Emily Artinian

born 1970, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, lives and works in

London and New York

www.emilyartinian.com

Christopher Atamian: What is the title of your piece at the Venice Biennale? 

Emily Artinian: It’s called Dead Dad / Emily Next Time. 

CA: Can you describe the piece and anything you find relevant? 

EA: Dead Dad (do the right thing) is an artist’s book made of 8 digital Lamda C-prints, 600mm x 400mm, on aluminium mounts. Here is the catalogue description, for better or worse: “Emily Artinian recently became executor for and one of the heirs of her deceased father’s estate. If inheritance can be reduced to precisely described objects (as legal and economic structures tend to emphasize), one could say that this consists of real estate and property investment companies. In her new compound role as artist and executor/property owner, Emily considers the more opaque aspects of inheritance. Having lived far from the estate’s location in Pennsylvania since she was an adolescent, she investigates her own relationship to this land and people. She takes the name Poppy Engels, a heteronym encoding her uncertainty about her father’s drive for extensive property ownership, something she often questioned him about in his lifetime. One strong sense – speculative, but insistent – is that this obsession was not unconnected to his own parents’ loss of home and homeland, when they were displaced to the United States as refugees. Dead Dad presents portraits of this property in a series of photographs. An accompanying artists’ book reprises and re-sites the photographs and, incorporating discussions Emily and her father shared before he died, adding textual meditations on the intricate legacy of inheritance and the complex emotions and responsibilities embedded in ancestral history. Addendum – some recent thoughts Having sat with the work for a few months now, I realize that making it was as much about mourning as about the ethics of ownership and issues surrounding inheritance. The book partly skirts the issue of sadness and loss by focusing on my father’s professional life, rather than concentrating on the more private person I knew. I realized this while I was making the piece, but in the catalogue description this aspect of it is not emphasized. I’m perhaps just getting ready to be able to articulate it – but not quite yet. Maybe answering your questions is helping. Another focus of the book is topical - the current world economy, and this is another way of turning inward sadness outside, of perhaps controlling it. A note on the title: ‘Dead Dad’ is something I swiped from Ron Mueck, whose sculpture Dead Dad is mentioned in the book: it stopped me dead in my tracks when I first saw it five or six years ago. 

CA: How does it fit in with your previous work? 

EA: In format and aesthetic, it’s similar: the book is built around my own photography and my own text, as are my previous works “From Ararat to Angeltown” and “Real Fiction.” The writing is similar too, using a form of poetic criticism or critical poetics...a hybrid of analytical and expressionistic prose. I first studied Russian Literature and then came to art later, in my 20s…Thus the aspect of critical writing in my work. The photographs that accompany the book continue a format that I’ve used all along: that of “dual-work” to steal a term one of my colleagues. Artists’ books generally get short shrift in exhibitions for many reasons connected to audience expectations of a book—a main one being the time that it takes to engage with one, and the more private nature of reading. Thus in my artistic process, though the book usually comes first and occupies most of my time and sweat and tears, there is always an accompanying piece or pieces—a ‘fast’ way in, a “gallery” way in. For my book “Real Fiction,” about Portuguese writer Jose Saramago, the exhibition included an installation of a small library, with chairs for the viewer/reader, all of Saramago’s books, and also a lenticular portrait/drawing I did of him in which his eyes followed the viewer around the room. The subject matter in Venice is a complete shift from the Tallinn exhibit (ThisPLACEd). Most of my previous works addressed fiction, especially the reading and interpretation of it. The new work is both more political and more personal. This is because of the shift that’s happened in my life since my dad died. The businesses and property he left are a full-time job to manage, and so overnight I went from being an artist and teacher to being in business, and definitely not by choice. Overlapping art and estate execution is a way of keeping all the juggling balls up in the air. It’s also a way of confronting both the frustration and the sadness of being in this situation. 

CA: How does it fit in with the themes of the Krossings Pavilion that you participate in? 

EA: I am not sure it does. Of course, one can always find/force connections, but I would prefer not to. The Krossings platform seems clichéd. It feels very 90s ‘multicultural’ this and that. Or eighties “transnational” this and that. But that is partly the shoehorn of the Venice program at work. And maybe I’m wrong. I need to re-read the bumpf on it, and I expect when we get there that there will be work in it and artists I find engaging, and others that I do not. This is how I feel about Altermodern, on now at the Tate. And about
Nicolas Bourriard’s Relational Aesthetics too. Though I think the Altermodern articulates globalism in art in a way that isn’t so cheerleadery. Which I like. 

CA: How and when did you become part of Under_Construction? 

EA: I joined the group sometime in 2005, I think...About two months after the visual dialogue started up on the website. I think someone dropped out and Silvina went looking for others to take that person’s place. 

CA: Where did you grow up and where do you live now?

EA: I was born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania during a blizzard, grew up in the tiny and gossipy village of Christiana, Pennsylvania and then moved to the slightly bigger and surreal sticks of Indio, in the California Mojave desert for high school. I currently live in New York and London. 

CA: Please comment on how you see the Diaspora-Armenia relationship? 

EA: I am not particularly interested in the relationship. Maybe because I am only half Armenian? Maybe because I am tired of cultural ghettoization? With specific reference to art, I’m even less interested. When I joined Under_Construction, the program was presented as an exploratory one. I thought the question we were feeling our way around was – “do we have things in common, and are we going to ‘fit’ together because we have Armenian backgrounds? OR NOT?” The openness, the possibility of a NO answer was the pull for me and that and the work/ideas of the artists involved were what made me decide to join. My answer, which evolved over the course of the visual dialogues, is that our “glue” is more the result of all being artists working in what is pretty much the same format worldwide in contemporary art these days. I did participate in the NPAK residency for two months in Armenia. Having studied Russian literature and having lived in Leningrad in 1991 the Russian and Soviet aspects of Armenian culture and art (particularly literature) were as engaging as the Armenian ones. Perhaps this has a lot to do with the fact I don’t speak Armenian? One day while I was in Yerevan, I was meeting with Bnagir, the writers’ group my book is about. I had spent at least ten hours with them in their weekly meetings and it came up that I was Armenian. A bunch of them hadn’t realized it at all. In fact, one guy refused to believe me. 

CA: How healthy is the art world in Armenia and the diaspora and what can be done to ameliorate things (education, museums, visibility, curatorial training etc?”)

EA: Why do we need any amelioration? Do we need an ROA art category? Maybe. Do we need an Armenian diaspora arts category? I am not sure. In the case of Under_Construction I think it was a good reason for us to come together: working with Achot, Archi and Silvina has been rich and rewarding. Some of the others who aren’t participating I’m still in touch with. But I feel like “Armenianness” is important only in that it brought us together. After that other commonalities have acted as the glue for me. I think Silvina will probably feel differently. I’m not sure Achot and Archi would. This question started to come up in one of the Q&A sessions with the public in Tallinn. I’m interested in discussing this some more in Venice. 

CA: Why hasn’t there been a “great” Armenian artist since Gorky? 

EA: Why do we need one? And what’s “great”? Anyway, there’s always (Larry) Gagosian. There’s less and less difference these days between artists (well-trained self promoters) and gallerists. Sometimes the gallerists are less self-promotional. Call Gagosian our great artist if you need one. 

CA: Emily, talk would you please talk about the piece you had in ThisPLACEd? About inheritance, paternal issues etc… 

EA: As I said above, this is really difficult. My father and I had both a confrontational and loving relationship. This has plenty to do with a very typical generational clash, maybe a very specific American one. I may be more ready to discuss this in person on Sunday. Beyond that, I’m not sure I can say right now. 

CA: Why the name Poppy Engels? 

EA: Pseudonyms, heteronyms, avatars seem to come naturally these days. I’m Emilia Romagna sometimes too. But that’s another story. Poppy Engels refers to both my own individual situation, and the potential re-casting of and re-conceptualization of capitalism and socialism that is happening around the world at the moment. 

CA: Emily, I know you for better or worse as a “book artist.” You made abook, I believe, to accompany your photographs in ThisPLACEd? Can you explain what “book art” is and talk to me/us about one or two projects that you like particularly or that you find interesting? 

EA: I recently wrote an article and have given talks on the definition of Artists Books on Wikipedia. I’ve made lots of the contributions to that entry, and I’ve encouraged people to add to it, and very much like the shape it’s taken recently (it was previously very limited). So in a way, if you read that, you’ll get something close to my take on artists books. Note that I don’t call it “book art.” This is more widely used in the US than abroad – it tends to refer to more craft-based work. This is oversimplifying things, but you can say there are two streams feeding the river of the field – (1) the practice of documentation and the use of text as a visual medium that grew out of 60s conceptualism, and (2) fine binding, livres de luxe. When an artist brings the two together, you’ve got a bad ass artists’ 67856 book.