Interview: Steven Pestana & Norman Coady

We have a lot to say Interviews with the artists of BRINK v2: Space and Intimacy

Steven Pestana & Norman Coady

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Norman Coady: One question that I have is, you often reference material from antiquity and I feel that this is kind of unusual in the arts, particularly conceptual art. You do have classical references, but they’re more in the domain of technique-driven work. I’m just wondering if you could elaborate on your interest in going that far back and kind of bringing up conceptual artifacts from antiquity.

Steven Pestana: I tend to use the imagery that I’m taking from antiquity more for symbolic value than as a reference to antiquity per se. For instance, it’s generally immediately recognizable without any sort of expertise at all. In doing that, I hope to bring attention to why that might be. What is it about this imagery that continues to resonate with us?

NC: So, do you think that resonance comes from exposure?

Just that it has been part of our history for so long, or do you think that they were on to something that is universal, something humanly universal?

SP: I think that there is something about the beauty that they were going for, things like the notion of proportion, that is inherently universal, that has undeniable aesthetic appeal to it.

That being said, I mean I’m sure some people think it’s awful and boring to look at. There are different degrees to which we can of course decide whether or not we’re going to engage with that aesthetic. But I think that there’s a power in things that have been cultivated over thousands of years; that of course will remain with us.

NC: I guess that the counterargument would be that those proportions have been assimilated and there’s still a reason to go back particularly to those specific images. That is, a minimalist could say, “We do have the golden mean. We’re referencing it. But we’re referencing it in a kind of modern vernacular.” But your vernacular—some of it—specifically comes from antiquity. Do you see any kind of downside to referencing images? Have you experienced that or are you careful with that?

SP: The potential downside is that it’s so omnipresent that its symbolic value could easily be bypassed. But that being said, while I have my own reasons for doing things, ultimately I hope that the work coalesces in a way that it creates a sort of uniform piece that is compelling without necessarily requiring knowledge of why I might have chose this or that symbol or imagery.

NC: In some ways I feel like the imagery isn’t omnipresent, in a way, because there has been so much modern imagery that has come in between us and that imagery. I wonder somewhat, people might recognize it as Greek imagery, or Homeric imagery, but I wonder if they actually know where the image is coming from?

SP: You mean it might be a vague collective memory?

NC: Kind of, yeah. What’s your experience been with that? Are people able to identify the images in the particular or is it that they have a vague sense that they come from a long time ago?

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SP: The impression that I’ve got in the reception to the work is that, if, for instance, you take an installation like the Opus Novum Sensorium, there are multiple elements at play. There’s very fine cabinetry. There’s etched brass. The etched brass itself incorporates imagery on it. Inside the cabinetry there are jewelry pieces that show a lot of detail and craft. Those pieces themselves also have their own latent symbolism.

I think that a thoughtful viewer will recognize the interplay of these things towards an overarching idea. For example, when I use a material like brass, of course it’s beautiful in the sense that it resembles gold. It’s reflective. There’s a lot of detail in the imagery that’s etched into that brass. That’s all great, but at the same time, if I were to select a material like brass, I’m thinking as much about the fact that at the peak of the Enlightenment brass was the silicon of its day. Generally if you had any sort of technological, scientific apparatus it was probably made in a combination of wood and brass. So, if you combine that with the sort of knowledge that was coming out of that, like I do in my work—these cosmographical systems—I hope that the message that comes out of that is that this is work dealing with the legacy of technology and artisanship.

NC: That definitely comes across. You have a piece called Giordano Bruno at the Threshold of the Quaternion, can you tell me a little bit about Giordano Bruno, who he was?

SP: Giordano Bruno was a heretical monk, Dominican. Burned at the stake for the sort of things that ordinarily someone might get burned at the stake for, you know, heresy. At the same time,

he was a proto-scientific mind dealing with things like symbolic logic. That would later on, as it developed, become things like computer science or, of course, the symbolic logic of Philosophy. He was dealing with what he called the Art of Memory, which was a tradition of mnemonics for a culture that didn’t have widespread literacy and needed to remember things. He had speculative notions of the composition of the universe. He was an atomist at a time when we had no way of detecting what an atom was. How this fit into the whole. What was the nature of the universe beyond the Earth.

So these are pretty advanced questions for a culture that was steeped in faith. Where we didn’t ask these things that often.

While these investigations of his did lead to his heretical thought, for me he’s a historical character who saw the universe in a very creative way, because he gave himself the freedom to look past dogma.

NC: It’s interesting because he is seen as a pre-enlightenment thinker and it seems to me that he’s reminiscent in a way of Lucretius the Roman philosopher and scientist. There’s a whole swath of thinkers around that time that seem… there’s almost something humorous about how lost they are, because when you get to the Enlightenment, the scientific revolution, those people are more recognizable to us. Even if they’re wrong, even if they say, “The Sun is the center of the universe,” we know that they’re taking a step in the right direction: That the Earth isn’t the center of the universe. They haven’t figured it out totally, but it’s characters like that who also seem so inspired and broad in their quest, they almost seem to be catching

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western civilization up to the point where they can then take off again and start progressing. If that makes sense.

SP: I agree. That’s one of the reasons why I single out characters like Giordano Bruno, because I think that it’s speculative thought that creates the conditions of possibility for things like the Enlightenment.

NC: There’s also the question, always, when you look at history, I wonder, “Are we living in these times?” Somehow, is what we’re doing going to be in line with future understanding?

Or are we taking a tangent? Will they see us as curious characters that didn’t really have the first clue on the real reality of the universe?

I guess it’s really hard to say. We live in an age where there’s a sense of sureness that we are progressing. And there’s a sense of confidence that we’re moving forward in the future. I’m actually curious if the future won’t prove us a little wrong and understand us totally differently. In some ways Bruno is heroic and in some ways he’s just wildly off at the same time.

Wouldn’t you agree?

SP: Oh yeah.

NC: I just find those characters in history so interesting. For his time, he’s attempting to break up something, but it’s very backwards, it’s almost as backwards as it is forwards. It’s a flailing sense of what he’s doing. That’s admirable but he’s just picking us up, bringing us back to where Lucretius was a

thousand years before so that people can proceed from there.

SP: Well, that to me calls up an interesting question of the utility of progress as a notion. Because you can praise speculative thought all you want for the freedom and the imagination to think of a world other than what we live in. But if it’s a backwards, tone-deaf imagination then that instantly calls forth, “Is this a truly progressive way of thinking? Is progress even of value anymore?” And I don’t mean anymore in the grand sense. I mean like within whatever this hypothetical speculative system that may or might not be backwards, is.

NC: I feel that progress is a kind of Western European goal.

There’s almost a feeling that if you’re not making progress you’re not doing anything.

SP: Yeah, I would agree with that. I think that it’s important to ask, “what represents progress to me?” Not me as an artist, but people should be asking, “What is progress,” to continue questioning whether all our fancy gadgets are in fact progress and not just reinforcing potentially a detrimental status-quo.

NC: Or bad habits or isolation…

SP: Yeah.

NC: …or all the other dangers that go along with it. It’s so hard to quantify certain kinds of progress. Which in and of itself— we’ll talk more about numbers later—but numbers lend

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themselves to progress, to measuring progress. And I think we’ve seen how that can be an unfortunate marriage.

But before we do that, let me ask you, since we’ve been talking about Bruno. So Hermeticism is the kind of driving force in a lot of your work…

SP: Yeah.

NC: …so how does it influence your work?

SP: Hermeticism for me represents this transitional space of thinking: Where humanity still has a place in nature, where human experience is mediated relative to symbols versus quantities, and where a transcendence is possible. With the Enlightenment, with what Max Weber called disenchantment, transcendence looses its centrality in the human narrative. For me, Hermeticism is sort of a Western spirituality par excellence. In a sense that it is intimately tied to what will become science. It is intimately tied to technology. But at the same time it doesn’t deny the role of the human in that equation.

NC: It occurs to me that perhaps the Catholic Church was right to burn Bruno. If he is a kind of pivotal figure and maybe he— or the things he’s pursuing—leads to the enlightenment then it becomes a real threat in a pedestrian way to the Catholic Church, right? There’s also something to be said, since we’re talking about a loss of transcendence, that even though Bruno himself might experience it, the path he’s on is the path

towards eliminating it. How do you feel about that?

SP: Oh definitely. In a sort of incremental kind of way, the Church, it was in their favor to burn every Giordano Bruno out there.

NC: But were they right to?

SP: I mean it’s never right to burn anyone. I think even today the Church would say it’s crappy that we burned someone, but…

NC: Right. They did have more sophisticated means of keeping messages out. Say we could just retire Bruno. Say we don’t burn him. Say we just put him on a really nice house arrest. We can even give him his books. He can sit in his study. He can spin his wheels but anything that comes out of there—the documents themselves get burnt and the information is contained. If Bruno inevitably leads to Enlightenment ideals, which focus on reason, that transcendence and enlightenment itself, like the other kind of enlightenment, becomes hampered, doesn’t it make sense to eliminate Bruno?

You celebrate him, but can you also see him as the gateway to negative things that might follow? But you might not find them to be negative though?

SP: Well, yeah, just like how you can see in the history of the United States the Republican party turned into the Democratic party and the Democratic party turned into the Republican

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party, things can always be flipped on their head. Something can always become its other.

NC: Is it the other though? I’m wondering if that’s what’s so cruel about Bruno as a character. He’s a pivot and I get what you’re saying.

How does that Hermeticism and the kind of reliance on symbol rather than number directly influence your work and how do you want that work to influence society in turn?

SP: Everything that we observe our surroundings through, whether it’s technological accessories like glasses or whether it’s ideological models like quantification or enumeration, shapes the way that we are able to perceive the world and in that sense, shapes the way that we are able to interact with the world. Most historical turning points revolve around these explosions of metaphor and the new imagery that accompany these shifts in perception.

NC: So, can you control that shift in perception as an artist? Is there a goal you have in mind?

SP: I think no matter what our intention is we are always going to be artifacts of our time. I think it’s very difficult to completely step outside of your era. And if you did, you might not be even speaking the same language anymore. You might not even be making art, or whatever it is that you’re trying to do.

That being said, I do privilege the idea of always questioning. I think it’s important to always question.

NC: Let me clarify a little bit, do you see your art as a means of shifting perceptions? It can be, yes?

SP: Yeah.

NC: Are you conscious of how you’d like to see the perceptions shift? Or is it more intuitive in the sense of passing along perceptions?

SP: I think the two go hand in hand. I am conscious of what I’d like to see shift, but I think that the effect is intuited. Because whether you’re speaking in terms of images or words, communication is a tricky issue. People have their own frames of reference. They interpret things differently. Things that you think you expressed in the most pristine, perfect way possible might be completely lost on someone who doesn’t share your frames of reference. So, I think that’s one of the powers of art generally: That you can kind of round up so many different elements, a setting in which the art is displayed, within that setting the art itself, there are so many ways that you can curate the experience of the piece that it becomes the frame for the viewer. It just gives you more control over how the work is perceived and how well your message is received and communicated and internalized.

NC: It’s so hard to actually, specifically control how people are going to receive; but I hear you to say that if you’re opening up

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new perceptions, a space for new perceptions, then, that inevitably that’s a positive, right? It just expands people’s sense of perception.

SP: Yeah.

NC: I’m interested in the kind of big data age we live in, as well. As I’m a teacher, I hear a lot about big data. A kind of flood of it and also, you know, in modern politics how it’s a means of—well, again—progress, right? Numbers allow us even in the most absurd and base way to count to ten. My three-year old daughter can count to ten now. She’s progressing through the numbers. And we, actually, as we get numbers we progress through them, and some people get quite far with them.

I’m wondering what your thoughts are on modern data, the kind of big data world and the shaping of our perceptions.

SP: For me, data has become one of the many surrogates for religion. People need to feel some kind of certitude in the world. There is no certainty in life, period, but it’s very comforting that there are numbers to support this feeling that I might have.

NC: It’s interesting to think that they kind of walk hand in hand. That the more information that there is, the more communication there is, the quicker it is, the more we actually rely on the same numbers to ground us. Which, it seems like a cycle because there’s so much that can overwhelm us then really numbers become the only place of refuge. If we were

actually exposed to a lot less information I’m not sure we’d be so reliant on numbers. We’d be able to process it. Is it our inability to process that has us default to numbers.

SP: So it’s kind of like the dazzling metaphysical powers of numbers?

NC: Right, or in a more pedestrian way, they are the salve to their own burn. That the overwhelming information burns us and then we grab numerical information to salve the burn. I don’t want to be too negative but it’s almost kind of a junk food thing. If you eat cheese curls your hunger never abates, it only stays excited. But the long term results of that is that the body is devastated—if you only ate cheese curls your body would definitely get devastated. It seems like as Homer Simpson said, “Beer. Beeeer. The solution to and cause of all problems.” It seems like data kinda gets to feed its own problems.

Is there no alternative to the numerically-driven perceptions that we have, or are we stuck with numbers now? And if we’re not, how would we get out from under that?

SP: The idea that we can regain or reclaim something that numbers have taken away from us leans dangerously close to a Tea Party idea, where there’s a better pure thing if we can just get back to it. But, really, I’d be the last person to fault science or technology in itself for the human condition. Things like numbers have their benefits. They help us to understand things in ways that a word would never could.

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NC: I totally get what you’re saying about a reactionary movement and the same with Nazism, a highly reactionary movement. Of course it was very pro-technology in some ways and very opposed to it in other ways and wanted to return to a natural bliss state. I hear what you’re saying about the TeaParty and that kind of reactionaryism; but concurrently, not science and similar technology; but the people who use data and throw down statistical information as a means to get what they want in society. That is also quite negative as well. You’re just talking about a different bully then. It’s the bully of progress; opposed to the bully of reactionism.

SP: It’s just one other tool in someone’s repertoire to be able to impose thoughts and an outlook onto a population.

NC: It’s reminiscent of the Soviets in a way. I mean, the Soviets were ahead of the curve in this way, in the sense that they were living in a very data driven society. In someways, without a kind of access to spirituality that’s what you’re going to end up with, possibly. I’m not saying we’re living in a Soviet—but I wonder in a way, now that we’re talking about it, whether America has the ability to be more numerically driven now that we lack an enemy that was notorious for being numerically driven. That we used to have to identify ourselves in an opposite way to that society: bureaucratic and numerical. But I think that also the rise of technologies and the ability to get numbers, legitimate ability to get numbers as well.

I guess I hear you as saying, that it’s hard to describe an alternative to what we have now because… well why? Why is it

hard to? You seem resigned to living within that.

SP: Resigned is probably not a word I would choose. Through things like art—and not just visual art, things like music, film, dance—we propose alternative symbol systems that help us cope with our experience. It’s certainly not the most scientific way, but I mentioned earlier that numbers are one of the surrogates for the religious instinct, you know, why should everything be scientific? Why should everything be subject to empirical validation? Quantification? Scientists themselves have a hard time with numbers, because they’re a human invention. So, like you said about numbers being a salve, when you get down to the nitty-gritty of what it is to rely on a number, I’d almost say that it’s more of a placebo than a salve.

NC: I wonder how effectively it’s working. I have the feeling that it may just exhaust itself. That’s the other possibility. Like any kind of system, it kind of exhausts itself because, in some ways, before this age of numbers we were living in the age of symbols, right? The deconstructionists were all about signifiers and it was all about image, and then it seems that that movement exhausted itself. There are other things that came along, but means of collecting data and everything that also helped that get a foothold, but I also think that at that time, the way that they were approaching it, that discussion about symbols had exhausted itself. We might be able at this point to return to that and draw fruit; that would be the hope.

SP: Something that I attempt with my work is by evoking things like antiquity—whether it’s the architecture of antiquity,

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characters from antiquity, the narratives of antiquity—these are stories that have been with us long enough that they’ve become part of who we are and how we experience and encounter our world. We might not be conscious of it at this particular event that’s happening in our life, we’re identifying it with the narrative from x, y, or z mythological or biblical story. So in that sense, these sorts of symbols become ways of quantifying in a quasi-numerical way. Ultimately they offer more freedom, because they’re flexible. They’re open to interpretation.

NC: Right, I think that’s right. And so that just goes along, there has to be a level of security to want that freedom, right?

SP: Yeah…

NC: For example, I feel like, I remember when Matthew Barney’s work was coming on the scene, or even at its height, people really struggled with not understanding why the drummer in Cremaster II was covered with bees. Or, you know, I was brought up in an age where it was ok not to understand art. That in fact, it was positive and not threatening. I do think that if you’ve been brought up in an age where knowing as soon as possible the answer, and having the means to it, it’s very threatening to have that freedom. Then you can be called out. If you can be called out about your misperception of a piece of work, you don’t feel the freedom to interpret.

Again, like that can come and go. That it kinda of swings back and forth. I kind of feel that the pendulum has probably peaked on numbers and hard data, because I do think that there’s a

level of fatigue out there. People have stopped trusting it.

There’s only so many times that you can tell somebody that it’s based on a study before they want to see this study.

I really appreciate the way that your work connects the longer history of art and perception and symbol and thought in western civilization. In the medieval age, for example, more and more we’re seeing it as a continuum. That really the break at the fall of Rome was a hundred or two-hundred years tops where society really collapsed, not even, maybe fifty years until it kind of starts putting itself back together. The myth of the Renaissance is that it comes, just pops out of nowhere. I appreciate that your work tracks down a lot of links to it.

A lot of art is informed by art history, but your stuff is also informed by history itself. You consciously go after that or is it just part of what your interests are, and your experiences?

SP: I would say that the work is more in dialog with history itself than with any specific art historical narrative. If anything, in terms of art history, it’s shaped by those things that recur throughout art history, that are more reflections of the fact it was made by a human than it is looking any specific or movement or era.

NC: Speaking of art history, but contemporary and current, can you tell me about a few artists who you feel like are in your peer group? Maybe what the connection is there?

SP: Sure. I think there are artists out there that are looking at

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art from a pan-historical outlook. Proudly being a part of their own era while embracing the imagery and techniques and ideas of previous eras and cultures. Layering it with the conceptual depth that can’t be extracted from the contemporary mindset.

A good example I think is, I really like Diana Al-Hadid’s work.

It brings together classicism with this sort of ingenuity of structure that goes into things like architecture and engineering, and harmonizes it with the creative, useless perspective of fine arts. David Altmejd is much more engaged with fantastical imagery, while acknowledging the legacy of human figuration. The use of the human as a device, not just as a representation.

NC: So where’s your inspirational well now? What is kind of popping your brain, are there either historical figures or periods that are kind of informing your work at this moment?

SP: I’m looking at how we have used different types of measurement to understand our human experience. That can range anywhere from numerical measurement to purely abstract concepts like perfection or harmony. I’m looking at how through these lenses, which ultimately place humanity back into this kind of Vitruvian-man, center-of-the-universe perspective. How our understandings, our anthropocentric leanings can ultimately result in environmental devastation, depletion of resources. Measurement is not just about the human—it’s not just about the foot—or the various different ways we’ve anthropocentricized measurement. Measurement is about remaining in harmony with the surrounding universe as our calibrator.

NC: It would be interesting to explore the Eastern angle on measurement too. Are you planning on doing that as well, or are you staying more with the Western canon?

SP: I’ve been looking mostly at the Western canon but it’s hard to extract Arabic influence from that. They were such mathematical innovators. I haven’t gone to the Far East yet.

NC: It’s interesting because you were talking about the Greeks and Vitruvian man and there was a level of rigidity back then too. The Greeks could get really quite rigid about their numbers, perfect proportions and all that.

SP: Well, so much of the Western mathematical canon is related to things like collecting taxes or making sure people aren’t getting cheated at the marketplace. It’s intimately, historically bound to power. So, the notions of things like infinity, which cannot be represented in any way, and is almost a kind of useless knowledge, presents a radically different model. I think it’s very interesting.

NC: I think it’s useless, practically in any kind of society, but extraordinary useful personally. Pretty much will clean your clock and ground you. It has the opposite effect. It’s very grounding. Acknowledging the insignificance of human endeavor, to a certain degree, really puts me back in the moment. I feel that’s kind of the Buddha’s aim—not that I’m a Buddhist, but that was the Buddha’s aim.

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