Our Grandmothers, 2017. Pigment print on canvas, 36 x 24 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Grant Wahlquist Gallery.
“Camp taste is, above all, a mode of enjoyment, of appreciation—not judgment. Camp is generous,” Susan Sontag wrote in her seminal 1964 essay Notes on “Camp.”
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It is here that we begin—and return—in the work of Joe Mama-Nitzberg’s new exhibition, Picture, not Portrait, currently on view at Grant Wahlquist Gallery, Portland, ME, through November 11, 2017. The exhibition presents a selection of recent works that open questions and create space for dialogue about the interplay between technology, memory, identity, and the curious legacy of postmodernism.
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Mama-Nitzberg is generous in his approach, simultaneously exploring and critiquing the complex ideas that most would prefer to put into reductive, didactic boxes of thought. Here, nothing is quite what it seems but all the better for us, as it opens up spaces for interrogation that are more often than not silenced.
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The works in the exhibition peel back the layers of perception to expose the complications of reality, of the simultaneous spaces that are at one contradictory and complementary. Here, we are liberated from the authority of the absolute, free to experience the work in whatever way we wish. Mama-Nitzberg offers insight into his process, allowing us to see the ways in which are can be a vehicle for debate, discussion, and contemplation.
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Could you speak about the legacy of postmodernism: what do you think this entails, both for better and for worse? How does your work speak to this legacy?
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Joe Mama-Nitzberg: The strategies of postmodernism are still reverberating and utilized even when they are not identified as such, including questions of authorship, power relations, pastiche, appropriation, image/text, high/ low.
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Postmodernism created an awareness and an embracing of an unfixed state. It is creating terror when employed by our president. The post-truth, post-facts playbook can have us scrambling towards the safety of essentialism. As comforting as this may seem, we cannot un-ring that bell.
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Untitled (Elite Detachment Sontag), 2017. Pigment print on canvas. 36 x 24 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Grant Wahlquist Gallery.
You use Susan Sontag’s seminal 1964 essay Notes on “Camp” as a jumping off point for several pieces in the exhibition, with particular attention to “[d]etachment is the prerogative of an elite.” How do you address her academic detachment in her work?
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Joe Mama-Nitzberg: The statement “detachment is the prerogative of an elite” jumped out at me. I was touched to think she was crowning “camp” queens as “the elite,” even if this might be taken as a critique. Although she was a part of the gay/queer community and did participate in “the life,” Sontag was an academic writing about a gay male subculture.
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One could say that her academic status detached her from this bar/street culture. One could also say that her gender detached her from this group. Perhaps there is some truth to this but perhaps it is exactly this distance and detachment that made it possible for her to theorize in the manner that she did. She was inside and outside simultaneously.
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When I began making these pieces, there was a Sontag moment happening in the culture. This was also the zenith of what has been popularly referred to as “Zombie Formalism” [a term coined by Walter Robinson referring to the resurrection of the aesthetics of Clement Greenberg]. I realized that many of the paintings that were qualifying as “Zombie Formalism”, for me also qualified as “Camp”.
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I was very interested in playing with just who the “elite” might be to the viewer. Artists? The 1%? Traditional gay male culture? Academia? Me?
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Untitled (Henri Matisse by Carl Van Vechten 1), 2017. Framed archival pigment print, 23.875 x 19.625 inches (framed). Courtesy of the artist and Grant Wahlquist Gallery.
How do your reconceptualizations of Carl Van Vechten’s portraits address power relations, cultural appropriation, and the limits of the digital?
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Joe Mama-Nitzberg: A friend gave me a biography of Carl Van Vechten as a gift. I had a very visceral response to the book. Both his life story and his photography produced true ambivalence for me. I found his dedication to promoting other artists to be generous as well as exploitative and self-aggrandizing. As a well-connected wealthy white man, he had the ability to introduce artists and artworks to the literati and the glitterati. Many of those that Van Vechten promoted were African American. I felt that Van Vechten truly wanted to bring about racial understanding and harmony and that he had tremendous respect for Black people. That said, I also felt he was a controlling diva who did not have to navigate life in the same way as many of those that he championed.
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And here it gets even more complicated. Van Vechten was a gay man during the many decades of the twentieth century when that was hardly a privileged distinction to hold. It was often a crime. Van Vechten was working to champion other marginalized peoples in a way to elevate his own status. Does that now make my use of his work righteous, as I identify as a gay/queer man, and hence it is also makes it my own marginalized culture to appropriate and represent?
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I say this with the awareness that I am looking at all of this through a twenty-first century lens. I take these questions of cultural appropriation and power relations very seriously. I need to examine my own position in the work as one that is questioning rather than answering. I have tried to create an open arena rather than a place where to make absolute proclamations of ownership.
As for the limits of the digital, I utilize Adobe Photoshop to make these images. I am self-taught in Photoshop and let’s just say I would never brag about my skills. One of my interests is what I am calling “the digital hand.” These consumer-based programs and algorithms have empowered me to make work in a way that was never available to me before. I have a confidence to work on my own with a level of freedom that I lacked as a younger artist who relied on others and their technical expertise.
The Van Vechten pieces in the show all have similar formal qualities. These similarities are created by the source Van Vechten images, as well as by how I make marks in Photoshop and the limits of the program. Photoshop is designed to be consistent and to jump through the same hoops over and over. That’s what Adobe is selling.
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Untitled (Henri Matisse by Carl Van Vechten 2), 2017. Framed archival pigment print, 22 x 18 inches (framed). Courtesy of the artist and Grant Wahlquist Gallery.
It’s always very telling when the work of rebellion becomes the very thing it set out against, in this case the work of the Pictures generation. Could you speak about the ideological failure of appropriation?
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Joe Mama-Nitzberg: The exhibition is titled Picture not Portrait because I liked the many ways this could reverberate and how it might be read. The title came from a piece with a quote from Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. I caught myself making the mistake of calling it The Portrait of Dorian Gray. Somehow to me it just sounded grand and correct. But… It is incorrect and I wanted to make sure I was using the correct title.
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To remember, I created the mantra “Picture not Portrait” and I loved the ring this had. As I use photographs of individuals and refer to their biographies, I was also thinking about both pictures and portraits. How do these terms operate for the viewer?
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Lastly, I use “Picture” to refer to the Pictures Generation/Group. I don’t believe that this work or these artists necessarily failed or that if they did that their failure was truly different than any other artistic radical gesture’s failure: they all seem to fail in the same way. We like to think that we can be outside of capitalism, and that critique, even if is commodified, is still somehow rebellious.
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This is nothing new. Wilde’s rebellion was always a cash cow. The subversion in his talks, books and plays made him a very wealthy man – that is, until his homosexuality sent him to prison.
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We often choose to be naïve and self-serving. We are stuck in a system that does not allow us to escape this double bind. Making work that is purely formal and avoids these strategies doesn’t work. Not making objects/commodities but accepting monies from institutions and collectors doesn’t really work either. With all of this said, today I will not choose cynicism and defeat. I am still deeply optimistic about the power of art to be radical and to communicate and affect change.
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Noble Sissy 1, 2017. Pigment print on fabric, 37 x 26 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Grant Wahlquist Gallery.