all of us are composits of these places — the implications and results of this connectivity, of person and place, place and memory, time and transference — these are the basis of my investigations as an artist: Within all of these places we pick up pieces and leave pieces behind — and buildings, structures, inhabited space (this could be bars or apartments or playground forts) are containers for infinite conflicting

Fire Paintings. 2009–Ongoing, Polyurethane, Acrylic paint, charcoal, casting sand, plastic wrap, mixed media, on canvas

and supporting histories. Those histories and their transference, that mediation, is the subject of a project I did last fall entitled Everything Until Then. Redistribution of a personal collection of found objects, gathered over many years, associated with several locations. It was driven by a need to put them back out into the world, giving them new hope or purpose. Redirecting their histories through and out of my own. The piece began with a request, sent through the virtual space of the internet, asking for those with whom I had previously shared physical space to accept these fragments, objects, keepers of memory and time into their own space, their own futures and possibilities. These people were invited into a virtual space, a website with a livefeed showing a physical space which they as the viewer had 24 hour access to for

THAT EXCITE ME TODAY | EVERYTHING UNTIL THEN

the duration of 11 days, in which time they could watch me build a wall and tear into it, retrieving this collection of objects. They had the opportunity to “share space” with me, these objects, my action before accepting my request to send a part of it to them. During this time, the viewers could respond, leaving the requested mailing address, or whatever other information that chose to give instead. — these are addresses, timestamps for when the addresses were left, and unsolicited commentary all drawn into a 2 volume book logging the process and contents. At the end of this process, the objects were divided and packaged into individually constructed boxes, made out of the wall to be sent out to their new destinations. They existed together for the last time at figure one here in Champaign, along with the log and a video made up of footage taken during the live feed, the

sounds of smashing walls, and vacuuming debris, the music that filled the room while I worked, and narration of a story about objects moving through spaces and lives. 97 boxes in total were built, packed, and either shipped or hand-delivered all over the country and the world (2 overseas) The thing thats so silly about all of that, is that it is predicated on an entirely false notion: and that is that the objects and spaces have feelings, that they care about purpose or love or consideration. Objects and space: inanimate, and envy of their indifference EUT objects themselves, like the spaces they came from, don't themselves care — they are inanimate, but my need to give them new space, new homes, my need to tend to these disinterested parties. I continue these somewhat empty gestures, calls out to an indifferent universe, by patching holes in buildings, giving them

WORNSON SOME OF TH E TH I N G S

gifts and affirmations, love that they don't need. They aren't the ones that care to be fixed, we care to fix them, because they hold us, they hold our loved ones, they make up our memories, they build on each other and on the events that transpire within them, and those events move into other places, like footprints or lint or hair. The spaces are us, just conflations of moments experienced from different viewpoints, And we are spaces, our bodies are the rooms, the corridors — we are the collections of residue of memory. And so we can rebuild, we can rebuild, ourselves, each other, our rooms. We can imagine our past places to help build our current ones. We can only know the room in which we stand through the lens of all the rooms that came before, and that remain, with or without us. Integral and indifferent.

I have certain personal motivations for work, and that’s not exactly what I want the viewer to get out of it. Everything Until Then for me was very much about the loss of this person and this life trajectory that I had planned with him, but by my putting it out into the world, I didn’t need anyone else to know that. I didn’t need the people on the other end to know that that was what I was doing. They knew that there was a loss, I think I noted it as a shift and with that shift a future was lost, one way that my life could have gone was lost in that shift and they knew that, but that was all that they knew. Some people knew, my poor sister that had to prop me up and put me in the kiddie pool on her back deck for three months was aware.

THAT EXCITE ME TODAY | EVERYTHING UNTIL THEN

Everything Until Then (Installation View). 2014. 97 drywall, boxes, film, book. Figure 1 Gallery.

WORNSON SOME OF TH E TH I N G S

F I L M N A R R AT I O N Narration taken from youtube video of Everything until then live feed. December 2014. I left New York in November. We packed up the things I was taking with me, mostly books and tools, into all these little flat-rate boxes from the post office. The boxes sat stacked in our apartment, blocking the couch, for weeks maybe. We shipped the boxes a few days before I was supposed to go. I remember walking them to the post office. A neighbor offered his hand truck another neighbor offered her shopping cart. We muddled down the street, uneasily, laughing at how absurd we looked, overtaken by the weight of all these boxes, sliding and catching. There is satisfaction is mailing so many boxes, a sense of relief. We went back home and when I left a few days later, it was with just a suitcase. Our home still furnished, the things I needed en route to my sister’s house, where I would be living.

Everything Until Then. 2014. Detail from book.

When I arrived at her house the flat-rate boxes were stacked in a corner. I didn’t pay them much attention for the first weeks I was there. I wasn’t reading or making, so there they sat until one day it was pointed out to me that one of the boxes arrived empty. I picked it up and one side of the box was torn open. A sort of violent tear, not just at a seam, but a hole. What struck me about it though was that someone, some postal worker between Queens and Des Moines had bothered to tape up the hole, to mend the broken box and send it along its way — empty. Such a strange thing to do. I put the box back in its stack then, refusing to unpack any of the boxes now. I didn’t want to know what was in there, what I had lost. I ignored it and stewed on it, and I thought about a box full of tools and books and photos bursting open in a parking lot somewhere. Hershell B. Chipp’s theories of Modern art laying on the ground next to my photographs and pliers. Maybe someone picked it up, maybe they took it home and read it, or gave it away. Maybe someone needed pliers. Maybe there is some postal lost and found box where those things end up.

Fire Paintings. 2009â&#x20AC;&#x201C;Ongoing, Polyurethane, Acrylic paint, charcoal, casting sand, plastic wrap, mixed media, on canvas

WORNSON SOME OF TH E TH I N G S

It hadn’t occurred to me when I left New York, to be concerned about whether or not the boxes would arrive, packed up with my life. In my head, those things would cross this distance intact without question, we would cross this distance, our lives could spread out over such space. Everything would move about in the world as planned, I hadn’t thought to worry that they might not make it, I hadn’t thought of what might be lost. The day we shipped the boxes, we borrowed a grocery cart from the neighbor across the hall. One of the red wire ones, the ones you see filled with bags of groceries, or with a child, rolling down the street. It’s strange seeing children in them, as it very much resembles a small, rolling, cage when their little fingers poke out and their faces press against the grate. It didn’t work as well as we wanted it to. Turns out babies and groceries weigh less than an a life on the move. Another neighbor offered his hand truck — and much advice, and many questions to which the answers did not matter. We walked to the post office, my stacks of boxes falling onto the street, a mixture of laughter and frustration — tension and whatever it is we try to fill the air with when some

frightening is coming. That’s the last I remember of the day we shipped the boxes, some back street between our home and somewhere else. There was a sense of security in those boxes, all perfectly packed up and shipped neatly away to my sister’s house, where I would be soon too. The day I was to leave a hurricane came. Sandy granted me an extra day at home. Everyone was frantic and angry and frightened. We huddled into our apartment together and let the world spin out around us. I didn’t think of the wind or rain, the people in trouble without water or safe places to hide. I didn’t think of my boxes. Or the airplane. Or the vastness of the distance that was coming. The rain came and went. The wind too. The strangeness and sadness and quiet apocalyptic atmosphere of the city clung on longer. And then I left. It was grey and wet, but I don’t remember the day very well either.

THAT EXCITE ME TODAY | EVERYTHING UNTIL THEN

When I arrived at my sister’s house the flat-rate boxes were neatly stacked in a corner. I didn’t pay them much attention for the first weeks I was there. Work was keeping me busy and I had clothes. I wasn’t reading or making, there they sat until one day it was pointed to me that one of the boxes arrived empty. I picked it up and one side of the box was complete torn open. A sort of violent tear, not just at a seam, but a hole. What struck me about it though was that someone, some postal worker between Queens and Des Moines had bothered to tape up the hole, to mend the broken box and send it along its way — empty. Such a strange thing to do. I put the box back in its stack then, refusing to unpack any of the boxes now. I didn’t want to know what was in there, what I had lost. I ignored it and stewed on it, and I thought about a box full of tools and books and miscellany bursting open in a parking lot somewhere. Hershell B. Chipp’s Theories of Modern Art laying on the ground next to my photographs and pliers. Maybe someone picked it up, maybe they took it home and read it, or gave it away. Maybe someone needed pliers. Maybe there is some postal lost and found box

where those things end up. It hadn’t occurred to me to be concerned about whether or not the boxes would make it, packed up with my life. In my head, those things would cross this distance intact without question, we would cross this distance, our lives could spread out over such space. Everything would be safe, would move about in the world as planned, I hadn’t thought to worry that they might not make it, that we might not make it.

WORNSON SOME OF TH E TH I N G S

DUST SCROLLS: T H E S PA C E T H AT B I N D S We leave pieces of ourselves behind, scratched in walls, between sheets, over floorboards. Always our souls are chipping away at themselves while picking up foreign pieces, a constant cycle of breakage and patching, stacking and tracing; These variant pieces of the world, merge within us, making us not singular beings moving isolated through the world but manifestations of each other and of our surroundings. Dust Scrolls: Space that Binds is an ongoing work of collection. It is an effort to find the physicality of memory and to gather the power of place. Each panel begins with a visual memory from within a room — a shaft of light over sheets, through blinds, the sense of displacement created by a window’s reflection — and

is stacked upon other memories from other places, blending and growing with the space it inhabits. Each time these panels are hung, they collect the dust and the light, the new lines and memories of the space, creating an increasingly vast, shifting, landscape that parallels the construction of memory. The Dust Scrolls guide us through an inherently intertwined memory, remind us of the uneasy terrain that grows within and without us, that binds us inevitably to one another and to a rich and indifferent human landscape.

THAT EXCITE ME TODAY | DUST SCROLLS

Glass Panes, Astoria to Present. 2014–Ongoing. Dust from each installation site, graphite on parchment, tape, mixed media. 9' ˟ 11'

WORNSON SOME OF TH E TH I N G S

Fire Paintings. 2009â&#x20AC;&#x201C;Ongoing, Polyurethane, Acrylic paint, charcoal, casting sand, plastic wrap, mixed media, on canvas

SOME OF THE THINGS

T H AT I N F O R M O T H E R T H I N G S

Fire Paintings. 2009â&#x20AC;&#x201C;Ongoing, Polyurethane, Acrylic paint, charcoal, casting sand, plastic wrap, mixed media, on canvas

SOMETHING G R E AT E R T H A N T H AT I want to be able to tell a story that cant just be told through words, or just with images, or just with sounds, or just with space; I want all of those things to feed into each other to become something greater than that.

WORNSON SOME OF TH E TH I N G S

I N T E R V I E W PA R T 4 Interview of Jess Kiel-Wornson taken January 27th, 2015 by Meme Betadam and Kaity Tighe. What movies do you like, recommend, or inspire you? I watched a really great series recently called “Les Revenants.” It’s on Netflix. It’s a zombie show and it’s a beautiful French series about this small mountain town and it’s full of all this incredible modernist architecture that is crumbling. It’s present day, but these people start coming back from the dead and they don’t know that they’ve died, and it’s actually very sad. There’s nothing gruesome or scary about it, its just about them trying to make space for themselves, and their loved ones having to tell them that they’ve died and then trying to make space for them in their lives presently. So this beautiful architecture and eerie mountain landscape is the perfect poetic backdrop for this incredibly sad story that is full of loss and haunting, and the impossibility of the notion that

Fire Paintings. 2009–Ongoing, Polyurethane, Acrylic paint, charcoal, casting sand, plastic wrap, mixed media, on canvas

people “live on in our memories” — well they don’t, not really. Memory is a very strong and important thing, but memory as such is not the equivalent of a human and all of the experience in their own memories and their own moments that have come with them. So I love that this show complicates these notions of loss and haunting and humanity, which are things that we as humans notoriously oversimplify. I think about that show a lot. I’ve been watching a lot of Tarkovsky movies, one called Nostalghia that is really beautiful and also very much about space and possibility and haunting and people having a tough time negotiating the world. I was a big Twin Peaks fan once upon a time. I don’t know why I thought to bring that one up. Do you have any other hobbies outside of art? I was just thinking about that, I don’t think I have enough hobbies. I love to travel, you know. My family did a lot of traveling and just being outside, and I had a lot of privacy

THAT INFORM OTHER THINGS | INTERVIEW

WORNSON SOME OF TH E TH I N G S

as a kid. My mother grew up with eight brothers and sisters, so I think when she raised my sister and me, it was very important to her that we have a lot of privacy and a lot of our own time. We lived in town in Des Moines, but we were backed up to these woods and a creek so I had a lot of exploration time and a lot of time to nest. I built a lot of forts and made a lot of spaces for myself. I guess I started my artistic practice as it is now long ago, you just never think of it as that, right? Yeah, exactly, we all do. I always try to take up knitting or something, but, I don’t know, I just watch a lot of movies in the winter, not all fancy pants movies. I gave you my “interview movies.” I’m not telling you what I am going to go home and watch tonight.

THAT INFORM OTHER THINGS | INTERVIEW

Still from Tarkovsky's Nostalghia.

WORNSON SOME OF TH E TH I N G S

Fire Paintings. 2009â&#x20AC;&#x201C;Ongoing, Polyurethane, Acrylic paint, charcoal, casting sand, plastic wrap, mixed media, on canvas

THAT INFORM OTHER THINGS | PYGMALION

PYGMALION AND G A L AT E A Jean-Luc Gerome There was this poster hanging in our living room growing up. My mom got it at the Met as a young woman. It's this amazing image of a sculptor falling into the embrace of his sculpture, a woman on a pedestal, reaching down to hold him. She's come to life. Everything in the room comes to life. It's called Pygmalion and Galatea, by Jean-Luc Gerome. It's an old Greek myth, a sculptor falls in love with his creation, but the painting is so much about the life of objects and and the power of a moment, of a space. I've always loved it and only just recently looked up while lying in bed — it hangs above my bed now — and thought about how telling that is. I wonder how much that painting has changed my life, or at least told the story of it before it happened.

Pygmalion and Galatea, Jean-Léon Gérôme. 1890, Oil on Canvas

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JEAN COCTEAU, THE ART OF FICTION NO. 34 Interviewed by William Fifield A collector had a house full of horrible things. “Do you like these?” Cocteau finally asked. “No. But my parents missed the chance of buying the impressionists cheap because they didn't like them. I buy only what I don't like.” A young Netherlander, said Cocteau, was the first to buy the impressionists and take them home. Locked in an insane asylum for fifteen years, he died there. In his trunk were found some of the masterpieces of impressionism, which had by then acquired considerable value. His parents went to the head of the asylum and accused him of having kept a sane man incarcerated. Cocteau's vivacity of intelligence caused him to live in a world of accelerated images, as if a film were run in

Fire Paintings. 2009–Ongoing, Polyurethane, Acrylic paint, charcoal, casting sand, plastic wrap, mixed media, on canvas

fast motion. One thinks of a different time stage as a real possibility: differing human beings apparently all on the same physical ground living actually at different accelerations. In Cocteau's case, there was no doubt that a rapidity of intelligence accounted for the multiplication, juxtaposition, proliferation, and mixing of experience and its exterior face, behavior — as well as for what was often called a certain superficiality or légèreté. “He who sees further renders less of what he sees, however much he renders.” First met on the set of Le Testament d’Orphée in 1959 among the lime rocks, tortured as they are into Cocteauan shapes by the wind, at Les Baux in Provence — significantly on the day he filmed the death of the poet, himself — Cocteau treated the interviewer to a glimpse into a life that bridges two epochs (Proust and Rostand to Picasso and Stravinsky). He chatted with eminent grace between takes, then went over to stretch out again (upon a tarpaulin laid down out of camera range) on the floor of the quarried-out cavern in rock, lit

THAT INFORM OTHER THINGS | ART OF FICTION

up eerily by the floodlights, to be the transpierced poet — a spear through his breast (actually built around his breast on an iron hoop under his jacket). The hands gripped the spear; the talc-white face from the age of Diderot became anguished.

in the “Resurrection” of Piero della Francesca. Lunch was preceded by a cocktail, mixed by the famous hands, which Cocteau said he had learned to make from a novel by Peter Cheyney: “white rum, curaçao, and some other things.” Lunch finished, the recorder was plugged in.

The taped interview took place in the Riviera villa of Mme. Alec Weisweiller a few months before Cocteau's death in the fall of 1963. The villa entrance was framed by facsimiles of two great Etruscan masks from his staging of his Oedipus Rex — a kind of static opera in scenes which he wrote after music by Stravinsky — masks worked in mosaic into the cement walk that winds through gardenia bushes and lilies to the portal out on the point of Cap Ferrat. You saw the schooner-form yacht of Niarchos out on the water toward Villefranche, where Cocteau lived in the Hotel Welcome in 1925 with Christian Bérard and wrote Orphée; the poet was framed by his own tapestry of Judith and Holofernes, which covers the whole of one of Mme. Weisweiller's dining terrace walls, and provokes strange reminiscences of the slumbering Roman soldiery

After you have written a thing and you reread it, there is always the temptation to fix it up, to improve it, to remove its poison, blunt its sting. No — a writer prefers, usually, in his work the resemblances — how it accords with what he has read. His originality — himself — is not there, of course. When I brought forward your resemblance to Voltaire at lunch you were — I had better say “highly displeased.” But you share Voltaire's rapidity of thought. I am very French — like him. Very, very French.

WORNSON SOME OF TH E TH I N G S

My thought was Voltaire isn't as dry-sharp as is supposed: that this is a miscalculation owing to imputing to him what would be a thought-out hypercleverness in a more lethargic mind. But in fact Voltaire wrote very fast — Candide in three days. That holocaust of sparks was simply thrown off. Whether or not this is true of Voltaire, it is certainly true of you. Tiens! I am the antipode of Voltaire! He is all thought — intellect. I am nothing — “another” speaks in me. This force takes the form of intelligence, and this is my tragedy — and it always has been from the beginning. It takes us rather far to think you are victimized by intelligence, especially since for a half century you have been thought of as one of the keenest critical and critical-poetical intelligences in France; but doesn't this bear on something you told me about yourself and Proust — that you both got started wrong? We both came out of the dandyism of the end of the nineteenth century. I turned my vest, eventually, toward 1912, but in the proper sense — in the right direction. Yet I am afraid the taint has persisted even to today. I suppressed all my earlier books of poems — from before 1913 — and they are not in my collected works. Though I suppose that, after all, something from that epoch has always . . . Marcel combated those things in his own way. He would circle among his victims collecting his “black honey,” his miel noir — he asked me once, “I beg of you, Jean, since you live in the rue d'Anjou in the same building with Mme. de Chevigné, of whom I've made the Duchesse de Guermantes; I entreat you to get her to read my book.

She won't read me; and she says she stubs her foot in my sentences. I beg you — ” I told him that was as if he asked an ant to read Fabre. You don't ask an insect to read entomology. Strictly statistically, you were born in 1889. How could it have happened that you entered into this childprotégé phase, so very like Voltaire, taken up by all Paris? Did you have some roots in the arts — in your family, for example? No. We lived at Maisons-Laffitte, a few miles outside Paris; played tennis at this house and that, and were divided into two camps over the Dreyfus affair. My father painted a little, an amateur — my grandfather had collected Stradivari and some excellent paintings. Excuse me. Do you think the loss of your father in your first year bears on your accomplishment? There is a whole theory that genius is only-childism, and you were brought up by women, by your mother. An exceedingly beautiful one, from her pictures. I can only reply to that that I have never felt any connection with my family. There is — I must say simply — something in me that is not in my family. That was not visible in my father or mother. I do not know its origin. What happened in those days after you were launched? I had met Edouard de Max, the theater manager and actor, and Sarah Bernhardt, and others then called the “sacred monsters” of Paris, and in 1908 de Max and

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Bernhardt hired the Théâtre Fémina in the Champs-Élysées for an evening of reading of my poems. How old were you then? Eighteen. It was the fourth of April, 1908. I became nineteen three months later. I then came to know Proust, the Comtesse de Noailles, the Rostands. The next year, with Maurice Rostand, I became director of the deluxe magazine Schéhérazade. Sarah Bernhardt. Edmond — the Rostand who wrote Cyrano. It seems like another century. Then? I was on a slope that led straight toward the Académie Française (where, incidentally, I have finally arrived; but for inverse reasons); and then, at about that time, I met Gide. I was pleasing myself by tracing arabesques; I took my youth for audacity and mistook witticism for profundity. But something from Gide, not very clearly then, made me ashamed. I recall something particularly scintillating you wrote in your first novel, Potamak, begun in 1914 — though I think you didn't finish and publish it until after the war — which must have been ironically autobiographical of that stage. Yes, Potomak was published in 1919 and 1924. You wrote something to the effect of: a chameleon has a master who places it on a Scotch plaid. It is first frenzied, and then dies of fatigue.

come to Paris; had had to leave Russia, I believe. There are these strange conjunctures. I often wonder if much would have eventuated if Diaghilev had not come to Paris. He would say, “I do not like Paris. But if it were not for Paris, I believe I would not be staged.” Everything began, finally, you see, with Stravinsky's Sacre. The Sacre du Printemps reversed everything. Suddenly, we saw that art was a terrible sacerdoce — the Muses could have frightful aspects, as if they were she-devils. One had to enter into art as one went into monastic orders; little it mattered if one pleased or not, the point wasn't in that. Ha! Nijinsky. He was a simple, you know; not in the least intelligent, and rather stupid. His body knew; his limbs had the intelligence. He, too, was infected by something happening then — when was it? It must have been in the May or April of 1913. Nijinsky was taller than the ordinary, with a Mongol monkey face, and blunted fingers that looked like they'd been cut off short; it seemed unbelievable he was the idol of the public. When he invented his famous leap — in Le Spectre de la Rose — and sailed off the scene — Dimitri, his valet, would spew water from his lips into his face, and they would engulf him in hot towels. Poor fellow, he could not comprehend when the public hissed the choreography of Sacre du Printemps when he had himself — poor devil — seen they applauded Le Spectre de la Rose. Yet he was — manikin of a total professional deformation that he was — caught in the strange thing that was happening. Put the foot there; simply because it had always been put somewhere else before. I recall the night after the première of Sacre — Diaghilev, Nijinsky, Stravinsky, and I went for a drive in a fiacre in the Bois de Boulogne, and that was when the first idea of Parade was born.

C'était malheureusement comme ça! Yes, I thought literature gay and amusing. But the Ballets Russes had

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But it wasn't presented then? A year or two later, listening to music of Satie, it took further form in my mind. Then, in 1917, to Satie's music, Léonide Massine, who did the choreography, I who wrote it, Diaghilev, and Picasso — in Rome — worked it out. Picasso? I had induced him to try set designs; he did the stage settings: the housefronts of Paris, a Sunday. It was put on by the Ballets Russes in Paris; and we were hissed and hooted. Fortunately, Apollinaire was back from the front and in uniform, and it was 1917, and so he saved Picasso and me from the crowd, or I am afraid we might have been hurt. It was new, you see — not what was expected. Aren't you really positing a kind of passion of anticonformism in the ferment of those days? Yes. That's right. It was Satie who said, later, the great thing is not to refuse the Legion of Honor — the great thing is not to have deserved it. Everything was turning about. All the old traditional order was reversing. Satie said Ravel may have refused the Legion of Honor but that all his work accepted it! If you receive academic honors you must do so with lowered head — as punishment. You have disclosed yourself; you have committed a fault. Do you think this liberty can go too far? There is a total rupture between the artist and public since about 1914. But it will cause its opposite, of necessity, and there will be a new conformism. The new great painter will be a figurative — but with something mysterious. Undoubtedly, Marcel — Proust — was stronger because

he hid his crimes (and he lived those crimes) behind an apparent classicism, not saying, “I am a nasty man of bad habits and I am going frankly to recount them to you.” You make me think of Hemingway, in that. His whole school — He told me a very interesting thing. He said: “France is impossible. The people are impossible. But you have luck. In America a writer is considered a trained seal, a clown. But you respect artists so much here that when you said, 'Careful; Genet is a genius,' when you said Genet is a great writer he wasn't condemned; the judges took fright and let him off.” And it is true, the thing Hemingway said. The French are inattentive and the worst public in the world — yet the artist is still respected. In America the theater audiences are very respectful, I am afraid. Who would you name as fundamental to this conversion? Oh — Satie, Stravinsky, Picasso. If you had to name the chief architect of this revolt? Oh — for me — Stravinsky. But you see I met Picasso only in 1916. And of course he had painted the Demoiselles d'Avignon nearly a decade before. And Satie was a great innovator. I can tell you something about him that will perhaps seem only amusing. But it is very significant. He had died, and we all went to his apartment, and under his blotter on his desk we all found our letters to him — unopened. Some moments ago, you spoke of this “other.” I think we would do well to try to pin down what you mean

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by that. Picasso has spoken of it — said it is the real doer of his creation — and you have during our earlier talks. How would you define it? I feel myself inhabited by a force or being — very little known to me. It gives the orders; I follow. The conception of my novel Les Enfants Terribles came to me from a friend, from what he told me of a circle: a family closed from societal life. I commenced to write: exactly seventeen pages per day. It went well. I was pleased with it. Very. There was in the original life story some connection with America, and I had something I wanted to say about America. Poof! The being in me did not want to write that! Dead halt. A month of stupid staring at paper unable to say anything. One day it commenced again in its own way. Do you mean the unconscious creates? I long said art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious. Latterly, I have begun to think: Is genius an at-present undiscovered form of the memory? Now bearing on that, you once wrote a long time ago that the idea is born of the sentence as the dream of the positions of the dreamer. And Picasso says a creation has to be an accident or fault or misstep, for otherwise it has to come out of conscious experience, which is observed from what preexists. And you've averred: the poet doesn't invent, he listens. Yes, but it may be much more complex than that. There's Satie, who didn't want to receive outside messages. And to what do we listen?

Simply, banally, how do you manage such things as names of characters? Dargelos, of course, was a real person. He is the one who throws the fatal snowball in The Blood of a Poet; again the same, a snowball, in my novel Les Enfants Terribles, which Rosamond Lehmann has translated (with obsessive difficulty, she wrote me); and this time, also, the black globule of poison — sent Paul to provoke his suicide, I found I had to use the name of the actual person, with whom I was in school. The name is mythical, but somehow it had to remain that of the lad. There are strange things that enter into these origins. Radiguet said to me: “In three days, I am going to be shot by the soldiers of God.” And three days later he died. There was that, too. The name of the Angel Heurtebise, in the book of poems L'Ange Heurtebise, which was written in an unbroken automatism from start to finish, was taken from the name of an elevator stop where I happened to pause once. And I have named characters after designations on those great old-fashioned glass jars in a pharmacy in Normandy. What about the mechanism of translation? I think you once wrote in German? I had a German nurse. Apart from a few dozen words of yours, it is the only language I know aside from French. But my vocabulary was very limited. From this handicap I extracted obstacle — difficulty which I thought I could use to advantage, and I wrote some poems in German. But that is another matter and touches on the whole question of the necessity of obstacle. Well, what is this question of the necessity of obstacle? Without resistance you can do nothing.

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You were telling some story about the impressionists and a Netherlander who bought them — which I think expressed one of your prime convictions: about the mutability of taste or, really, the nonexistence of badgood in any real objective sense. And about that time I believe you suggested poetry does not translate. Yes, Rilke was translating my Orphée when he died. He wrote me that all poets speak a common language, but in different fashion. I am always badly translated. What I have read of your poetry in English does you no justice whatever. I write with an apparent simplicity — which is really a ferocious mathematical calculation — the language and not the content. Which is to say the after-the-fact work, for, regrettably, our vehicles of communication in writing are conventions. If Picasso displaces an eye to make a portrait jump into life or provoke collision, which gives the sense of multiview, that is one thing; if I displace a word to restore some of its freshness, that is a far, far more difficult thing. Translators, mistaking my simplicity for insubstantiality, render me superficial, I am told. Miss Rosamond Lehmann tells me I am badly translated in English. Tiens, in German they thought to make my La Difficulté d'Être “the difficulty to Leben”; no! “the difficulty zu sein.” The difficulty to live is another thing: taxes, complications, and all the rest. But the difficulty to be — ah! to be here; to exist. Well, of course, if I may put in here, it seems you are writing a language of considerable contraction out of a world in which there is a very substantial amount of changing light and shade. You have got to say a very great deal in a little space if you are to

convey simultaneity. You write somewhere that you mustn't look back (on your own product) for “might you not turn into a column of sugar if you looked back?” It is easy to take the surface of this joke; slide off. But it seems to me you evoke facetedness, glint, crystallization, perhaps even the cube, because you were intimately connected with the origins of Cubism; I don't want to go too far. I know from what you have told me that you do not “work these things up” — they jump into your mind. What are you to do, then? “Deapt” them? Make them less apt and water them down? But that would be false. It is possible to think that here is a reaching for more mysterious truths, truths that issue from juxtaposition, on the part of a delicate and in its special way quite modest mind. Story, of course, translates very well. Shakespeare translates in part because of his high relief — the immense relief of the tale derived from chronicles ordinarily, which one may read as one might read Braille. But surely the world doesn't read Shakespeare for just a kind of Lamb's tales approximation? No. Truly. There is something else. Madame Colette once said to me one needn't read the great poets, for they give off an atmosphere. It is truly very strange, too, that we poets can read one another, as Rilke says. With a friend to help with the words, I can read Shakespeare in English, but not the newspaper. Your own definition of poetry seems relevant here. You have said somewhere that when you love a piece of theater, others say it is not theater but something else; and if you love a film, your friends say that is not film but it is something else; and if you admire something

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in sport, they say that is not sport but it is something else. And finally you have arrived at realizing that that “something else” is poetry. You see, you do not know what you do. It is not possible to do what one intends. The mechanism is too subtle for that, too secret. Apollinaire set out to duplicate Anatole France, his model, and failed magnificently. He created a new poetry, small, but valid. Some do a very small thing, like Apollinaire, and have a large reward, as he did finally; others, a great thing, as did Max Jacob, who was the true poet of Cubism, and not Apollinaire, and the result — one's gain and reputation — is minute. Baudelaire writes much fabricated verse and then — tout à coup! — poetry. Isn't it the same in Shelley?

Why, then, bother? When it goes well, the euphoria of such moments has been much the most intense and joyous of my life experience. What finally worked out between you and Gide? I read once in a French critic that his work always tended to keep to the surface, but yours plunged for the depths, with — sometimes — a considerable fracture of the waves, as well as sounding. We commenced to dispute in the press toward 1919. Gide always wanted to be visible; for me, the poet is invisible, one who walks naked with impunity. Gide was the architect of his labyrinth, by which he negated the character of poet.

Shelley. Keats. One single phrase, and the whole of the poem carried into the sky! Or Rimbaud commences writing poetry right from the start, and then simply gives it up because it is very evident the audience doesn't care.

Do you keep a sort of abstract potential reader or viewer in mind when you work?

Is that really true?

You are always concentrated on the inner thing. The moment one becomes aware of the crowd, performs for the crowd, it is spectacle. It is fichu.

Yours and mine is a dreadful métier, my friend. The public is never pleased with what we do, wanting always a copy of what we have done. Why do we write — above all, publish? I posed this to my friend Genet. “We do it because some force unknown to the public and also to us pushes us to,” he said. And that is very true. When you speak of these things to one who works systematically — one such as Mauriac — they think you jest. Or that you are lazy and use this as an excuse. Put yourself at a desk and write! You are a writer, are you not? Voilà! I have tried this. What comes is no good. Never any good. Claudel at his desk from nine to twelve. It is unthinkable to work like that!

Can you say something about inspiration? It is not inspiration; it is expiration. [The gaunt, fine hands on the thorax; evacuation of the chest; a great breathing out from himself] Are there any artificial helps — stimulants or drugs? You resorted to opium after the death of Radiguet, wrote your book about it, Opium, and were, I believe, in a period of disintoxication from it when you wrote Les Enfants Terribles.

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It is very useful to have some depressant, perhaps. Extreme fatigue can serve. Filming Beauty and the Beast on the Loire in 1945 immediately at the end of the war, I was very ill. Everything went wrong. Electricity failures nearly every day; planes passing over just at the moment of a scene. Jean Marais's horses made difficulties, and he persisted in vaulting onto them himself out of secondfloor windows, refusing a double, and risking his bones. And the sunlight changes every minute on the Loire. All these things contributed to the virtue of the film. And in The Blood of a Poet Man Ray's wife played a role; she had never acted. Her exhaustion and fear paralyzed her and she passed before the cameras so stunned she remembered nothing afterward. In the rushes we saw she was splendid; with the outer part suppressed, she had been let perform.

We have these great difficulties of communication in print. All our readers are not John Gielgud or Louis Jouvet, and unfortunately when they read a novel they must play the parts. How are we to get across the shadings? I pose this because I know you have experimented with this technical dilemma. I hope you will let me reproduce eight lines of your Le Cap de Bonne Espérance.

et là [Descent inward, with a note of grief almost.] dort la profonde poésie. Whatever else, I am sure few readers would supply that phrasing if your words were printed on a straight line. Very difficult. Rossellini, in Rome, told me that if he were to put down in a script all his imagination casts up for the scene he would have to write a novel; but in fiction we must put it down, or it is lost. And the public is lazy! You ask them to enter into habits of thinking other than their own, and they don't want to. And then . . . what you have written in autograph changes in typewriting, and again in print. Painting is more satisfying because it is more direct; you work directly on the surface.

Yes.

We are struggling with imponderables here.

I will not need to translate. That will not be the point.

But of course. The Cubists had to get rid of the whole question of subject, which is a thing, to express the poetry — or art — which is a thing also. And that was the meaning of Cubism, and not the accident that Matisse noticed the forms were cubic.

Mon oeuvre encoche et là et là

et là [Sudden discovery.]

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You are the greatest expositor of Pablo Picasso, I should think very likely including Picasso. Your testimony is invaluable because you have been with him side by side through the whole art revolution from 1916 onward and because you have said his principle of permanent revolution and refreshment in art is the chief single influence in your own creative universe. He has no theory. He cannot have, because the creation ends at his wrists. Here. (Cocteau touches two beautiful, thin, coupled wrists, quite different from the costaud wrists of Picasso.) His mind does not enter in; there is an insulation, a defense, which he has formalized over years. It is the hand — la main de gloire — one thinks of the sacred mummy hand capable of opening any door, but severed at the wrist. An essential problem is that one cannot know, questions of formulation and art are too complicated for it to be possible for one to foresee, and one simply does not know. Perhaps for this reason Picasso says of painting that it is the art of the blind. He never reflects; never halts; makes no attempt to concentrate his expression in a given work . . . to produce a chef-d'oeuvre. With him, nothing is superfluous and nothing is of capital importance. Could this be another way of saying that everything is of capital importance for the total oeuvre — but spread or diffused, not compacted — as in a da Vinci? He has done that once or twice. Formulated Guernica. And the Demoiselles d'Avignon — which it must be recognized was the beginning of Picassan art, before which there is no “Picasso” though there are Picassos. He finds first, and afterwards researches. Not, as is sometimes said, surfacing that given by intuition — but rather accommodating to the discoveries of his hand. It is important to know that this puts one in constant flight from oneself; from one's

“experience.” Like Orpheus, Picasso pipes and the objects fall in line after him, the most diverse, and submit to his will. But what that will is — ? I wonder if you recall what you wrote about him in 1923? If you would recall for me — You wrote: “He contents himself with painting, acquiring an incomparable métier, and placing it at the service of hazard. I have often seen Picasso seek to quit his muse — that's to say, attempt to paint like everyone else. He quickly returns, eyes blindfolded . . .” Yes. One day in 1917 — the year I induced him to attempt stage design; the settings for Parade — the company was on stage rehearsing when we noticed a vide — a space — in the stage design. Picasso caught up a pot of ink and, with a few strokes, instantly, caused lines to explode into Grecian columns — so spontaneously, abruptly, and astonishingly that everyone applauded. I asked him afterward, “Did you know beforehand what you were going to do?” He said, “Yes and no. The unconscious must work without our knowing it.” You see, art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious. The artist must not interfere. Picasso, too, does not want to be interfered with. When we were at dinner at D.C.'s the first satellite passed over. “Ca m'emmerde,” he said — “That sullies me. What has it to do with me?” He is wholly concentrated on his work — more than any other man I know — inhumanly! He needs nothing outside his own closed universe. He rebuffs his friends — but sees nonentities — why? Because, he says, he does not want to nurture feelings of resentment against those few he loves: who, alone, can disorient

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him. He does not want to resent their intrusion — on the permanent gestation. Yet — how strange it is that this art — so completely “closed,” that is, personal and isolate — has the great popular success. It entirely contradicts the shibboleth of the artist's contact with his audience. Is it possible to penetrate this closed universe and get his (undoubtedly partial and biased) opinion on him? He would tell you nothing! He never discusses the rationale. How can he, for it is a process of the hands — manual, plastic. He would reply with boutades, jokes and absurdities: he lives behind them, in the protection of them, as if they were quills of the hedgehog. His tremendous work — he works more than any other man alive — is flight from the emptiness of life, and from any kind of formalism of anything. Expressionism has gone on and on knotting the cord — till it seems likely there is nothing left to knot but the void. But if the Montparnasse revolution has come to its end Picasso seems able to go on. Believe me — he does not know what to do but he knows unerringly what not to do. His hand knows where not to go, to avoid the stroke of the slightest banality, the least bit academic — a constant renewal — but where it does go, where the line does go, is merely the only place left. Why does he deify the ugly? The effect on his psyche of the Spanish War? Do you know he made the first sketches in the direction of Guernica before the Spanish War? The real inspiration of Guernica was Goya. Even so, was Picasso turned to the late Goya by the Civil War? It seems as if Picasso is transported “bodily”

more than altered by an influence, even if remaining in a frame of art reference. Art is but an extension of the life process for him, not differentiated. Buffet criticized him publicly, and when he was asked to retort by judging Buffet's art he said, “I do not look at his art. I do not like the way he lives.” When he had been particularly heartless and inaccessible in a human situation, I confronted him with it. “I am as I paint,” he said. Tiens, mon ami, it takes great courage to be original! The first time a thing appears it disconcerts everyone, the artist too. But you have to leave it — not retouch it. Of course you must then canonize the “bad.” For the good is the familiar. The new arrives only by mischance. As Picasso says, it is a fault. And by sanctifying our faults we create. “It is too easy when you have a certain proficiency to be right,” he says. Does Picasso consciously try to displease — reserve to himself the right to displease like his torero friend Luis Miguel Dominguín? You told me how pleasant the original sketches for his chapel of La Guerre et La Paix were, and how he progressively deformed them until we have the final work — which is pretty frightening — and which you tell me made Matisse so terrified of being caught at producing conventional beauty that he deformed his chapel at Vence. He thinks neither of pleasing nor displeasing. He doesn't think of that at all. What do you think of the French new-novelists who are beginning to abandon subject — Robbe-Grillet? Nathalie Sarraute?

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I must make a disagreeable confession. I read nothing within the lines of my work. I find it very disconcerting; I disorient “the other.” I have not looked at a newspaper in twenty years; if one is brought into the room, I flee. This is not because I am indifferent but because one cannot follow every road. And nevertheless such a thing as the tragedy of Algeria undoubtedly enters into one's work, doubtless plays its role in the fatigued and useless state in which you find me. Not that “I do not wish to lose Algeria!” but the useless killing, killing for the sake of killing. In fear of the police, men keep to a certain conduct; but when they become the police they are terrible. No, one feels shame at being a part of the human race. About novels: I read detective fiction, espionage, science fiction. Do you recommend, then, to writers they read nothing serious at all? I myself do not. To get back to that about Algeria, and so on — as a point of clarification — I gather you mean the writer can't escape his world but oughtn't to let his detail memory be too much interfered with? [And here Cocteau did something odd. He stood — rather tiredly — he was very slight, quite small — his photographs belie and do not really convey him; Picasso, for one, is wholly portrayed by his photos and if you have seen them you know him — and he went with slow steps to an end table. And he took up a tube of silver cardboard or foil, which made a cylinder mirror upon its outside. And he placed it down carefully in the exact center of an indecipherable photograph which was spread flat on this table, that I would learn was Rubens's “Crucifixion” taken with a camera that shot in round. Masses of fog blurred out

in the photo; elongations without sense. Upon the tube, which corresponded in some unseen fashion with the camera, the maker, the photograph was restored — swirls became men. Nevertheless, the objective photograph remained insane. He didn't say anything. Later on, he did remark, seated wearily, “I feel sorry for the young. It is not at all as it was in the Paris of ‘16. Paris has become an automobile garage. Neon, jazz — condition everything. And it is not at all as it was, a young man sitting writing by a candle. In Montparnasse, we never thought of a 'public.' It was all between ourselves. A great scientist came here the other day; he said, 'There is almost nothing left to be discovered.' And we know nothing about the mind! Nothing! Yevtushenko came to me. We had absolutely nothing to say to each other. Do you know why? There were twenty or thirty photographers and journalists there to snap and misrepresent it all. And the young are in a limbo that hasn't a future. Their auto accidents — to express their sense of the shortness of tenure. The world is very tired; we go back to the Charleston, the clothes of the twenties. And speleology — that is a rage here — burrowing down to the most primitive caves.”] You wrote one of your novels in three weeks; one of your theater pieces in a single night. What does this tell us about the act of composition? If the force functions, it goes well. If not, you are helpless.

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Is there no way to get it started, crank it up? In painting, yes. By application to all the mechanical details one commences to begin. For writing, “one receives an order . . ..” Françoise Sagan — others — describe how writing begins to flow with the use of the pen. I thought this was rather general experience. If the ideas come, one must hurry to set them down out of fear of forgetting them. They come once; once only. On the other hand, if I am obliged to do some little task — such as writing a preface or notice — the labor to give the appearance of easiness to the few lines is excruciating. I have no facility whatever. Yes, in one respect what you say is true. I had written a novel, then fallen silent. And the editors at the publishing house of Stock, seeing this, said, You have too great a fear of not writing a masterpiece. Write something, anything. Merely to begin. So I did — and wrote the first lines of Les Enfants Terribles. But that is only for beginnings — in fiction. I have never written unless deeply moved about something. The one exception is my play La Machine à Écrire. I had written the play Les Parents Terribles and it was very successful, and something was wanted to follow. La Machine à Écríre exists in several versions, which is very telling, and was an enormous amount of work. It is no good at all. Of course, it is one of the most popular of my works. If you make fifty designs and one or two please you least, these will nearly surely be the ones most liked. No doubt because they resemble something. People love to recognize, not venture. The former is so much more comfortable and self-flattering.

It seems to me nearly the whole of your work can be read as indirect spiritual autobiography. The wound in the hand of the poet in your film The Blood of a Poet — the wound in the man's hand out of which the poetry speaks — certainly this reproduces the “wound” of your experience in poetry around 1912-1914? “The horse of Orpheus” — without which he remains terrestrial — is surely that poetic and invisible “other” in you of which you speak. En effet! The work of every creator is autobiography, even if he does not know it or wish it, even if his work is “abstract.” It is why you cannot redo your work. Not rewrite? Is that absolutely precluded? Very superficially. Simply the syntax and orthography. And even there — My long poem — Requiem — has just come out from Gallimard. I leave repetitions, maladresses, words badly placed quite unchanged, and there is no punctuation. It would be artificial to impose punctuation on a black river of ink. A hundred seventy pages — yes — and no punctuation. None. I was finishing staging one of my things in Nice; I said to the leading woman, “When the curtain is to come down, fall as if you had lost all your blood.” After the première next night, I collapsed. And it was found I had been unknowingly hemorrhaging within for days, and had almost no blood. Hurrah! — my conscious self at lowest ebb, the being within me exults. I commence to write — difficultly above my head in bed, with a stylo Bic, as a fly walks on the ceiling. It took me three years to decipher the script; I finally change nothing. One must fire on the target, after all, as Stendhal does. What matter how it is said? I have told you I dislike Pascal because I dislike his skepticism, but I like his style! He

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repeats the same word five times in a sentence. What has Salammbô to say to me? Nothing. Flaubert is simply bad. Montaigne is the best writer in French. Simply out of the language, almost argot. Almost slang. Straight out. It is so nearly always. [At this one point in the tape recording we have now reached, and as I remember only here, his voice loses its vibrant timbre — it “bleeds out.” His voice was exceptionally young; here it becomes faded. One feels sure he recognizes the imputations for the art of writing in the decision not to correct; I recall that if La Machine à Écríre was a disaster, clearly because it was intentional effort, then the successful Parents Terribles was dicté in a state of near somnambulism; there is the temptation to rerun the tape many times at this point, and ponder. That dicté — combined with “retouch nothing, not even orthography” — frightens; Picasso seen at firsthand too touches this terror; for it is certain that it is his line which writes, through all his later art, a living line, which he merely watches; a dilemma of the Montparnasse generation; one feels Cocteau has looked into this chasm inwardly many times, and that here is his courage.] By refaire, a moment ago, I think you did not quite mean “rewrite.” What is wanted is only what one has already done. Another Blood of a Poet . . . another Orphée . . . It is not even possible. Picasso remarked the other day that the bump on the bridge of my nose is that of my grandfather, but that I did not have it when I was forty. My nose was straight. One changes, and is not what one was. Radiguet?

Oh, he was very young. There was an enormous creative liberation in Paris. It was stopped — guillotined — by the Aristotelian rule of Cubism. Radiguet was fifteen when he first appeared. His father was a cartoonist, and Raymond used to bring in his work to deliver it to the papers. If his father didn't produce, then Radiguet did the sketches himself. One day, in the rue d'Anjou, the maid announced that there was “a young man with a cane” downstairs. Raymond came up — he was fifteen — and commenced to tell me all about art. We were his whole history, you see, and he'd been used to lie on the bank of the Seine out of Paris and read us. He had decided we were all wrong. How? He said that an avant-garde commences standing, and ends seated soon enough. He meant, in the academic chair. What did he propose? He said we should imitate the great classics. We would miss, and that miss would be our originality. So later on he set out to imitate La Princesse de Clèves and wrote Le Bal du Comte d'Orgel, and I sought to imitate The Charterhouse of Parma and wrote Thomas l'Imposteur. How old was he when he wrote The Devil in the Flesh? One still sees that novel in so many of the bookshop windows of Paris. Oh, he was very young. He died at the end of his teens. That was — in ‘21 — yes — two years before. He was remarkable in that he began perfectly from the beginning, without error.

WORNSON SOME OF TH E TH I N G S

How is that possible? Ah. Answer that! He slept on the floor or on a table from house to house of the various painters. Then in the summer vacation with me on the Bay of Arcachon he wrote The Devil in the Flesh; Bal du Comte d'Orgel he did not even write, but sat and dictated to Georges Auric, who tapped it out on the machine as they went. I looked on, and he simply talked it all out. Rapidly and effortlessly. And it is flawless style. He was a Chinese Mandarin with the naïveté of a child. Those were certainly very remarkable days. Modigliani. Yourself. Apollinaire. I will recount one thing; then you must let me rest. You perhaps know the work of the painter Domergue? The long girls; calendar art, I am afraid. He had a domestique in those days — a “housemaid” who would make the beds, fill the coal scuttles. We all gathered in those days at the Café Rotonde. And a little man with a bulging forehead and black goatee would come there sometimes for a glass, and to hear us talk. And to “look at the painters.” This was the “housemaid” of Domergue, out of funds. We asked him once (he said nothing and merely listened) what he did. He said he meant to overthrow the government of Russia. We all laughed, because of course we did, too. That is the kind of time it was! It was Lenin. Your position as by far the most celebrated literary figure in France is crowned by the Académie Française, Belgian Royal Academy, Oxford honoris causa, and so on. Yet I suppose that these are “faults”? It is necessary always to oppose the avant-garde — if that is enthroned.

Cocteau at dinner in Paris, a little restaurant in the Sixteenth arrondissement. Critics? A critic severely criticized my lighting at a Saturday evening opening in Munich. I thanked him but there was no time to change anything for the Sunday matinee. He felicitated me on the improvement. “You see how my suggestions helped?” he said. No, there will always be a conflict between creators and the technicians of the métier. I was struck by the banality of Alberto Moravia in an interview with a movie actress recently in the French press. I saw him on television and he was very mediocre. But that is the difficulty. That is the kind of thing that goes down with the public. And all they want are names. Appreciation of art is a moral erection; otherwise mere dilettantism. I believe sexuality is the basis of all friendship. This sickness, to express oneself. What is it?

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WORNSON SOME OF TH E TH I N G S

Fire Paintings. 2009â&#x20AC;&#x201C;Ongoing, Polyurethane, Acrylic paint, charcoal, casting sand, plastic wrap, mixed media, on canvas

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IT COULD BE SO GOOD I spent a lot of time in Mexico growing up, I was there in December and definitely had this fantasy of just giving up my life and just moving to beach and making fucking jewelry out of sea glass, and I could be so happy, it could be so good.

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I N T E R V I E W PA R T 5 Interview of Jess Kiel-Wornson taken January 27th, 2015 by Meme Betadam and Kaity Tighe. Where do you see yourself after you graduate? This is my second year at UIUC, or third semester, so I am half way done. I have no idea where I want to be or what I want to be doing after this. I have started over the last several years to make a list — I’ve always been a list maker — and I have started a list of things that I know that I want, things that I think that I want, and things that in a perfect fantasy world I would have. And I keep all of these lists going and the things that I am certain that I want is that I want to make and show art and I want to be part of an art community and a contemporary art conversation. I know that I need to have that for the rest of my life. I also know that I want to have a great deal of land, I would like to live in the country, and that is as long as that list is right now. Those are the only two things

Fire Paintings. 2009–Ongoing, Polyurethane, Acrylic paint, charcoal, casting sand, plastic wrap, mixed media, on canvas

that I want. I think that I like teaching but it makes me very nervous. That first thing, that is the most important thing, will fall by the way side, in order to teach, so I have to figure out if I can negotiate that or not. But I don’t know, I don’t think that I want to live in New York, I might want to live overseas. I could live everywhere. I spent a lot of time in Mexico growing up. I was there in December and definitely had this fantasy of just giving up my life and moving to the beach and make fucking jewelry out of sea glass, and I could be so happy, it would be so good. So sometimes I fantasize about that and then I think that I would probably get bored and I’d want to do this and that… I don’t think that I will actually end up doing something like that. I want to spend more time in Eastern Europe; I want to check that out. I lived in Vienna for a while and had a really amazing experience there, really met a lot of interesting people, and had a lot of interesting relationships and experiences and places and it was all bizarre and wonderful. I’m not committed to any of it. I could go anywhere. I want to spend some time after I graduate traveling around the US. I haven’t

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done enough traveling within the states. There is a lot of really incredible culture and subculture in this country and I would like to know more about them for sure. I think it is really interesting what our brains pick up, they cling on to these other things and it makes this entirely new idea that is inseparable from the thing that is real. What I am most interested in is thinking about the way that public and private inhabited space collects us as humans and how we are built up in these rooms that we inhabit, and what that means about inhabiting a shared world. I don’t really think of people as individuals as much as these manifestations of one another and the places they’ve been and the things that they’ve done and so that connectivity is really important to my work and thinking about those networks, if that makes sense. Sometimes you go into a building and you can feel that something is off or you can feel these presences, and they are real. I don’t have any religious background or anything like that but I do think that history does build physically in places and

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I think that my home is what it is in my mind as a result of all the other homes that I’ve ever had, and so it is all accumulating on top of one another and everybody else who has every lived in the apartment that I live in now, they’re there too in a way. I have certain personal motivations for work, and that’s not exactly what I want the viewer to get out of it. Everything Until Then for me was very much about the loss of this person and this life trajectory that I had planned with him, but by my putting it out into the world, I didn’t need anyone else to know that. I didn’t need the people on the other end to know that that was what I was doing. They knew that there was a loss, I think I noted it as a shift and with that shift a future was lost, one way that my life could have gone was lost in that shift and they knew that, but that was all that they knew. Some people knew, my poor sister that had to prop me up and put me in the kiddie pool on her back deck for three months was aware.

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COLOPHON All artwork copyright © 2009–2015 Jess Kiel-Wornson DESIGNED BY KAITY TIGHE | MARCH 2015 I wish to personally thank the following people for their contributions in making this book successful: The Artist, Jess Kiel-Wornson for the time she spent organizing her work, sending over files, editing documents and donating her time to discuss her life and artistic practice. This book would not have been possible without her. Meme Betadam for her contributions in interviewing, editing documents and helping to organize and obtain files.

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Christopher Hohn and Tedra Ashley-Wannemuehler from the Lincoln Bookbindery in Urbana, IL, for the sewn hardcover binding, as well as their knowledge and assistance in the customization process. Sue Steinfeldt at the Illini Union Bookstore in Champaign, IL, for the softcover perfect binding. Lance Dixon from Dixon Graphics in Champaign, IL, for the book printing. Typeface: Avenir (Light, Light Oblique, Medium, Medium Oblique, Black, Black Oblique)