WBURG spent an evening in the sculptor Gae Savannah’s studio last year. A beautifully organized stockroom of plastic beads, hairclips, exotic fabrics and other unknown, brightly colored objects, her workspace is a dreamworld for browsing, touching and fabricating her eccentric constructions and installations. Savannah’s inquiry, however, rests on much more than bric-a-brac and silk.—Ed.
WBURG: So you were telling me about this one—
GS: Yes, Little Igloo has become this tall crazy tower thing. It’s still in sketch phase, but I’m trying to leave loose areas in my sculptures all the way through the process now.
WBURG: Is that a way for you to try less hard?
GS: Yes ironically, ‘cause at the core, the whole ethos of these pieces comes out of trying too hard. It relates to the Narrator in Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground, who’s just so overwrought and wretched. He wants so much to go to this disdainful socialite’s party. He hounds the guy until he reluctantly invites him. But then the Narrator demeans himself even further by turning up two hours early to the party.
Trying too hard is the putting on too much make-up, the screwing around with the dress and missing the party. In the British TV series Keeping Up Appearances, Hyacinth epitomizes this mode in her insane, conniving antics that always fail. That’s the whole sort of myopic ‘anti-methodology’ here…
‘Shopping-mind’ is another main underpinning… I’m basically making sculpture from a girl vantage point—it’s girl sculpture.
I was educated in shopping and consumerism since the day I was born – Christmases for example, were mountain ranges of gifts. Shopping makes me happy —it’s my girl hunting. The idea is to dive into the cliché, and dive into the stuff, and see if there is something to be made from it…
WBURG: So you feel really connected to everything that’s in here?
GS: Yeah. But there’s also a lot of Asia in here… well, eclectic orientalist pastiche. For instance, this is an Asian altar thing that I got and nobody really knows where it’s from. Got it in a Chinese store, but I think it might be Japanese. And then these are sort of little plastic gazebo frames for wedding cakes.
WBURG: I can see—the sheer quantity of materials, and the eccentricity of the objects—
GS: Yes, most people aren’t going to find these materials. I can tell you all the Asian furniture stores, and I know all of the Chinese furniture dealers, Indian fabric storeowners, Korean accessory wholesalers...
WBURG: So you have to travel all over the City. You must go to Queens a lot.
GS: Yes. And also when I go to other countries, I buy things like crazy, in effect attempting to absorb the foreign culture through its wares.
When I was in Morocco there was so much new, crazy stuff in the bazaars in Marrakesh that I couldn’t aesthetically take it all in. Especially, I just couldn’t wrap my head around the myriad, multi-faceted colored glass lanterns that hung from ceilings in shops and restaurants. I was completely beguiled. —Could not make out which lamp was more beautiful than the others. I had met my match! Hence, I was so pleased to find this Moroccan lamp in a New York cut-rate store a few years later when, without 20 other variations around it, I could understand it.
WBURG: Is this a Moroccan lamp made in Morocco?
GS: No, it’s a Moroccan lamp made in China. (laughs)
WBURG: Oh, I see.
GS: It’s very gorgeous etched stained glass with purple, blue, magenta and orange panels and it was cheap.
WBURG: So are you thinking about who makes these things, too?
GS: Of course.
WBURG: Have you seen these little beaded purses that are sold out on the street?
GS: I’m pretty sure they’re done by hand. By women in the mountains who get paid 35 cents a day or something. Traditionally, craftwork such as beading is a ritualistic process where there is meaning in the doing. For instance fringe, which to Westerners signifies something frivolous or extraneous, signifies rain for Native Americans. But in the capitalist paradigm, the craftsperson is the fool due to his not finding a way to produce products more efficiently.
WBURG: But aren’t you buying into that by purchasing those products?
GS: Yes, I’m saying that I’m complicit. I’m in suburban-capitalist girl oblivion. I want to shed light on the hubris of most upper crust Americans—how we take everything for granted and are careless, like Daisy in The Great Gatsby, in our actions towards the greater swell of humanity.
What I basically want to comment on is the slipperiness of values. In making art out of “inconsequential” footstools, benches and hair accessories—quintessentially superficial, skin-deep extraneous, amenities—I want to divulge the paradox inherent in our value structures.
Starting with a female outlook at the culture, I’m already coming from a devalued position. So that has made me question all the values. And things that seem really superficial can actually be the most profound, and things that are the “most profound” may actually be the most superficial. For instance, plastic accessories can tell the weighty story of global capitalism.
WBURG: So you are interested in paradox and playing with that? There’s a sense of play—
GS: Yes. Absolutely. I just recently realized that I’m toying with the Fool archetype, and fools always clown around, lost in folly… I want to avoid all of this highbrow, pretentious preciousness and conversely, hope the pieces turn out funny, sheepish, or somehow exuding an idiosyncratic character.
WBURG: But your work is precious—
GS: Well, precious is a very tricky word. My work is precious in a folk-art, outsider, trying too hard way. It’s obsessive-compulsive to a degree. What I don’t want to make are masterpieces in museums… I just want it to be very sensory and tactile.
Everything I’m doing is the un-coolest stuff in relation to what is considered prestigious, high contemporary art. The current über popularity of Andy Warhol with his deadpan works and intentionally non-committal, flat facial expression epitomizes the sort of blankness required for most art world sanctioned artwork now.
So I do feel that I’m playing out the Fool archetype by dealing with material that is not acceptably derivative and sardonic but instead physical, visceral, emotional. You know, these are three taboos that most facile, or cerebral, contemporary art won’t touch. We are in high Post-Modernism, and it’s all mannerist, skateboard chic or one-liner—it’s that slick surface. So, I just want to be flagrantly un-cool in this cynical environment.
WBURG: And your work is “hot”, because it’s physical?
GS: Hot?
WBURG: —Because your work is coming from a response that you are having that’s authentic—
GS: Right—it’s almost shameless. In a way, it’s why I love Dostoevsky, because his characters are shameless. Like dogs, they really don’t have dignity. Dignity is good, but over-the-topness, being in the murky subconscious – … yeah, it is more authentic, it’s more real, it’s turbulent…
WBURG: I guess that’s what I mean by hot: it’s not objective, it’s not even a stance, in a way.
GS: Yes, it’s not even a stance. In Brothers Karamozov, the father is a buffoon. He knows he’s a fool, but he simply cannot resist stirring things up. He just can’t have things going according to protocol—because it’s too boring (laughs).
I just want to look through the female glasses and see what’s there in all this frothy, glittery, shiny stuff—in all this surface decoration. But then on principle I avoid the safe, tidy shores of clarity, preferring instead to vacillate—or just drift in the muddled waters of emotional distortion.
Related links:
www.gaesavannah.blogspot.com
Gae Savannah is a sculptor/writer based in New York City. Her artwork and writing have recently been published in Daily Constitutional, Sculpture, Flash Art, NY Arts, dART International, and Animal magazines. Exhibitions include scopeNY, Miami, London (with curcio projects), Hunterdon Museum (NJ), Mattatuck Museum (CT), Swope Museum (IN), Exit Art, Dam, Stuhltrager Gallery, Cynthia Broan Gallery, and Chelsea Museum (Dangerous Beauty, January-April, 2007.)
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Lei-Tsu, 2003
Hair accessories, Christmas ornaments, beads, feathers, wire, wood
22 x 9创
Oblivion, 2004
Mixed media
186 x 102 x 45创
Laika, 2006
Hair accessories, beads, and mixed media.
21 x 16 x 9创
Kisu, 2006
Jawclips, beads, Chinese footstool
9 x 12 x 5创
Meung Shei (detail), 2003
Mixed media with pool and fountain
117 x 100 x 90创
Gala, 2003
Hair accessories and mixed media
19 x 13创
Fatty, 2004
Hair accessories, trimming, beads, wood
16 x 11创
Tahla 2004
Fabric, Christmas ornaments, aluminum, wood, bamboo
95 x 32 ½ x 29创
Khaya, 2004
Aluminum, wood, hair accessories, fabric, beads
14 ½ x 14 x 14创
Patisserie, 2002
Clockwise from top: Sally, Madagascar, Melusine,
Madrigal, Contessa, Arabella, Dolores (7 of 20)
Mixed media
approx. 13 x 12创 each
Drawn Domestique I, 1999
Pastel, ink, paper, cards, pictures
100 x 175创 (dim. variable)
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