JULIA SCHER Julia Scher, Wonderland, 2018 | Page 51

57
TAPING THOUSANDS OF HOURS […]
M. DIETRICH
MD
One of your upcoming projects includes a performance as part
of Sunday Sessions at MoMA PS1 in February. Could you tell me
more about the performance that you are planning there?
JS
In collaboration with Topical Cream, I’m presenting a work
called Anti Bodies; I’m imagining Consent Clinic with people, some
architecture subplot, some curves, some consent annunciation.
To look and to voice through a topology and calligraphy of surveil-
lance production and submission. To consider the moment when
one submits. When do we submit to anything? When do we submit
to a protocol, a job, to be tightened up? If an alarm goes off, when
do you react?
MD
You once said what scares you most is that people constantly
mistake or misread fake as real and real as fake. Is your work still
concerned with that question, especially in relation to digital and
non-digital forms of representation? I remember talking to you
about Kim Kardashian’s book Selfish containing only selfies.
JS
Real and fake has such a great history with television. I hate to
call TV the bad guy—it’s not the only player. In the 1950s, when
they started making reality shows—shows with “real people”
weren’t “news.” We accept now that Kim Kardashian makes fake,
where before we would say, “Oh, she ’s faking it, she ’s not real.”
I don’t hear that same critique anymore. There is no such thing as,
“This is really fake.”
I think Kim Kardashian’s show is fighting surveillance with sur-
veillance. I also tried that. But fight mutates into compliance and
deep regard—and then maybe later, regret. And regret and rejec-
tion can take many forms. What’s powerful but uncanny in the case
of the Kardashians is pregnancy, since that’s also about duplica-
tion, variation, doubling. Something that surveillance does as well.
The question is also about how the idea of surveillance is hacked
and appropriated in the case of “Keeping up with the Kardashians.”
I think the devices that people really enjoy will be developed.
We will be getting to sit here, talking with Kim and the little ones.
Kanye will be playing music in the corner of this room. Films have
sought over time to garnish real life. But in the next generation
of image uptake, we no longer will sit and view a single-channel
event, where one thing happens, then the next and the next. Future
technologies have us immersed in the operating room, in the whole
place where you were born, wherever it was. More real than real, it
will be next real or whatever new word comes up.
MD
You started off as a painter—in fact, a landscape painter. Do you
still paint?
JS
Yes, I am a closet painter. I was interested in land art, light and
sun. What particularly interested me in painting was the notion of
light in fifteenth-century Dutch painting. That was also the same
time I got a video camera, and I asked myself how could I shoot
something that is inclusive of landscape. I also started taking selfies
at that time, and I wanted to combine that with landscape. In 1985,
I was still mainly making paintings. I worked on a landscape dip-
tych with a real camera mounted at the top. The painted image was
a large hypodermic needle between two legs. Behind it, a monitor
was installed. The title of the work was Hardly Feel It Going In.
Even back then it was about the question: How do we watch, and
who gets hurt?
Security Bed, 1994, installation view, New York, 1994. Courtesy: the artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin.
Photo: Joseph Cultice
Maurin Dietrich is an Assistant Curator at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin
where she programs performances, exhibitions, and publications. Besides studying
art history and comparative literature in Berlin she worked at schir concepts, locat-
ed in Tel Aviv and Berlin, Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin as well as the 9 th Berlin Biennale
by DIS Magazine. Recent independent projects include the exhibition To smile in
the cheese, to lie in the butter, curated in collaboration with Kate Brown with works
by Frances Stark, Josef Strau and Michaela Meise, among other artists. Besides
that she curated the solo exhibition with Heike-Karin Föll at Tonus, Paris together
with Cathrin Mayer and the solo exhibition of Oscar Enberg at Frankfurt am Main.
Julia Scher was born in Hollywood and grew up in the San Fernando Valley.
She received a 1975 BA in Painting/Sculpture/Graphic Arts from UCLA, and a 1984
MFA in Studio Arts, from the University of Minnesota. In the last thirty years, her
research has explored social control dynamics in the public sphere. The art proj-
ects have taken the form of interactive installations, reformulated surveillance, site
tours, interventions, performances, photography, writing, web work, linear video,
and sound. Scher’s work has been included in several exhibitions including the
Venice Biennale, the Whitney Biennial, the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus,
Ohio, the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota, Tapias Museum, Barcelona,
Museo Nacional, Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, the San Francisco Museum
of Modern Art, the Museé d’art Moderne, Paris, Künstlerhaus, Stuttgart, Kölnischer
Kunstverein, Cologne, and the ICA, London.
51