EMPIRE STATE OF MIND, a group show curated by Jacob Fuglsang Mikkelsen featuring works by Victor Bockris, Bess Greenberg, Ellen Jong, Anton Perich, Marcia Resnick opens at the Copenhagen Photo Festival, Denmark, from May 13 – 20, 2010. Marcia Resnick has graciously granted me an interview to discuss her work, “Re-visions”, which will be featured in the show.
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Photograph © Marcia Resnick
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I love the way your work explores the precocious aspects of childhood. All to often, we forget that kids have their own secret desires. What was your inspiration to revisit the private life of your childhood?
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Marcia Resnick: In 1975, while driving my car in Manhattan, I became embroiled in a car accident which left me unconscious and internally bleeding. When I awoke in the hospital, my entire life flashed before me. I began to think about all of the events which led to my being there, daily dissecting my life with a linear historical perspective. After I returned home, I began to write ideas and draw pictures in preparation for doing a book which considered my life thus far, with both a sense of poignancy and irony.
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Photograph © Marcia Resnick
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I like how you subvert the seeming purity of 1950s America, particularly with the cowgirl and Howdy Doody images. What was it like growing up at that time, and how did it inform your work as an artist?
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MR: I was raised in a middle class home in suburban Brooklyn by Jewish American parents who were very strict and authoritarian. Television was a large component of life in the 1950’s…Hopalong Cassidy, Howdy Doody and the more artistically stimulating Winky Dinks and Jon Gnagy were fixtures in my childhood, in addition to the popular playthings advertised on television such as slinky toys and hula hoops. I had a special fondness for Jon Gnagy and religiously learned how to draw by watching him on television.
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Photograph © Marcia Resnick
Photograph © Marcia Resnick
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The piece that explores the fear of being wallflower within the company of children at the school dance is the perfect foil to the image that has your subject being told not to look at her feet in the company of adults. I find it interesting that in one context the girl is an extrovert; in another she is an introvert. Please speak more about this dynamic.
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MR: Peer pressure has always been a motivating factor influencing the behavior of children. The desire to be liked by other children is quite different though than the desire for the approval of adults. This dynamic speaks to this difference.
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Photograph © Marcia Resnick
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For your piece captioned “She was often gripped with the desire to be elsewhere”, how did that desire take you to New York City?
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MR: That desire took me “all the way” from Brooklyn to Manhattan when I moved there at sixteen years old to study art at NYU and then, Cooper Union after which I went to graduate school in California at California Institute of the Arts. That desire also took me to Europe, Mexico, Central America, Morocco, Egypt and the South Seas and Japan and China in years to come.
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This work was made in 1978, a very edgy period in New York City’s history. Did your environment in any way play into the themes you are exploring here?
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MR: I moved to Tribeca in 1975. I was teaching photography at Queens College and NYU. I did the bulk of the work on “Re-visions” in 1976. It took two years to get it published, during which time I frequented artist’s bars and music clubs at night and Soho art galleries on weekends. There was a palpable electricity in the cultural milieu of NYC at that time. The downtown artists scene was a hotbed of aesthetic creativity. I drew inspiration from the contemporary art and music scenes.
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More Visuals!
www.copenhagenphotofestival.com