Interview with Oguri

What’s your mission, or hope, as an artist?
Dance. Basically I feel inspired to dance. I began dancing with Body Weather and Tatsumi Hijikata’s  work, but it was not to learn a kind of tradition or to be a ‘dancer’. I was attracted by the spirit and community. Body Weather does not teach one how to move but is an investigation of the body through working with and learning from others and explores the connection of body to space. A lot of people connect Butoh with the atomic bomb and Hiroshima, and I want to make it clear that that is a misunderstanding. Of course that is a very strong human experience and everything is related, but Butoh is not a direct expression for that. Rather the dance is a possibility for human understanding. Butoh is revolutionary, but it just means ‘dance’. Dance doesn’t have a goal. I work between my body and myself.

How did Caddy! Caddy! Caddy! come to be?
Because of my interest in William Faulkner.

How does Caddy! relate to the Japanese performing arts tradition?
I found Faulkner through Japanese literature. Oe and Nakagami  were inspired by him, and if they are like my fathers, I wanted to meet my grandfather. When Faulkner visited Japan in the mid-1950s after World War II, he said I am like you. I come from the south–the losers country. There is physicality in Oe and Nakagami’s work, and for me that is dance.  I find the same thing in Faulkner’s work.

What influence has Butoh had on you as a performing artist?
Butoh is respect of Tatsumi Hijikata’s dance. In Japan, there was folkdance, ballet, and modern dance. There was a society where performers presented seven-minute pieces for a classy, sophisticated audience. Hijikata comes along half naked and shines the light in the audience’s eyes. He brought the idea of homosexuality and sex and eroticism on stage. He killed a chicken on stage, and the little girls fainted and he was kicked out. After he was expelled, people sought him out because he seemed so cool, and at the time, many people had the same antiestablishment sense. He did a lot of collaborations and events, but it was very avant-garde, very strong cutting edge work.

This year’s Spirit & Place theme is “Inspiring Places.” Does Caddy! take its sense of place from Faulkner’s writing?
William Faulkner lived his entire life in one small county town. From there he created hundreds of characters and lives full of memories and imagination. He invented a fictional place, Yoknapawtawpha, that the reader feels and travels through. In the dance we carry the spirit of the stories.

Can you describe what it’s like to perform this piece?
I have the opportunity to be in Faulkner’s imagination, to dance his stories in space and explore many different characters and the strength and depth of humanity.

What do you ask of the audience who attends this performance?
If you have a chance, please read Faulkner.

Caddy! Caddy! Caddy! The William Faulkner Dance Project is Saturday, November 7 at 7 pm in The Toby. Tickets are $10 for the public and $7 for IMA members. Purchase tickets online

BONUS: Show any Toby ticket stub and receive half off the ticket price for Caddy!

The exhibition opened Saturday and runs through January 18, 2010 in the IMA’s Star Studio. I spent my Tuesday lunch in the exhibition. The students’ video works and the film documenting the process with Dash drew me in. I was also tempted to add my own daydream to an IMA Flickr set shown in the exhibition as a slideshow. But my stomach was growling so I’ll have to go back.

I was delighted to sit down with Julie for a quick chat earlier this year.

Interview with artist Julie Dash

Was there a recent experience that led to the title for the exhibition, Smuggling Daydreams into Reality?
That’s something that as an artist I’ve been doing all my life and career. It’s not always easy being a visual artist. Creative ideas can be fragile and sometimes you have to protect those ideas at the same time you are developing them. We’re born creative beings. As you get older people demand that you be less creative, less imaginative and more pragmatic so you learn to protect and nurture your imagination. I’ve learned to smuggle my dreams into reality.

What do you hope visitors to the exhibition will take away from their experience?
First, it’s a way of giving a public voice to my students. Second, it’s a way for visitors to see and hear and interact with the students. And for me, it’s a great experiment with teaching and nurturing creativity. This is the first time I’ve worked with students in this way. I was presented with the opportunity and said “I can’t turn this down.” For the students, myself and the community, I hope we will continue this experience on some level.

The exhibition title also serves as a theme for this year’s Museum Apprentice Program. How do you hope the students in the program will be impacted?
I hope they will have fun smuggling their creative ideas, and at the same time they will unmask themselves. Everyone walks around with some mask on. This is the perfect venue to talk about unveiling because you have access to art and experts in one place. The students went into the galleries and looked at African and Asian masks and then video blogged about their experiences.

As a filmmaker, your daydreams would seem to be wonderful breeding ground to explore new stories, plots and characters. How have your daydreams found their way into your craft?
You’ll always see some of my daydreams in my films. If given an assignment or a script, I have to dream it from beginning to end before I make it. Dreaming comes in handy. It’s really just a more romantic way of saying “visualize.”

Are there ways you might recommend people to access and record their banished fantasies or deferred hopes?
Video blogging – it’s private and easily done with a flip camera and tripod. You can sit with yourself and talk about experiences.

Tell me something about yourself you think readers would like to know.
Before a filmmaker, I’m a mother. My daughter just graduated from college. So you could say, first I’m a mommy.

Note: this interview was also published in the fall issue of Previews membership magazine.

Interview with Alice Waters
As published in the winter issue of the IMA’s Previews membership magazine

Q. What culture do you think has the most interesting relationship with food?
While I can only speak to the cultures I’ve visited, I find the Mediterranean culture of Southern Italy has a unique balance in their relationship with food. Food is part of the fabric of life there. It’s not on the side in the form of health or fueling up. It’s connected to meaningful everyday experiences. Sitting down at the table with family and friends is precious and important.

Q. What did you learn from your grandparents about food?
Not much. My grandparents were Irish English and it seemed to me that they liked to eat quite a lot, but that’s it. They had a narrow, limited diet. My parents were concerned about diet but didn’t know how to cook. My interest in food came from working in my parents’ Victory garden, and my passion came from traveling to France at the age of 19. The experience opened up a world to me.

Q. How are children in the Edible Schoolyard project transformed by food?
When kids are growing the food and cooking it themselves they build a sense of pride in what they are doing. When they serve it, they want to eat it, and their friends want to eat it. The ideas about food happen by osmosis. The values we talk about are absorbed by the kids in the process of working in the garden and kitchen. Science and history classes educate their senses and open their eyes to the world around them, not just to food.

Q. What’s the relationship between food and art?
You can set a table with flowers and cloth and it’s like magic. I think of art as magic. It nourishes us in beautiful ways that we can’t speak about. I see beauty as a way of caring. Both food and art offer the possibility of seeing the world in a different way.

The reason I’m interested in working with artists is to take food out of that ‘foody’ place and put it into the beauty of culture. Food is a universal language. We are digesting fast, cheap and easy. The consequences of the choices we make are destroying our world and our culture. I envision a place where an artist is curating the food. You would walk through a beautiful museum and food would be part of that experience.

Q. What artists inspire you?
Peter Sellars, Olafur Eliasson and Ann Hamilton – These artists have a way of surprising people and caring about the same set of values that I’m talking about.

Q. What’s in your refrigerator?
All the produce I brought back from a friend’s garden, jams given to me, milk, coffee, a bottle of Bandol Rose Wine, two small bottles of sweet wine from my daughter’s birthday, duck eggs, pickles, mustard, walnuts and hazelnuts, a couple lemons and Seltzer water.

Q. If you could be any food, what would you be and why?
It’s a toss up between being sweet like tomatoes or spicy like garlic.

Recipes from Alice Waters
If you are still unsure of what will dress the Thanksgiving dinner table tomorrow, try these recipes from the kitchen of Alice Waters.

Interview with artist Dawoud Bey
As published in the fall issue of the IMA’s Previews membership magazine

Q. Can you tell us when you became interested in portraiture?
As I began to figure out what I wanted to do as an artist, I was spending a lot of time going to museums and galleries looking at work by other photographers. The pictures that resonated for me most strongly were those that were of human subjects. There seemed to me something quite powerful about a person confronting the camera, returning the attention of the photographer. Early on I was most struck by the photographs by Mike Disfarmer that I saw at the Museum of Modern Art in the mid-70s. I also was struck by Richard Avedon’s show of portraits at Marlboro Gallery around that same time. James Van Der Zee’s photographs had impressed me in the Harlem On My Mind exhibition. I wanted to make photographs that resonated for me the way those photographs had.

Q. How did you begin to focus on photographing teenage students?
Young people became the primary subject of my work in 1992, when I was invited to do a residency at the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Andover. During the eight weeks I was there, I photographed both students at Phillips and students from Lawrence High School, a town a few minutes away. I also worked with the teachers to extend the idea of the portrait into the classroom in other forms, including writings produced by the students. I began to realize how much young people were excluded from the fabric of “the art world” as I knew it and how much their images had been stereotyped in the larger culture over the years. I decided then that I wanted to construct a more complex representation of these young people while also engaging in my own ideas about the photographic object.

Q. Can you talk about how you develop your relationship with the students you work with?
My relationship with the students actually begins while photographing them. I make photographs as a way to find out something about someone. I don’t attempt to develop a relationship and then translate that relationship into a picture; I do my finding out through the camera. All of the pictures in Class Pictures were made by spending two or three weeks in each school. Usually I have only 45 minutes in which to take a student’s photograph, since the student has been released from class in order for me to photograph them. Before making the photograph I ask the student to sit quietly for a few minutes and write something about themselves. Once they are done I make the pictures without reading what they have written. I think if a portrait is well done the viewer is left with a feeling that they have connected to the life of another human being, even though they may be a stranger. The photographs are posed and highly staged, but with an eye towards creating an appearance of informality.

Q. What advice would you give to a young Indianapolis student looking to discover his or her own voice through art?
I would say look at as much art as you can, and make as much art as you can. Never stop looking, and never stop learning. The whole history of art is available to you; it is up to you to know that history and to figure out what you want to contribute to it. Then seek out the training and education that will allow you to accomplish that. And have fun too!

Class Picture Day on Flickr!
In celebration of Bey’s exhibition, we’re inviting you to share your own high school pictures. Artist Dawoud Bey displays statements written by the students alongside the portraits he captures. Be sure to include your own caption.

Submit your class photos, past or present, and we’ll post our favorites here on the IMA Blog!