Atmosphere interviews Justin Novak

Welcome to Atmosphere, a conversational interview magazine featuring past and present ECU community members.

Justin Novak joined the faculty of the Emily Carr University of Art & Design as an Associate Professor of Visual Arts in the Fall of 2007, teaching in the areas of Ceramics and Illustration.

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A: How would you describe your practice?

JN: Well it is certainly in a state of flux right now. The only way I can describe my practice is that it has come full circle. I started off in graphic arts and illustration, but after a twelve-year career as a freelance illustrator, I moved into doing ceramic sculpture. My graduate degree focused on ceramics, as did my first full time teaching job, and clay had become the core of my practice, so my artistic identity was pretty tied to it. In the past three years I’ve gravitated back towards drawing and illustrative practices while, rather coincidentally, Emily Carr was looking to build up its illustration program. This synchronicity has rekindled my love of working in two dimensions …possibly moving toward four dimensions, as well, as I am excited about the potential of the bridge to animation.

A: So when I ask you about your practice, you are describing initially your material practice but it sounds like for you teaching is a substantial part of your practice as much as making?

JN: Certainly it is. I do clearly separate the goals of my teaching from those of my creative practice. But at this point of transition, the University’s increased investment in illustration is mirroring my own artistic aspirations. In each capacity, I’m scrutinizing pictorial practices, studying how they acquire meaning, and trying to develop a strong discourse around them. The parallel makes it impossible not to get caught up in a similar analysis.

A: So you are making 2D narrative work?

JN: Yeah, I am, but how related or disconnected that is from the ceramic practice changes day to day, probably minute to minute.

A: Is this transition exciting for you?

JN: It is. It’s a little disconcerting how much the broadening of my focus has slowed down my productivity in the short term, but it is exciting that the territory is new, and yet it is in many ways a return to my original calling.

A: Does that surprise you to find yourself in this circle you have described?

JN: Yes, I’m delightfully surprised that at middle age I can suddenly perceive a clear arc in the trajectory of my creative life.

A: I think the next question builds on this. What kinds of risks do you take in your creative practice?

JN: I am not sure I would necessarily frame it as risk just because it’s been some time since I’ve relied on the commercial viability of my work. I think what I am doing now would be hugely risky if I depended solely on the sale of my work. I stepped back from all of the gallery relationships and exhibition patterns that I had built up.

A: Are you happy to have stepped away from that?

JN: Yes I am. It was a much needed re-imagining of my practice. It has been important to me at some stages of my career to maintain continuity, in theme, form, or craft. And there are other times when it is important to move into uncharted territory.

A: Do you ask different questions working with illustration instead of ceramics?

JN: With ceramics there is little opportunity to go into an in depth narrative. Just because in the realm of objects there is a limitation with how far you can extend that narrative. I guess the question is how to best harness the unique potential of each art form.

A: By narrative do you mean storytelling?

JN: Yes. There is a lot of implied storytelling in the ceramics that I have done but that is a little different from working with the sequential form of a comic, a book, or a film.

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A: Are you interested in non- linear narratives?

JN: Well in a sense that is what I have been doing up until now. I have been working with the fragmentation of narrative as it might be expressed in a set of objects. Now I’m contemplating the context of popular culture, and different audiences, and delivery systems than the gallery or museum settings I’ve relied on.

A: So what are you working on now? And what is its form delivery and distribution?

JN: Well I think that the form delivery and distribution are all up in the air right now. It’s all going to settle out in the coming months, but I have been working on a set of allegories. The clearest reference for me is fables or parables that have a simple symbolic moral to them. Comics and animation are a logical starting point.

A: Are there animals in them?

JN: There are animals and there is at least one human character, Icarus Junior. He’s mythical, but I guess he fits into the humanoid category.

A: In light of what you are working on now what kind of impact would you like to have on others?

JN: It is hard to answer that without feeling presumptuous. I have a bit of skepticism and humility about presuming an impact as an artist. I suspect that one’s work has a relatively small chance of impacting people precisely as intended. But I certainly do feel there are some severe problems that we are facing as a culture that can be boiled down to a really simple set of choices or perspectives. And so I hope to offer something in the spirit of Aesop’s simple fables, prompting people to contemplate their own behavior, and the nature and effect of their impulses. Social behavior has changed a lot since Aesop, but there seem to be some central lessons that we still haven’t learned as a society. I’m hoping to update Aesop’s contemplation of human foibles as played out in the age of global impact.

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A: Does this mean that part of what you are communicating is that each of us has some sort of agency?

JN: Yeah, very much so… as played out through seemingly small choices.

A: Can you define your principles and how are they manifest in your work and daily life?

JN: I guess the one principle that is constant in my life is a commitment to inquiry, and I think it’s manifested in my work. Not that I ever sat down and made it a conscious decision about it, but I ended up devoting a large portion of my life’s energies to being an educator. Since inquiry is such a strong guiding principle within the university, it’s not surprising that it’s insinuated itself in other aspects of my life. My work, especially now, very mindfully poses questions.

A: I like the process of asking questions and being in a state of unknowing and confusion. All those things are valuable.

JN: Hopefully that comes across in the stories I am working on -and again I am just starting the process of into moving into more specific narrative work – My hope is that these narratives will be the kinds of allegories that pose fundamental questions about living in this world and how we to contribute to it.

A: Is this shift from ceramics to drawing and illustration informed by this desire to communicate these particular qualities?

JN: Yes, it is… in an elemental and mechanical way. There are some serious limitations to creating environments when you are working sculpturally. You can suggest narratives on a localized level. But if you have an allegory that you want to expand in time, and shift from one context to another, you are rather limited by the realm of objects.

A: What is the best thing anyone ever taught you?

JN: Well, I spent my adolescent years in Rome, and the city itself taught me a great deal. But I was fortunate to have two great high school professors, one that taught me art history and the other literature. It was a blessing to have two incredibly sharp minds to help dissect the impossibly rich layers of beauty and allegory and the cultural ferment that spawned them.

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A: So your consciousness popped at that time?

JN: My consciousness popped at that period of life when one’s consciousness typically does pop. But Rome is such a laboratory of living history, dense with examples of how ideologies, desires, power and beauty all intertwine. So it was perhaps more tripped-out (and more aesthetically intoxicating) than most pops. Baroque Italy is nearly hallucinogenic in feeling, composed of ideologies that were competing and hybridizing at the same time, in a way that defies any easy deconstruction.

As a young child, before my family moved to Rome, my principal influence was Marvel comics. I went from that to this landscape of Berninis, Michelangelos and Caravaggios. There are actually an awful lot of easy parallels I could draw between Bernini and Marvel comics. They are not so dissimilar, in their stylization, in their gestures, or in the sentiments that they evoke. They probably functioned in similar ways by communicating to a large audience using a strong sense of scale. …heroic figures getting caught up in epic ideological battles. Both delivered with elaborate, hypnotic rhetorical imagery and both dazzlingly well-crafted…You go to a church in Rome like San Luigi dei Francesi, which has the highest concentration of Caravaggio paintings, with the St Mathew series, it is rather like reading a comic across the church walls.

A: What three authors have most influenced your work?

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JN: Certainly Dante is up there, both literally and in a more evocative way. In the realm of criticism, there’s Dave Hickey. And I’d have to give another nod to Marvel comics… Jack Kirby and Stan Lee.

A: What are you reading now?

JN: Marvel comics keeps coming up. The author Jonathon Lethem recently completed a collaboration with illustrator Farel Dalrymple, a retelling of ‘Omega the Unknown’, which had a very short run of ten issues in 1976. As a kid, Lethem was a big fan of the original, so he approached Marvel comics and proposed the idea. The project is brilliant.

A: This question takes things in another direction. Where do you stand on environmental impacts?

JN: Well I think it is a big question that we haven’t really begun to address in a lot of material practices in the fine arts. I think it is a luxurious position. The whole world of design has had to reexamine everything it does along those terms because the culture is tied to mass production. The contemporary arts realm acts like it’s exempted from that issue because it doesn’t produce on the same scale. But it is something we need to address. It does impact a lot of the decisions I am making right now. I am considering narratives that can exist simply on the screen. If a story can be animated for the screen that don’t have to be printed and distributed as material objects. The content does touch on it but I am thinking a lot about delivery systems. It is something that I just am starting to wrap my head around. I have been somebody very attached to objects and books in the past, so as the world changes it’s a fascinating thing to examine. What sort of phase are we moving into and is culture going to based as much on production of physical, tangible things? How much do we need to root our culture in artifacts anymore?

A: I would agree. Ok what one question could I ask you that would unravel your work?

JN: “How does the medium relate to the content?” Right now I am developing iconic characters in various ways, and some iterations are awkward. In a sense, I’m surrendering to the trial-and-error nature of the artist/audience relationship. It’s a bit unusual that characters destined to inhabit a two dimensional universe are actually born in three dimensions as ceramics sculptures. There is a fitful disjointed process through which the work is taking form and finding an outlet… I think I myself have been purposefully unraveling the logic that my whole practice had been founded upon, so I guess the work is pretty vulnerable to questioning.

A: That is very exciting! Is it the idea of a disassembly or deconstruction?

JN: Yes, I was concentrating on ceramic figurines for quite a number of years, and thinking about that whole history, and the varied cultural implications of figurines. And I had gotten settled into viewing my own work in relation or opposition to the history of the medium. But a fascination with vinyl figures had developed, and that whole universe of collectibles that is connected to animation, and toys and graphic arts. Out of convenience, I started to translate that genre of form into ceramic materials, as I didn’t have the means to produce works in plastics. And then this very odd thing happened in that I found the objects intriguing precisely because porcelain was such an incongruous material for that formal vocabulary. The uncharacteristically fragile material lends the figures vulnerability and a bit of nostalgia. I guess what has been unraveled was the comfort I had with a reasoned subversion of the traditional figurine. Once my affinities started to coalesce more randomly and organically I had no choice but to yield to a more intuitive process.

Interview conducted by Randy Lee Cutler November 2009. Coming soon: Atmosphere interviews Liz Magor!

Posted in Interviews, Uncategorized.

Tagged with Justin Novak.

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By rcutler – November 21, 2009

Atmosphere interviews Randy Lee Cutler

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Welcome to Atmosphere, a conversational interview magazine featuring past and present ECU community members. Once interviewed, members are welcome to become contributing editors, who are invited to interview anyone of their choice. Interviews will appear every few weeks.

Randy Lee Cutler is Atmosphere’s inaugural guest. She is an educator, curator, writer, artist and performer, whose work is orientated toward social change. She has a PhD in Cultural History from the Royal College of Art, UK where she examined the subversion of the sciences in the surrealist enterprise. At present her practice explores alternative possibilities for being in and interpreting the world.

She has just returned to teaching from a yearlong sabbatical. Atmosphere interviewed her at Gene on Main Street in Vancouver, BC on September 23, 2009.

You’ve been on sabbatical for a year. Welcome back. What did you do and what was it like to be away for a year?

RLC: One of the feelings I had, especially near the end of the sabbatical, a month before I came back was a sense of deep appreciation. That I had the opportunity, and that the school supports this – I am so appreciative that I had the time to de-stress from the work cycle, and get more deeply into my own practice. I was so interwoven with the rhythms of the school that, in some ways, I’d lost a sense of myself. The sabbatical was a chance to become reacquainted with my emerging interests. Now as a result of that time, I feel refreshed, like I’m a different person; more mindful, attentive with the sense of a new beginning.

A: You wrote a book while you were away – was that your intention?

RLC: No. In my sabbatical application, I proposed two academic essays – one on decay and one on digestion – and a related video project. When I began writing in late September, I started to do academic research on digestion and visual culture, but it was not going anywhere interesting for me. As a way to keep going I started doing these small pieces of writing on digestion which I found really fruitful. One of the first things I realized was that digestion can be understood as a metaphor, so I started to research metaphor and produced some writing on it. I did about 3 of these short creative non-fiction pieces and realized that for this project I was more interested in the creative non-fiction form than in academic writing. Working in an art school, I don’t feel the pressure to produce exclusively academic writing for peer reviewed journals. I have the freedom to explore new ideas and new ways of expressing them, which for me was to find a voice outside academia. Emily Carr nurtured this sense of possibility by providing many opportunities such as creating new courses and teaching studio classes. I’d never properly written creative non-fiction, but at some point I realized that this is what I was doing, and what I wanted to do.

A: At what point did you think of it as a book?

RLC: I thought I might publish them as separate essays, though at that point I wasn’t really thinking outside the project. By November or December, I thought I had some really interesting content, and was writing on the natural environment, biological processes, art and film. I started to think about the structure; maybe what I had here was something substantial and not just discreet essays. At that point I went away for a month to Scottsdale where I didn’t do any writing, but I did a lot of thinking, reading and I watched a lot of films. Then when I returned – from January to April, I wrote at least 4 or 5 hours every day and started to see possibilities for structure. I had this idea for an abecedarius – an ABC – on the subject; it congealed into a project, but also allowed me to have an infinite number of beginnings or openings. Once I figured out that the structure was pliable, but also contained the project, I felt like I had a manuscript. That was about February.

A: Did you discover a new process?

RLC: In October I reconciled with the possibility that I might not produce anything, and that would be fine. I was feeling some of the pressure of a sabbatical, but I just made peace with it, and really started enjoying the writing at that point. I was finally getting out of my own way. The other thing was that just being able to get up, make my coffee and breakfast, go to the computer and write for hours was an incredible luxury that we don’t have in our regular work life. It would be impossible to recreate that without the sabbatical. …I’ve learned that a really good way to mark the end of the teaching year is by going away in May. I went to a retreat at Hollyhock and did a 5 day workshop on Writing & Meditation.

A: We have a responsibility to mark beginnings and endings consciously.

RLC: Absolutely. At this stage in our careers as high functioning individuals we sometimes take ourselves too seriously. But, ironically, we don’t always have a lot of opportunities to simply experiment and play.

A: Can you say more about this?

RLC: Well, when I started the sabbatical, my neck went out for 5 weeks – forget about ideas, experiment and play; I just had to deal with the pain and sense of bodily failure. In those 5 weeks I stared to develop a theory about what happened, which was that I had a lot of stress in my life and my body was producing an excess amount of cortisol. When the job stopped, I wasn’t producing the cortisol and was essentially going through withdrawal from my addiction to my own hormones. That was the start of the whole process – it made me become more embodied and think deeply about bodily processes. I thought about how we take in experiences and how our bodies react to them. In many ways, that was the beginning of the writing – a narrative of one’s own body experience and how it is informed by visual practice and readings on anthropology, biology, fiction, etc.

A: Your pain was a kind of path?

RLC: I got so interested in cortisol and hormones, the immune system and how the body takes in experience that the writing certainly came out of that condition.

A: What is your greatest personal concern for the 21st century?

RCL: I think I live too much in the future, preparing, anticipating, projecting, getting excited by future plans, projects and conversations, future dinner parties, engagements. By living that way I am missing out on so much experience and knowledge in the present moment. When I was at Hollyhock, I learned that when my mind wanders, it wanders into the future and for the first time I became aware how much I do that. Some people probably go into the past, but I go to the future. The point of the meditation work I did at Hollyhock was to experience the moment, not just in thought but also in the body. I feel that I miss out on so much because I’m often somewhere else in time. This may be why I like science fiction.

I also think that this personal observation sheds light on a lot of our problems; we’re so concerned with what has happened in the past, or what will happen in the future. Projecting who we want to come, or what we want to consume, for example. It is important to have aspirations and ambitions, but it seems to get in the way and a big component of not living in the present is consuming too many resources as a result.

A: Pragmatically, how would your life be different if you were living in the present?

RLC: I’d probably be moving more slowly and wouldn’t be rushing from one thing to the other. Wouldn’t feel compelled to schedule so many things in a day.

A: This seems to relate to the question of desire in our lives. Where does the desire to move quickly come from? Whose desire is our desire?

RLC: I spent an entire year learning to how to respond to my own desires, and now I’ve slipped my professional life over top of my desire; in many ways it’s eclipsed and occluded that already. Now my desire has become need; my need to prepare for class, need to prepare assignments, and go to a meeting. It’s amazing how quickly the more personal and profound explorations have quietly and slowly slipped away to be replaced with responsibilities of the job and a professional persona. But I am trying to hold onto the things I learned and experienced while away.

A: How do you describe your practice?

RLC: It concerns embodiment. I apply writing, performance and video to whatever subject I’m interested in or what I’m teaching, which often deals with the body; the body and technology, the body and gender, the body and health, or the environment. On another lever my practice manifests itself as just being in the world and the conversations I have and the food I make and share with people. I perform in my art and my teaching as a kind of behavior modeling; I’m trying to model a kind of mindfulness, care and generosity, even though I often fail at this. I try to use my time at school as a manifestation of my spiritual practice. On my sabbatical I discovered increasingly more relaxed states of being, and these states were extremely productive and generative for my practice. My practice is ephemeral; I don’t always or necessarily make things. I’m committed to interactions, not things.

A: How does your practice contribute to a better world? Or is that your interest?

RLC: Of course it is. There’s a sense of care with people and the air, water, other life forms. I’d like to think that all of my interactions leave some kind of positive residue or trace in some way. I think that maybe when we are stressed we lose our attention to the details that allows us to think through things properly.

A: Do you think the question of whether we make a contribution or not is a matter for historians?

RLC: I don’t know that we should necessarily aim to make a contribution, maybe we should aim to…what’s that phrase you hear about going into the wilderness…?

A: Don’t feed the bears?

RLC: …something like don’t leave your stuff behind; no, wait, …its take out what you bring in or something to that effect. On one level a contribution means leaving a mark, but on the other hand it may mean leaving only footprints, or traces of your presence. Whether or not this is a contribution, I don’t know. I mean, what’s a contribution? Do I want to make a contribution to culture, make some kind of a lasting mark on this planet. I struggle with the idea of contributing to the world. I’m so comfortable with having an ephemeral practice. You don’t need to leave hard and fast evidence or material. A positive presence is a contribution. Leaving space for people to have their experience is so important. There’s an idea in the Cabala – Jewish mysticism called zim zum which is about contraction. I have interpreted it to suggest that you can absent yourself so others can be present. The contribution is not adding necessarily, but creating space, it is a gesture that generates potential.

A: Doing what is indicated by the context? Like creating the armature in the system to support certain development?

RLC: By allowing the conversation to happen and see what it needs, rather than forcefully directing it. I’m coming to see my contribution is just seeing things emerge and then helping others realize their potential. Maybe it’s a product of getting older. And it’s not passive but a kind of active modeling communicated to colleagues, staff and students about expectations for dialogue and exchange. At some level this idea of emergence needs to be taken very seriously, even when it’s about experimentation and play.

A: Well, you were the first interview for Atmosphere. How did it go?

RLC: Great. This is an exciting project and opportunity for learning more about the people that contribute to the culture at ECU. In a way I think it may instigate even more conversations than we already have and provide a context for considering our related interests and perhaps spark future collaborations!

Visit Randy’s blog at: http://blogs.eciad.ca/rcutler/

Interview conducted by Duane Elverum, November 2009. Coming soon: Randy Cutler interviews Justin Novak.

Posted in Interviews, Uncategorized.