Ephemeral Permanence - Michael Stipe
Sonic landscapes, the cockroach of sculptures, and stepping into the 21st century.
The polymathic Michael Stipe is a singer-songwriter, film producer (Being John Malkovich, Velvet Goldmine) and a visual artist. On March 8, his band R.E.M. releases its fifteenth studio album, Collapse into Now, with guest stars including Patti Smith and Peaches.
When you are working on music how is image part of the writing process, because I feel that it is something that is not recognized in your work. Because you are defined so clearly as a musician, the visual component is never looked at with equal criticism. Does that visual component happen before you write the music, while you write, after?
My main contribution, outside of my voice, which just comes out of my mouth, is the lyric, and when I listen to music, and particularly R.E.M. music in its genesis state, I see landscapes and I see images and my job is to try to capture that in a lyric that will translate for someone who is not me.
So you get instrumentals and you see images?
The lyric comes from somewhere very visual, so the visual aspect of everything for me is almost paramount to the music. Before music I took photographs, I’ve always been very visually oriented. Music is just an unbelievably profound medium through which to express different emotions, and the pop song is such a beautifully intact, limited form that is really fun to fuck with.
Do you ever feel like the image works against the lyric or the sound?
Yes. And sometimes that is great and often it just kind of steals the listener’s dream or replaces what they might envision – it is replacing their sonic landscape, their visual sonic landscape, with mine.
When did you start making objects?
I’ve done it for a long time. If you look on the third R.E.M. album cover (Fables of the Reconstruction, 1985) I had this idea for this thing that is like a pendulum —So I created this thing and photographed it and that became the record cover. Then I opened a book and set it on fire and that became the other side of the record cover. So I’ve been doing this kind of thing off and on for some time. I realized early on, probably when I was about twenty, that I was a terrible painter. I don’t like my handwriting. I don’t trust my own line, so I am a really bad drawer, I am a terrible painter. I’m really an art school fuck-up. I didn’t graduate – I went to art school because it was where all the hot guys and hot girls hung out and you could get espresso and quote Kerouac and talk about the Gang of Four and it provided me with this community within which I felt very comfortable and very safe. I started seriously making things about four years ago and it kind of landed on me very unexpectedly. The bronze cameras are the ones that people seem to know or recognize the most, but I’m doing this other series of books and my favorite edition ever of the New York Times.
And the fruit and vegetable stand, is it an exact replica?
Yes, it is an exact replica with one exception of a vegetable stand in Chinatown, New York. So there are these exact replicas that I’m doing of these objects that have either immense meaning to me or that I feel have been incredibly overlooked as these beautiful structural components to our everyday and they deserve recognition.
What did you start making four years ago?
The bronze cameras. If anyone is even lightly familiar with R.E.M. and the stuff I sing about, I’m constantly wrestling with sentimentality and nostalgia, memory. Reality versus some dream reality, and that’s something that I think plays into these objects, particularly with the cameras, which become fetishized themselves. They aren’t actually anything except the thing that provides us with memory or with something through which to be nostalgic or sentimental, which is the photograph.
Why bronze?
I like the idea of an object that we fetishize and have this desire to keep, because it is something that provided us with joy or memory, with memories. But it is very impermanent, and bronze to me feels very permanent. Bronze to me — if the city of New York was destroyed by whatever futuristic force, bronze might be left. So these objects are my cockroach of sculpture. I wanted something ephemeral that felt very permanent.
I like that the things you choose are obsolete or about to become obsolete – mini-cassettes, Polaroid cameras. Permanence and obsolescence.
A lot of that is about our fetishizing these objects. We are completely freaked out that they are gone. Right now everyone’s like, “Hang on a second! I like the Kindle, but I don’t want books and magazines and newspapers to go away.” We have attachments to these things and we are progressing so profoundly into this century already. The idea that you can’t instantly see an image on the back of a device when you take a picture to a five year old is ridiculous already. So what’s it going to be like in fifteen years time? Change is the one thing we have absolutely no control over and yet we are absolutely terrified of it. Everyone is. And we spend most of our lives trying to be okay with change and it is human nature that we are kicking against it and it is utterly necessary of course.
What are the sculptures you’ve done?
Right now I’ve been working on birch plywood panels. Around the 100th anniversary of the birth of Jean Genet I was exploring queer identity, historic queer identity, and what that has come to mean in the year 2010.
It’s interesting that you use the word “queer.” I mean, that’s a choice. Why do you choose that word?
For me the word queer is just all-embracing and more of a universal term and one that doesn’t try to subdivide or work within this binary idea of sexuality. Instead it just says, “Look we are all on some level this and let’s embrace that.” Let’s embrace our queerness – not an outsider status, let’s embrace what makes us different and make it something to be envied.
And it sounds fresh.
It feels very now.
You’ve always had such an idiosyncratic sense of taste, where, how, when did that start? You would buy socks from the Potter’s House [a thrift store in Athens, GA] and turn them inside out. You would collect vintage TV carts. You kind of get on this thing about objects that are mundane and you fetishize them and celebrate them.
And elevate them. It is elevating the mundane. I’m discovering in myself that a lot of the work that I do in these other mediums that I am exploring be it wood, paper, appropriation or replicas of everyday objects – I find that a lot of the places that I go to with this stuff is what I call “ether work” which is that it’s not expressly unique to Michael Stipe, it is stuff that is in the ether and it drops down on a lot of people at one time. Going back, my comment about books and magazines and newspapers and where they are going – where they are really going versus our idea of where they are going is something very profound and it is something that is very right now.
Name ten artists you find exciting right now.
There’s a show up at KW in Berlin by an artist named Absalon that I think is brilliant, he’s now dead. What he does with space, whether it is a film or video piece or an actual space is so beyond much of anything that I have seen before. Dean Sameshima. Tauba Auerbach. Wade Guyton. Wolfgang Tillmans. Ninja – Die Antwoord, unbelievable and super amazing live. They are all over it. Rob Pruitt is taking things to whole other levels. James Franco is taking things to whole other levels. Douglas Coupland, who I think is one of the great-unsung plastic artists of our time.
What about these? (Points to shoes on shelf.) This is important.
That’s very important. The story is a little bit too sad to tell right now, but it is the shoe from the last Alexander McQueen collection before his death and when I saw them I really felt like single-handedly fashion and art and culture had stepped into the 21st century in a way that was undeniable. It was a ground zero kind of moment seeing a model walk in these shoes for the first time.
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