ASHLEY YANG-THOMPSON MISS EXPANDING UNIVERSE Interview by Geoffrey Young
Geoffrey Young: Before moving to Great Barrington what kinds of work kept you alive while you were doing your art in Manhattan? Ashley Yang Thompson: Before I moved to GB, I was a resident at Flux Factory in Long Island City, Queens. As part of my residency, I had access to a warehouse filled with old SNL props, art books, decorations, paper, et cetera. It was like Christmas all the time. I'd take the best looking books and haul them to Strand and rare book stores, where I'd sell them. Other than that I was lucky to sell nearly every single oil painting I made while living in NYC. I also got paid to handwrite letters for a matchmaking service for single Jews. I have gorgeous cursive. The first work I saw by you was the performance you did at my gallery in 2018. You’d memorized some poems, and, sporting a wig with green pulsing battery-generated lights, you delivered the poems while moving, bending, spinning, stretching, so that we were as aware of your body in space as we were of the content of the poems. And the content of the poems was sexually candid, if not transgressive. Is performance central to your art, still? I grew up in a theater school in San Francisco that my step-father taught at. It was considered acceptable behavior to break out into song in the middle 30 • JUNE 2020 THE ARTFUL MIND
Photographs courtesy of Ashley Yang-Thompson
of a math test. I regularly cartwheeled out of classrooms. When I was twelve I played the main nun in Guys and Dolls. Performing is as much a part of me as my nails or ear wax. I do a bit of performance art, and it’s an intense experience for me. I’m usually terrified, and art has always been a vehicle for me to overcome my fears. Because I’ll do anything the art demands; I’m committed. Even if it’s publicly humiliating. Especially if it’s publicly humiliating. The embarrassment is informative. It’s a thread I am compelled to follow. There’s often nudity and urine and transgressive elements because I want to investigate why that is transgressive. Why can men casually stroll shirtless in the summer, while a woman might be arrested for doing the same thing, or at least cause a big scene? Why is my body so loaded? And what are the beliefs I’ve unknowingly latched onto that cripple me? And so I use art to confront that status quo and uproot business as usual, and it’s very awkward. The kind of permission that artists give themselves, to look into dark corners, or under the bed, for unprocessed memories, or unexplored assumptions, is not given to everyone. Most artists remain content to stay within tried and true conventions. One beacon for me has been something Carroll Dunham said: “I just paint
what I want to look at.” Easy to say, but harder to do? I love that! I’ll add it to my long list of pithy words to live by. Toni Morrison said something similar: “If there’s a book you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” Otherwise the same stories will be told over and over again, otherwise I’ll keep trying to fit my extrawide, size 8 ½ feet into Cinderella’s impossibly nymph-like glass slipper by cutting off my own toes. I make Worm House because I want to see pro-acne, pro-wrinkles, pro-ugly, pro-excess body hair, pro-egregious human error advertisements. I want to love all the sloppy parts of myself, and of others as well -- by giving yourself permission, you give others permission. I am so much more curious about the evil stepsisters than Cinderella -this idea that you have to maim yourself and swallow the pain in order to be accepted. The idea that there is only one ideal woman, and that you have to destroy others and destroy yourself in the process of becoming someone you’re not. What also comes to mind is the title of Bruce Nauman’s neon spiral wall sign: The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths. That’s pretty ambitious, but as the poet Dean Young said, “The error is not to fall, but to fall from an ungreat height.” Anyways, I’m not trying to save the world, but I’ve got to save myself. I’m severely
