Season 3, Episode 3
Ben Binversie:
How do we confront hatred in the world? With more hatred? Anger? Sadness? What about creativity? Not the easiest choice, but perhaps the necessary one.
(singing)
This is All Things Grinnell, I'm Ben Binversie. On today's show, we're joined by artist Jean-Ulrick Desert. As he says, his art utilizes very recognizable forms and materials from everyday life but presents them with a poetic twist meant to interrupt expectations and to create space for dialogue in the place of discomfort. He deals a lot in the meaning of symbols and his work I very visual, so it wouldn't hurt to check out the episode where perused his work a little before the conversation, but I think you'll find it engaging even without visual aids. Definitely check him out at some point though. So we're going to talk about the power and responsibility of art in this wild world we live in, but before we go any further, a few things; first, there's some discussion, brief as it may be, about themes of violence and sexual assault. Now, this conversation is from earlier this spring, the week before COVID threw our worlds for a loop. A lot has changed since then, but the idea of creative resistance was already on our minds, and that idea is even more present now.
As most of you have probably heard, a black man by the name of Michael Williams was recently murdered in Grinnell. In the aftermath of such gruesome violence, how do we respond as a community? Supporting Michael's family through donations and letters of support? A vigil in his memory? These are an all too familiar sight, especially this summer. Searching for justice where there is none can be a daunting endeavor, but I've been wondering about the role of artists during these times. Jean-Ulrick got us thinking about that during his visit. I asked him how he's able to step back from the tedium of everyday life and see the potential for creativity.
Jean-Ulrick Desert:
It's just an effort of creativity that we all need to engage, whatever our discipline. Whether we're engaged in the spoken word, or the visual arts, or science, or whatever, that there's creativity possible in the everyday things and it's just a matter of being able to listen, to see, to hone in on I guess what some people would call intuition. Perhaps actually it goes back to my formation in terms of where I went to college; I went to Cooper Union in New York City, a very, very small school, in the architecture school specifically, and I don't think people would typically think that one would be studying in architecture school philosophy or poetry, but that actually is part of the curriculum there. And being confronted with certain works that have a great deal of breadth or air to them, I think that's one moment.
I think then, my development as a visual artist, there comes a point where you're experimenting a lot and you're doing what I would call derivative work, meaning people were making work that is vaguely reminiscent of Warhol, or too reminiscent of Warhol, or Jean-Michel Basquiat or someone. And after a certain point, you will start to discover your own voice, and when you have made enough of a body of work where you can step back, and either for yourself, find or discover what is the string in your different projects, or if you're fortunate, other people will begin to tell you what that is. And that's in particular if you're doing a certain type of creative work where you're not painting the same blue painting or dotted painting again and again and again, which is another method that I suppose some creative people take that road. Mine is not necessarily that case, because as I showed in my presentation, the projects have various forms, so one might think it's from different artists, but once you find what that spine is, those things in common, then you begin to realize that it's one person.
Ben Binversie:
Yeah. What brought you to Grinnell this week?
Jean-Ulrick Desert:
I was invited.
Ben Binversie:
Just showing up unannounced, how dare you.
Jean-Ulrick Desert:
No. So I was invited and had some conversations with various people in the language departments for the most part actually. It seems to have been a confluence of various people in various departments, somewhat unrelated to each other, who have come across my work, my name and I think it's because of that overlap, those intersections. And I thought, "Well, I've never been to this part of the US I don't think", I wanted to experience that friendly invitation, it's not so incredibly difficult for me to talk about my work, because it's my work, so I can talk about every part of the experience of how the work came into being and I don't necessarily bring, how can I put it... hopefully without it sounding like a slight, I tend to say that I don't think one needs a Ph.D. to enter into my work, but I don't want to disparage the great deal of research that is embedded in the work as well, so there's plenty that one can go into. But for me, it's fine that the creative experience for the viewer can either happen at a slow pace or it can happen at a fast pace and regardless, it's still about something that can possibly continue to unfold and open up.
Ben Binversie:
Yeah. I know a lot of your art is not necessarily biographical or personal to you. You're seeing something that maybe others are doing in the world and you're kind of amplifying others' voices is how you put it sometimes, but you're still choosing things that maybe strike you or resonate with you, even if you don't always agree with them politically or socially. But what is it that attracts you to certain ideas and makes you want to bring your lens to them?
Jean-Ulrick Desert:
Well, even if I may take certain things that I think are relatively universal, though that can be critiqued, let's say very general, ultimately my perception will always be my unique perception as an immigrant to the United States since I was a child, coming from a long Caribbean — specifically Haitian — legacy or heritage, being a person of color in the context of the United States adds another element, being a middle-aged person at this point another, being part of a somewhat contested LGBT community is another element. All those things intersect to create a particularly point of view on these generalities, and understanding how those generalities can somehow function. I suppose maybe it was a bit more trendy in the '80s when I went to school, but to a certain degree I can say that I know how semiology works and so the images or symbols can become my alphabet in the same way that words can be that for a poet, you see. So part of the key to this idea of intersectionality is that, well, you're fully that, simultaneously being fully that and fully this and fully that.
Ben Binversie:
You've done a lot of works in different countries and you've shown your works throughout the world. How does the context in which you know your viewers or your public will be engaging with the art dictate what you do with it and the approach that you bring to it?
Jean-Ulrick Desert:
Well, I think it's important, not everyone would agree with this, but I think that certain assumptions can be made about your audience. We all have to begin, to a certain degree, with certain assumptions about other people. They may be dead wrong. They often are wrong actually, because we are all not cut out templates of the cliches that exist, but we have to start somewhere and we just have to own up to it and enter into it. If we're open and we do some research and we do some talking, and it doesn't have to be some sort of heavy political stuff, we can allow for certain... to learn and understand like, "Oh, they're not as stuffy as I thought that maybe they would be, so I can chill out a bit and make something a little more progressive"."Oh, no they're probably going to be more uptight than I realized, oh my God, so let's reign this part of it in a little, or let's talk about the center by defining as much of the periphery as possible, and that will somehow begin to form ". So I have to constantly make a certain type of research to understand what the context that I'm putting something in, that will inform me with the imagery, it'll inform me with the particular methodology. There're so many things that actually contribute ultimately to what that final thing will be.
I know in general the take that I probably want to do, and of course, I don't want to imply that I create a kind of formulaic art either, where it's just like some sort of mathematical equation and just fill in the XYZ, because there is something to also be said about the making. The actual roadblocks and discoveries on that highway of actually in the making, and you realize the color and the energy and the this and the that, that are part of that creative process as well. Perhaps I'm overthinking it, but I've long contended that this is not a leisure activity and that there's, as I see it, a particular role I play in society as an artist, and that comes with what I view as a heavy responsibility. My tools may not be like that of a surgeon with a scalpel, and yet I can create work that can cut as deeply and as emotionally, and perhaps create damage as well. So that responsibility should be taken extremely seriously even, I guess, if I choose to just decorate.
Ben Binversie:
Yeah. Some of the more public exhibitions or displays that you showed kind of reminded me of, I recently watched the documentary Faces Places, have you seen that?
Jean-Ulrick Desert:
No, I don't know about it.
Ben Binversie:
Do you know the filmmaker Agnes Varda? Have you heard of her?
Jean-Ulrick Desert:
No, tell me.
Ben Binversie:
Okay, I'm not trying to flex, like with being well versed, I don't know shit.
Jean-Ulrick Desert:
No, no, but tell me.
Ben Binversie:
I recently watched a documentary and it's this old, I think she's French, lady, she's definitely getting up in her years now, and a younger photographer who's gained some acclaim, and they both admire each others' work but they had never worked together, and so together they're filming this documentary. They're just going around little villages in France I believe, and they plop down in the villages and get to know the people a bit, do some, really just talking to people, but research for the art project that they're going to do, which is they drive around in this truck and they print photos from the truck and then paste them onto walls and stuff.
And most of them are just big pictures of people, but they do it in a way that means something, so they're at some sort of plant where most of the people working there are men, but then they do a little art piece of the wives of these men and they put them up giant on, I think it's like a shipping container plant or something, they're filling shipping containers, and they put up these giant murals of these women to highlight the role the women are playing behind these men.
And the process of going into a community and poking your nose around and getting to know them, or maybe doing the thing, setting your exhibit up while other people are walking around and interacting, and the process of just being there and making the art and seeing what a community could want or need, or what art you could bring to a place that would really resonate with people I think. I don't know, it was just reminiscent of that and I thought it was really cool.
Jean-Ulrick Desert:
Oh totally, what you've described totally resonates with me, because it makes visible something that is very real, that in the context of where these men work is anything really seen. Maybe there's a bit of a social network in which it comes out, but I think to create an artwork where the presence of these women who support their partners is a very beautiful, striking statement to make to the community, as well as to those men who are there in that factory. Totally resonates with me, I think to create work that is so personal to people, I think, is a great target actually and clearly, it has a larger, let's say, ethnographic, whatever, social studies kind of importance as well, to archive that kind of situation, as I said, to make it visible is really quite nice. So I don't know, maybe some of my work is part of a particular school of thought. I try not to, I figure that's the job of the writers, curators, historians, people who are writing and reading all the time.
Ben Binversie:
Yeah, and have a good lay of the land in terms of what other people are doing.
Jean-Ulrick Desert:
Exactly, I can't read every book. It's just impossible.
Ben Binversie (18:26):
Yeah, and I also was thinking about what I do in starting to try to be creative with audio, and I think about the good storytellers that I know and how they'll take, on like a radio program, someone will tell their story but then they're going to cut it up and just like, "Pooh, pooh, pooh" and then rearrange it and then add music and other sounds, and bring it together with another story and some context, then like, "Pooh", you have a story in a way that the person didn't tell it right away. Maybe the way that they say it is like they're filtering the person's story through them and they're telling it in a more impactful, better way. Not that the person isn't able to tell their own story, but this audio storyteller has some capabilities, some tools, and maybe a larger voice that they can amplify the other people's voices.
Jean-Ulrick Desert:
The truth is that there are people who are not able to really tell their story in a manner that is comprehendible to all of us, and so for the storyteller who's able to filter that and take that in and chop it up and create an architecture all around it because the actual person who may be telling the initial story may start in the middle, then shift to the end, then shift to the beginning, and maybe that works, maybe it doesn't, but there really is, I think, an art to storytelling, quite frankly. I'm not sure I can say that's been an interest of mine per se because I've been much more interested in the nonlinear story.
I've made a couple of videos and I tend to fight even with myself about, "Hmm, how short can I make this video so that it isn't a burden for someone to have to really sit there for 45 minutes and watch something?" And when one creates a video one has to work with a timeline, so it's a bit of a struggle because what I like about creating some of the artworks that I've done, like my Burqa Project for example, where I have four burkas that I sowed up using the American flag, the German flag, the British flag, and the French flag, where and how does one enter into that? I never consciously say, "Oh, this one has to go first, this one has to go second, that one has to go third", it all moves around depending on where it's being exhibited.
So again, it's not linear, you don't read it that way, but there are literally so many doors that one could open in order to enter into that work. And granted, when something has so many doors, there are a number of people, I don't know what the percentage is, maybe 20%, as high as that, close down because they're not being spoon-fed. But I actually think that nonlinear, I'm interested in, is that things can then just continue to unfold because people can project into what they want and I find that to be liberating, and quite frankly I think it helps the work that I do as well because it has a greater, larger relevance to people. Whatever preconceptions they may have, like in that particular one, where they always assume, or not always, but when people haven't seen me they assume that some of this work is done by a woman. "Really? Okay. Doesn't matter. Could be".
Ben Binversie (22:58):
It certainly could be. A lot of what you do is... you seem to take an interest in other peoples' perspectives, whether it's their perspectives on your art and then making art out of their reactions in a sense; I'm thinking of a very personal project for you that you undertook for years and years where you walked around Germany in lederhosen and you yourself became the art and the performance in a sense, and what came out of that was, among other things, is you would have people take pictures of you as they saw you, and you were very interested in how they see you and that really was the art in the sense, is, "How do these people see me, a black man, dressed in these lederhosen and what does that mean?" So can you give the background for where that project came from and what it meant for you to be very personally involved with discovering what people thought and how they saw you, instead of how they look at the world, maybe. Or maybe it is both.
Jean-Ulrick Desert:
Yeah, there's a lot in there that I can say, so I'll cut to the chase, that I want to offer through my artwork the most authentic of an experience as possible. It would be disingenuous for me to fake that. I cannot fake looking through their eyes and make those little choices. Yes, I can fake it, but then it becomes theater, and this is a very different thing. The genesis for the work was that I was walking, many years ago, having flown to Germany to see the wrapping of the Reichstag by the artist Christo and Jeanne-Claude.
I was at one point, in the center of the city, attacked by two people. Actually one person, the other one was trying to hold him back, and it was completely a racial incident, in Germany, white Germany. And speak to anyone who has been affronted, who's been violated in some way, there is a residue of a kind of trauma in that experience, whether it's a woman or a man, black, white or blue, who has been almost raped, or someone who has had a certain type of vile language thrown at them, whatever. There is always some level of trauma and it's different for different people because we all have different capacities to take in and reject certain things. So for me, I feel that generally speaking, creative people, whether you're a writer, a visual artist, or whatever, have the ability to also exorcize certain emotions and things out if we concentrate in a particular way. And so I wanted to create a project that was, for me, a certain kind of healing and empowering action of some sort.
So rather than either be super angry about the situation or crumble under victimization, I decided to just fly back to the United States and start to create a project in which I would make an effort to look like, superficially on some level, the approved German body, in space that would not elicit such violence. And that's how I entered into creating the work. Cliches exist, stereotypes of other peoples all over the world, and the Germans have several cliches that exist of them, and I thought, "Why don't I just grab one of those and jump into that, and buy myself a travel train ticket that was open-ended that I could just go all throughout the country again, and this time present myself in public space in this kind of stereotyped cliché costume, because I think that the Germans don't realize that people in the heartland of India or Malaysia or anywhere, there are so many other places in the world, that particular costume just screams of 'German, German, German', it's not merely Bavarian, it's German".
And that's what I did, I looked at pictures, I somehow created a pattern, found leather to create these pants that were as close to white Caucasian skin tone as I could, went to some hair shop and bought fake, not real, but blonde hair, sowed it into the seams and created little tresses, took a trip to buy a tyrolean jacket and felt hat, removed the feathers, put in more blonde hair. I mean, it was creating an outfit that was different but the same. Different but the same. So that there is this aura of the sameness, and then there are these kinds of, as you enter in closer, one begins to perceive all these odd little differences that have different reasons for being there, including the little cowbells around my neck that people could hear me, "Dingle, dingle, dingle" as I walked.
Ben Binversie:
Yeah, you made your presence felt.
Jean-Ulrick Desert:
I made my presence felt in a light and simultaneously forceful way, and it was almost impossible to not be noticed. You know that people are touched, even if they go out of their way to try to show you that they haven't seen you, for example. It offers this very odd confronting moment for people, some of which sometimes rejecting what this image is because for some people it's incredibly loaded, so I realized at times that laughter was an awkward mechanism for just not wanting to deal. It was a very good experience to begin the piece, I think I learned and grew from it as well, that I had placed certain things in line, and of course, there was going to constantly be an element of surprise, even for me in making the work, because again, as I said, I cannot fake what people see, but I can take on that hard work of engaging all those people and seeing what comes from it and allow them the possibility of being the archivers, the documenters of that interaction. In the end, I'm able to re-deploy those experiences and those images out again into public space.
Ben Binversie:
Yeah, and that became a big part of... what you did with that project was make these kinds of postcards of yourself and when other people had taken pictures of you and then displayed those, and then the display of those and people's reaction to that also was creative in a sense, and the way that you chose to display them. Obviously, you were thinking about it and the way that people responded then to that, also more insights to draw from that, so like a never-ending... how people see things is very interesting.
Jean-Ulrick Desert:
Yeah, and there are still images that people haven't seen because I just haven't really put it out there and deployed it. There are a couple of videos, which I think showed maybe one, raw footage that really I think people here at Grinnell were the first people to ever see them, even though they were shot like 20 years ago. So it has a kind of ongoing, never-ending story kind of quality, I suppose, to it. It's not the only work I do of course, but I knew at a certain point that the project did for me personally what I needed to do, in terms of the healing aspect of that work, and I started to realize little by little what it did for other people in terms of shaking them up or making some people actually hunker down and get even more nasty actually.
That also is part of the reality of the world that we live in. I don't see my work as functioning as a full-out agent of change per se, that would be really great, but I just don't believe that's truly possible. I think that it has to come from people themselves. But I can see that my work can plant certain seeds and that those seeds may take years to sprout somehow, and that's something that I do see, that I do do. Maybe it's related to this idea of the artist having his own scalpel.
Ben Binversie:
Yeah, and this project, in particular, was also maybe your own act of creative resistance to some of the forces and trends and ugly parts of this world.
Jean-Ulrick Desert:
I have a particular view about my role as an artist that I believe, but I've come to realize it's also foolish to assume that all artists are either politically correct or on the right side of history and ways of thinking, because quite frankly there are also artists with, to me, abhorrent views of the world and people and politics as well, and they can be just as talented in their manipulation.
Ben Binversie:
Yeah, that's a good point.
Jean-Ulrick Desert:
So those are the artists that work behind the scenes for the propagandists as well, to tell you that your neighbor is cooking too much garlic or something or other, they're bringing rats into the neighborhood.
Ben Binversie:
Bringing it back to Grinnell here, you've got a day or so more here, I was interested in... you did a workshop yesterday with students and I was there taking part in that, how do you approach coming to, whether it's a school or anywhere where you might be doing a workshop and working with people and bringing their ideas? I know you purposely kept... you described your art but then you kept the ideas a little abstract from that because you didn't want to impose your vision on a project that we might create.
Jean-Ulrick Desert:
I was trying to push for being here longer, to do something much, much more involved, and needed to streamline it, if you will, and make it much simpler than what I initially intended. And certainly, I'm not one of the artists who wants to propose to students becoming mini-mes, there are some people who like this pedagogical approach, I'm not particularly interested in that because I feel if I put my teacher hat on, I feel the obligation to empower students to learn how to fly, or fly better by themselves. So with that in mind, my intention was that we'd get a room of many interdisciplinary interests, people coming maybe who are focused on economy, some people writing, some people arts, who knows? Physical ed. Because I'm a strong believer in diversity, and I know that when people hear the word "diversity", they're often thinking racially. No, I'm not thinking that way. You can get a whole bunch of white people in one room and there's plenty of diversity right there, you just need to open your eyes and really see it and go beyond their faces.
And I felt very strongly, or I still feel very strongly that the future is about working in collectivity and that these are tools we need to begin to figure out now and get better at, and I think that's going to be what is needed. Again, I had no preconceptions per se with regards to what a small collective could or would do, but it's good also for a small group of people to know that outside of the box potential exists and that they can do it, and maybe with the help or the nudging of an outside person, this can start something.
Ben Binversie:
Yeah, I think what you were saying about creativity not as a wholly positive force maybe, but maybe neutral, and artists bring their preconceptions and their ideas about the world to their art, and that impacts the impact of their art, something that I haven't thought too much about because I think there's not enough creativity in our world, so when I think about getting more creative and encouraging other people to be more creative, it feels like a wholly positive thing because it just feels like we're lacking that kind of mind frame and relationship with the world. So I maybe naively think about creativity in that way, but I appreciate that you came to Grinnell and that you took the time to work with us and talk about your work and give us that little nudge to think outside the box.
Jean-Ulrick Desert:
Thanks a lot, are we good?
Ben Binversie:
Yeah, we're good. Thank you very much.
Jean-Ulrick Desert:
Okay, super.
Ben Binversie:
Jean-Ulrick Desert is a wonderful artist, born in Haiti, formed in the United States and Germany, and spreading his work throughout the world. Obviously, there are some limitations to discussing visual works on a podcast so check out his website and follow him on Instagram if you want to look at some of his work. Music for today's show comes from [Brett Newski 00:41:27] and Lobo Loco, with this song, Bavarian Beach Bar. If you want to get in touch with the podcast, email me at podcast@Grinnell.edu. Make sure you subscribe to the show to get new episodes when they come out or follow the college's Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook pages to keep up with the podcast. Thanks for listening, if you enjoyed the show pass it along to a friend and take care. I'm your host Ben Binversie, stay weird and keep working towards a better world people.