DIALOG BETWEEN BARI ZIPERSTEIN AND IRINA VALKOVA

BARI. How could two artists who live half way across the world, St. Petersburg and Los Angeles - one living under post-industrialization and the other post-communism, have an artistic practice which manifests with such similar aesthetic and conceptual concerns? Perhaps, it’s our consideration of the psychology of space/architecture in relationship to our locations, which have lead us both to transform our living spaces into quirky sculptural environments. Often by adding stark white site-specific sculptures that protrude from our apartments and documenting the process through photography.

IRINA. I have actually lived both in St. Petersburg and in Los Angeles, two years in each city. In both cities I felt a sort of estrangement from the architectural culture of residential buildings. In Los Angeles, there are many houses made of very lightweight materials, which are cheap and adjusted to the local natural conditions such as the high possibility of an earthquake or warm weather all year round. This type of architecture corresponds, in my opinion, both to the materials you have chosen for your project and to the project itself. What I found absolutely astonishing in Saint-Petersburg was walls, floors and the plumbing system which were just painted over so many times instead of being redone that they almost got a new shape - more rounded and at the same time kind of ‘formless’.

BARI. In order for a real-estate investment to pay off, decisions must be cost affective, practical, and idiosyncratic when remodeling a flat for a new tenant. Recently, fabricated Styrofoam molding was attached with glue to window ledges of my apartment complex. The economy of materials makes sense for Los Angeles. In both of our projects, decisions about building materials becomes crucial to the authenticity of the photograph. An aesthetic of seamlessness, cleanliness, and whiteness becomes normalized by the sculptures integration into its environment through photography.

I am curious how you think about your more organic shapes, do you think of them as parasites? Perhaps making a psychological or architectural problem more visible?

IRINA. Both in your work and mine I find crucial the idea of continuation and growth.
Personally, I was thinking about the abnormal growth. The architectural problem is expressed through the reference to a sickness, morbidity. This sickness could entail parasitism (as cancer does).

BARI. Similar to your work, my stark white architectural beams, made of foam core and plaster, mutate out of functional and decorative objects, rendering an environment that is overgrown, monumental, illusionary and artificial. I conceptually distinguish between which sculptures are props for the photographs and which sculptures are on display in the gallery, ultimately adding to the set quality of the final images. When simultaneously exhibiting both sculpture and photography, there is never a one to one ratio between either. If a sculpture makes an appearance in a photograph it acts as a mere prop and is discarded upon the completion of the shoot.

Do you display the objects that appear in your photographs? For the installation, you did have both the photograph and the displaced white sculpture displayed in relation to one another. At the time, I recall you asking whether it was necessary to actually display the sculpture, which had a discrepancy to the slick photograph. In person, the sculpture was cracking and the color was aging. Have you come to any conclusion?

IRINA. At first, the photograph was taken as a documentation to my work. The actual context in which this particular piece was made was crucial: the sculpture is not simply adjusted to the particular wall, it is cast into it, so that the sculpture ideally coincides with the wall, floor and furniture. It is literally a part of the actual domestic setting, but at the same time it can be separated. So it’s pretty obvious: if the sculpture suits one wall or environment, it won’t suit another. It will look foreign and sort of restless, which is a conscious strategy. In other words, I see these sculptures as two Russian ‘travelers’ who come to Helsinki from Saint Petersburg (the first mounting of the show) and appear to feel a bit awkward in a totally different context, whereas at home one can hardly discern them among other objects. In fact, I recall locals coming to our flat and not noticing the sculpture.

BARI. I am interested in site-specificity that takes the ‘site’ as an actual location, its identity composed of a unique combination of constitutive physical elements. From this perspective, are the interior spaces in your photographs of your flat in Russia? If so, can you talk about your interest in site-specificity and how your work functions within the architecture of post-communism?

IRINA. I lived in this flat one year and a half when I studied at Smolny College in Saint Petersburg. It is actually older than one might think: this 1920s house was built in the architectural style of Russian constructivism and since then there hadn’t been any considerable renovations. Soviet residential architecture of this kind is generally much more decent - in terms of quality, layout and space - than the post-soviet one. Being in a pretty poor condition, my flat still presented an interesting example of soviet petit - bourgouis style. Since it was too pessimistic either to compare my flat to modern living standards, say, in Europe, or see it as an anachronistic layer of Russian history, I have chosen another option. I dealt with the flat as if it were an abstract environment, functionless and purely esthetical, as a variety of shapes and patterns. This was one of those rare situations, when my artistic activity sort of paid off. Not that brown water in the bathroom and broken toilet-bowl were consigned to oblivion, but I found in this flat at least something that had to to do with my everyday thoughts. The position of observator inspired me to take advantage of this environment. I intentionally involved only an abstract aesthetic image of objects and surfaces, without focusing on any other kind of possible interpretations.
Can you tell me about the space you use in your project? Is it your apartment or someone else’s?

BARI. For the past two years, I have been creating a series of collages that deconstruct idealized domestic scenes culled from home décor magazines such as Better Homes & Gardens and Architectural Digest. These works on paper function as studies for sculptural interventions on a grand scale. I realized the collages in three-dimensions and lived among them in an actual domestic setting: my Los Angeles 1920’s Spanish style apartment. The series of photographs produced from this process replicate the quality of a high-end magazine spread because the work is a comment on the utopian lifestyles proffered by home décor magazines. The photographs illustrate decoration consumed by architectural outgrowths—an interior design gone very much awry.

My interest in the investigation of site-specificity lead me to live within this environment for three months while completing this ambitious project often having to physically negotiate the space in odd and precarious ways. Overtime, I placed full coffee cups, incoming mail, and my purse on top of the sculptures resulting in the environment digesting the sculptures.

IRINA. I see your objects as a very bold simplification of the already simple architectural structures. To me, it makes evident the idea of ungrounded simplicity. It seems to me that both you and I depart from problematic environments. If this is so, what’s the ‘problem’ of your space?

BARI. My artistic practice is engaged with the architectural history of Los Angeles and can be read as an investigation of how urban landscapes are defined by consumerism. My work has often related to ideologies centered on mid 20th century American capitalism and consumer excess. The sculptures are interruptive to the living space or plethora of proffered images of sterilized homes, which give themselves up to its environmental context, being formally determined and directed by it.

My work posses an undercurrent of economy, a trait one could trace back to Minimalism, Mondrian’s spartanity, Malevich’s suprematism, Tatlin’s constructivism or even Modernism in general. The minimal and post-minimal artists self-reflexive practice incorporated issues concerning the economics/fabrication of materials, phenomenology, and architectural site specificity. My work has developed out of this aesthetic shift, which enabled me to investigate the epistemology of sculptural production, process, and practice. In the essay, Michael Asher and the Conclusion of Modernist Sculpture, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh outlines three concepts, which are crucial to the transgression of modernist sculpture: “the notion of specificity, the notion of place, and that of presence.”

Americans are fed utopian lifestyle imagery from upscale shelter magazines, which are a necessary cultural production to maintain the capitalist society. Hoping we will always want more and never be satisfied. An exhibition of mine in Los Angeles was titled (This Isn’t Happening) Popular Hallucinations for your Home, which is a manifestation of hallucination as if America ran out of space to build and consume. Resulting in architecture literally started to sprout or grow out of our own mass-produced objects. You can’t plant architecture like a seed and watch it grow but I’m interested in infusing sculpture or architecture with a mechanics of growth or parasite qualities. What results is a photographic image or sculpture that is a manifestation of these surreal and uncanny theories.

IRINA. Some of your constructions imitate everyday objects while other appear to build upon the existing ones. Do you consciously differentiate between these two approaches?

BARI. In terms of the sculptures imitating the object in which it’s actually consuming, that’s an interesting observation. Yes, some of the sculptural constructions are extensions of the decorative object and others pierce the object by passing through it. These are engineering and formal choices, which were negotiated by producing schematic drawings for every decorative object. Meticulous measurements and formal choices were made as to how the plastered foam core objects would mutate out of a single object.

The schematics served as the architectural plans for the project. Often, I refined the schematics once the sculptures were produced in anticipation of the final composition of the photograph. Working from room-to-room, my process had a built in failure in which the schematics failed to produce the geometric object or composition I envisioned on paper. The objects would fall, were too tall or short, or not fit into or underneath the domestic object it was measured for. The pleasure of the project was produced from the mathematical and formal negotiations to produce these precarious sculptures.

What directions are you taking the previous body of work? Any plans to infiltrate more post-communist spaces?

IRINA. The terms ‘post-communist’ or ‘communist’ don’t make much sense to me. I see them more like labels that can hardly be used for describing situation in Russia of the 20s century. Being a part of this historical period, I cannot completely abstract myself from it. Speaking about my recent work, I try to interpret everyday objects, emotions that become so habitual, that we don’t really notice them. Aesthetics can neutralize objects in terms of ideology - not by making them ‘beautiful’, but by creating a new esthetic code that would convey non-ideological information.

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BARI. How are two artists who live half way across the world, St. Petersburg and Los Angeles - one living under post-industrialization and the other post-communism, have an artistic practice which manifests with such similar aesthetic and conceptual concerns? Perhaps, it’s our consideration of the psychology of space/architecture in relationship to our locations, which have lead us both to transform our living spaces into quirky sculptural environments. Often by adding stark white site-specific sculptures that protrude from our apartments and documenting the process through photography.

IRINA. I have actually lived both in St. Petersburg and in Los Angeles, two years in each city. In both cities I felt a sort of estrangement from the architectural culture of residential buildings. In Los Angeles, there are many houses made of very lightweight materials, which are cheap and adjusted to the local natural conditions such as the high possibility of an earthquake or warm weather all year round. This type of architecture corresponds, in my opinion, both to the materials you have chosen for your project and to the project itself. What I found absolutely astonishing in Saint-Petersburg was walls, floors and the plumbing system which were just painted over so many times instead of being redone that they almost got a new shape - more rounded and at the same time kind of ‘formless’.

DIALOG BETWEEN BARI ZIPERSTEIN AND IRINA VALKOVA

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DIALOG BETWEEN BARI ZIPERSTEIN AND IRINA VALKOVA