Kathryn Garcia, Film Still, Lily of The Valley, 2011

Legacy Russell: Let’s talk about your relationship to visuality. What role does the lens play in toying with representation in your work? Does it stand in the way or act in solidarity with your gaze as an artist? In your borrowing of parts from other sources, do you ever find yourself behind the camera?

Kathryn Garcia: Well you know the movie Peeping Tom by Michael Powell? I would say that movie is very formative in my understanding of the gaze, the gaze of the camera, the violence of the gaze. My approach is different than what Powell was exploring in that film I would say, but informed by it nonetheless. I am very much interested in voyeurism in relationship to film. Like in Pussy Little Panty Boy for instance, I gave Matt Greene [from the film] an idea and let him run with it, but the idea I suggested was something he had fantasized about before I suggested it. My friend Natalie Rodgers filmed it while I watched. So my role was more to act as a voyeur who empowers the others fantasy with use of the gaze rather than act as director. Similarly in Lily of the Valley, the movie I’m working on now, the character is developed with Gordon who plays Lily, and is very much a fictional autobiography. To me at least with the type of work I’m doing, film is fantasy – the screen is fantasy, the image of woman on the screen is very much related to a fantasy of the feminine, whether it be played by a woman or not – it’s a construction based on fantasy. Maybe that’s why I like asking men to act as women, to construct their fantasies of women for the screen- because I think that as a woman I am still constructed from a fantasy of what a woman is, and a man enacting this makes it more obvious that it is in fact a construction.

LR: What are some characters used in your creative process that you have “met” through producing work?

KG: Carla and Lily definitely. Lily is a character I developed with Gordon who plays her, she’s named after the hermaphroditic flower of the same name. She wears a lot of white so the name kind of fit her character. Carla, I don’t know Carla just came to me while I was drawing her, I think it was the heels that made her have a personality so I decided to name her. Carla is an ongoing character that I am continuously developing she’s kind of based on the structure of a comic book protagonist. Lily was recently killed but will re-appear in the afterlife.

LR: Let’s talk about your piece “Cooking Instructions;” the collision of the female form, the kitchen, and sex has been experimented with many times before. I think about Janine Antoni’s food work or Isabella Rossellini’s “Green Porno.” What’s your politic when it comes to the kitchen?

KG: Well that work was a reference to Alice Constance Austin, an early feminist architect and city planner who designed a utopian cooperative commune called Llano del Rio in what is now the city of Palmdale, California. The commune was founded on several feminist principles, such as the design of a kitchen-less house. The kitchen-less house was thought of as a “feminist” solution to long workdays spent in the kitchen. I made a few works based on this work, as a way to kind of expose gender roles implicit to early feminist thought, and to kind of parody the idea of utopia related to architecture. The first work was called “kitchens of the future,” which was composed from found footage from General Motors’ “Design for Dreaming,” and film coverage of the Monsanto “House of the Future,” located in Tomorrowland, Disneyland both films were created as futuristic fantasies of kitchens that aided women in their housework thereby allowing them more free time. I inserted clips from lesbian porn into the montages, superimposing them onto the appliances operating within these “futuristic” kitchens. The video you are referring to was basically the same idea except that instead of 50’s era promo videos I used a SIMS video about Kitchen Design. I found out that SIMS was the best selling PC game in history, and it’s basically like 2nd Life but more popular, and in a way more suburban. The characters buy houses, find jobs, have relationships. The clip I used from SIMS is all about designing your kitchen, so in a way this simulated kitchen was also a utopic kitchen. I just imagined suburban housewives going nuts over designing their “perfect” kitchen and what that implies – what kind of gender policing it basically conforms to or propagates, so inserting porn and cooking instructions into this was a way to parody the policing of gender in relationship to architecture.

OG Kitchen Video

Kitchen Video with SIMS

LR: What about Pussy Little Panty Boy? What does it mean to project these images many times over in a dark room? How does the experience of “the cinema” and the vast histories therein inform the viewing of your work? How did this experience inform your showing at P.S.1 last year?

KG: So Pussy Little Panty Boy is a work I made for a show that Sarvia and I did in our apt gallery (second-floor) that was based around the movie “single white female;” that movie is basically about a pathologized lesbian who emulates her roommate and basically steals her identity, in a way she steals it out of repressed desire for the roommate. She is becoming the object of affection. The other as fetish. So in this video I asked Matt to imagine becoming me or to be the third member of my relationship. Matt had asked me to pose for his works before and so I felt there was a natural transference between us. I was exploring an aspect of desire that turns into fetish of the other, becoming the other. Like the mis-identification with the muse or like in the beginning of Virdiana when the male character caresses Viridiana’s clothes and puts on one of her shoes. How desire can turn into a fetish of becoming the desired.

I guess cinema influences my way of seeing in general, I think that’s almost unavoidable having grown up in L.A. I wanted this work to look kind of like a home video, like a homemade fetish video. There is this sense that you’re looking into someone’s room, the almost anonymity of the bodies against the curtain in the background you can see the scene but not everything is revealed. It’s really about voyeurism in relationship to film – looking into something that you’re excluded from. The multichannel projection was more of a curatorial decision although when I first imagined presenting the piece I imagined it as a series of projections on multiple screens, to make it carnivalesque, dreamlike, and confrontational, like a series of images out of sequence yet related, like a dream sequence or montage in an old Hollywood film. The experience of walking into a room to be surrounded by images out of sequence, like a voyeuristic glimpse into someone else’s fantasy.

PUSSY LITTLE PANTY BOY

LR: Tell us about the piece Waltz with Royce.

KG: Waltz with Royce is just basically a found video that I found really captivating and eerie so I’ve kept it as the outro of the site since it launched. I like how Royce is kind of ambiguous I think it’s a woman, but in context to the other stuff on the site people always wonder if it’s a man. She’s so haunting and beautiful to me.

Waltz with Royce

LR: When looking at your work, I often think of Jorge Luis Borge’s essay Blindness, or Luis Buñuel’s Un chien andalou (1929); can you expand on your own modes of seeing, re-seeing? Presenting, re-presenting?

KG: Well Bunuel is definitely an influence of mine, the last scene I filmed with Lily was in part based on Viridiana. I love Bunuel and how he has these kinds of surrealist narratives that lead nowhere but in the end are sort of rhetorical, like in Exterminating Angel (1962) for instance where they can’t leave the room and this group of very elite bourgeoisie are basically reduced to animals, trapped within their class. Afterward they go on to be trapped within their ideology, after they escape the manor they are trapped within a church. Bunuel is breaking through the ideologies of his time or the ideologies in context to his work, his experience. I guess my work is similar, but the ideologies are different. Using an image or visual language to break through constructs of seeing that in a sense become ideology, you know what I mean? I like to break through constructs of masculine and feminine. In the last scene with Lily I am very much playing with the idea of masculine vs feminine and that being an imaginary binary (every binary is imaginary) but also the image of Lily very much replicates an odalisque, the quintessential portrait of the woman but in this case it is a man.

Legacy Russell is a writer, artist, and cultural producer. She is the Art Editor for BOMB magazine’s BOMBlog and the co-founder of CONTACTProject.net.