John Menick Blog

Last week, the New York Foundations for the Arts published an interview with me as part of their “Meet a NYFA Artist” series. (I was a video fellow last year.) Thought I might reproduce the interview here:

Please tell us what are you working on and what’s coming up for you.

There are usually several things going on at once, but the biggest thing I’m finishing up is a project I shot in Paris last fall called, Paris Syndrome. It’s a video about Japanese travelers in France. I read an article in The Guardian a few years ago about how Japanese travelers allegedly have a great amount of difficulty when travelling in France. There are all kinds of mental health problems, from depression, to paranoia, nervous breakdowns etc. A Japanese psychiatrist living in Paris called it “Paris Syndrome.” I found the article fascinating, but the whole thing seemed little hard to believe. So I was able to go to Paris this year and interview some French and Japanese psychiatrists about it. I’ve got all this footage and I’m currently trying make sense of it all.

What is your biggest influence or inspiration right now?

I get hung up on weird things, which makes answering questions like this really hard. I just wrote something about a book the RAND corporation published in 1955 called, A Million Random Digits with 100000 Normal Deviates. It’s just that: a 600-page book of random numbers. It’s as thick as the Brooklyn Yellow Pages. It’s like a work of conceptual art, only stranger. Something like that can keep me going for weeks.

Do you collect anything?

I collect books. Nothing special – not like rare books or anything. Paperbacks, science fiction, art book, computer books, whatever. I buy them compulsively. It’s a little bit of problem, actually. I also assemble things for my work. I’ve been collecting factoids for a project called Hearsay. One I just wrote down is, “New York is the most diverse city in the world.” Everyone in New York says that, but then someone in London told me, “London is the most diverse city in the world.” So both go in the collection. In the end they’re all presented in a video slideshow. No debate. I believe anything.

How do you start on a project?

It’s really hard to say. I find the best projects aren’t premeditated. If I just start working on something, I know it’s going to turn out well. If I’m forcing myself to start something, it’s a bad sign. Actually, finishing things is the hard part. I think Sam Shepard said something like, “Beginnings are easy. Endings are impossible.” Maybe he didn’t say that, but I like it anyway.

What is an indulgence for you?

Other than interviews? Late-night champagne and oysters in Paris with friends.

What is one technology that you’d like to see developed?

A cheap electric car.

Is there anything that you’d like to see addressed more adequately by artists’ service and funding organizations? If so, how might this issue be addressed?

Health care. It’s way beyond the scope of artists’ organization, though. It’s a national crisis. Health care shouldn’t be “affordable.” It should be free.

What role has the Fellowship played in your life?

It helped me live for a few months as I transitioned back to New York after spending the summer and fall shooting my project abroad. Without it I would have been lost.

What is your workspace like?

A large desk, small MacBook, too many hard drives, chairs. The books are all over the place: a study of the Tunguska incident, a biography of Charles Ponzi, a couple books on the history of tourism, a collection John Cage writings, a Robert Smithson catalog. Occasionally there’s a drawing on a table or wall or the floor. To my left there is a wall of clippings: a group of stills from Warner Brothers cartoons, an image of Antonioni talking to his actors while shooting Zabriskie Point, a bunch of cryptic scribblings that say things like “stage fright” and “inconsistency.” I put the scribblings up there when I get an idea, and then I instantly forget what I originally meant. It took me a while to realize the forgetting part was probably the point.

During the early 1950s, John Cage isolated himself in one of Harvard University’s anechoic chambers. He did so to experience “pure silence,” and as the story is often told, his pounding heart and whining nervous system disappointed him. He learned that absolute silence, as a conscious experience, was impossible.

Cage sought pure silence, but was he as strict about his other working method, chance? Randomness is as elusive as silence. A coin toss favors one side over the other, depending on the physics of the toss. It’s not equal odds. Likewise, a personal computer can only produces a relatively random number. If played out over a long enough period, patterns can be detected in most “random” systems.

But in 1955, a few years after Cage visited Harvard, a group of researchers at the RAND Corporation published the results of an eight-year inquiry into pure chance. Their researches resulted in the wonderfully titled, A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates. It is a massive reference book comprised of a short technical introduction followed by four hundred pages of random digits and two hundred more of random normal deviates.

Who would use such a beautiful thing? Cryptographers, statisticians, and game designers, but no artist probably did. The book is an artistic project in itself, something done simply for the heady pleasure, not unlike Alighiero Boetti’s Classifying the thousand longest rivers in the world or On Kawara’s One Million Years. As quoted in a 2001 New York Times article referenced in the book’s updated introduction, the RAND project is paradoxical, its success based on “how to use order to generate disorder.” Aren’t we again talking about a research similar to that conducted by many postwar artists? Aren’t these mathematicians, researchers and scientists making a procedure that covers its own process, writing a book without an author?

I’m showing Hearsay in “A Series of Coincidences,” a group exhibition curated Regine Basha opening this Saturday (Feb 21) at Cabinet’s new exhibition space. Stop by if you get a chance. Details follow.

A Series of Coincidences
Sat, February 21, 6pm – 9pm
Cabinet, 300 Nevins Street, Brooklyn (map)

FREE. No RSVP necessary.

Organized by Regine Basha

Featuring:

Serkan Ozkaya: Installation
Daniel Bozhkov: Object
John Menick: Video
Dario Robleto: Text

6-7 pm: conversation with Serkan Ozkaya and Daniel Bozhkov
7-9 pm: hobnobbing, conversation, and drinks

John Menick. Plot Points, 2009. Graphite on paper. 18″ x 24″.

“Paper Exhibition,” a group exhibition curated by Raimundas Malašauskas, is opening on January 15, 7 pm, at Artists Space (38 Greene Street). I have a couple of new works in the show — Hearsay and Plot Points. From the press release:

What does the line between reality and fiction look like? Can an exhibition be a life-sized paper model of itself? Whose name didn’t make the press release? And if it sounds good on paper, where is the paper? These enigmatic questions locate Paper Exhibition at the periphery of the known—between paper architecture and new pages of old books. The exhibition renders the open space of the gallery as a labyrinth of folds, holes and gaps through which an exchange between the literal and the literary can happen…

The exhibition includes works and performances, in order of disappearance, by: Julieta Aranda / Olivier Babin / Fia Backström / Judith Braun / Alex Cecchetti / Mariana Castillo Deball / Dexter Sinister / Gintaras Didziapetris / Jonah Freeman / Aurelien Froment / Dora Garcia / Mario Garcia Torres / Mark Geffriaud / Loris Gréaud / Morten Norbye Halvorsen / Will Holder / Pierre Leguillon / Gabriel Lester / Marcos Lutyens / Benoit Maire / Nicholas Matranga / John Menick / Melvin Moti / Trong Gia Nguyen / Job Piston / Pratchaya Phinthong / Conny Purtill / Adam Putnam / Amy Robinson / Joe Scanlan / Gareth Spor / Donelle Woolford / Joe Zane

Happy new year from the Imperial Valley.

(Photo from my Salvation Mountain photo set.)