#ditch projects

Amy Yao at Ditch Projects

Israel Lund is an MFA candidate at Mason Gross School of Arts. He has shown at Ditch Projects in Springfield, Oregon, Galerie de l’Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Art de Nancy in Nancy, France, 12Mail Gallery in Paris, France and Gallery Steinsland Berliner in Stockholm Sweden. His books, Some But Not All of My Clothes and Thrasher Fanzine (co-edited with Sam Korman) were published by Publication Studio and his work has appeared in Clark Magazine, Weekday and the forthcoming edition of Bronze Age.

What materials do you use in your work and what is your process like?  Recently I’ve been making paintings using a truncated silk screen process on raw canvas. Instead of using a source image through which you would pull the ink through, as is in traditional screen printing, I burn an open rectangle into a screen and work within that. The final image is a result of manipulating the screen, the squeegee, the amount of ink I use, and the physical makeup of the canvas. Some of them end up looking like blown-up photocopies. For this interview I made a bunch of paintings where I literally photocopied some older paintings and then used a de facto CMYK screen print process to make these quasi copy paintings. Then I scanned them on the computer to get the image you see. There’s an R. H. Quaytman interview where she says she’d like to have “painting” in her materials list. I like that.   

What kinds of things are influencing your work right now?  E-40, the Internet, jokes, grad school, New York City, the Internet…

If you had to explain your work to a stranger, what would you say?  It really depends on if I’ve been drinking or not.

What artists are you interested in right now?  Virginia Overton, Cam’ron, Thomas Pynchon, Alex Felton.

What are your plans for the next year?  Hopefully finish grad school, travel to places I’ve never been to, and swim in the Atlantic Ocean. I haven’t done that yet since moving back to the east coast.

What were you like in high school?  All I cared about was skateboarding. I had an obsession with trying to skate at every skatepark in New England, so suffice to say I had a one-track mind. I grew up in Vermont.

What do you do when you’re not working on art?  Since I’m in an MFA program, and work for an artist in the city, if I’m not making art, thinking about it, reading about it, looking at it, touching it, getting interviewed about it, or making jokes about it, I’m most likely trying to sleep. Or drinking coffee.  

If you hadn’t become and artist, what do you think you’d be doing?  Since I was obsessed with skateboarding and becoming a professional skateboarder didn’t pan out, the only other thing I remember saying I wanted to be was an R&B singer, so most likely that.

What are you really excited about right now?  Living on the east coast again.

Israel Lund is an MFA candidate at Mason Gross School of Arts. He has shown at Ditch Projects, Springfield, OR; Galerie de l’Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Art de Nancy, Nancy, France; and 12Mall Gallery, Paris, France. His books, Some But Not All of My Clothes and Thrasher Fanzine (co ed. Sam Korman) were published by Publication Studio and his work has appeared in Clark Magazine and the forthcoming issue of Weekday. israellund.tumblr.com

Sam Korman:  First question: when did you start your tumblr and why?

Israel Lund:  Let me check the archive of my tumblr, I'm not even sure. It's says July of 2008!! Damn, so much longer than I thought!

SK:  3 years. tumblr was started in 2007, so you were in on the dawning, though I think flickr had already existed for a while at that time. 

IL:  I guess I started it because I have some attraction to images. I was keeping this book thing that had a bunch of images in it, basically 1 per page, like an analog blog, and so when I found out about tumblr, it made a lot more sense to just keep it there. 

SK:  Where did the material come from for the original book, the physical one?

IL:  From magazines, books, and some print outs from the internet. I love images, but I also like the physicality of the container. That's just as important to me. Unfortunately for that book though, it got thrown to the wayside after I started my tumblr. 

SK:  And that's almost all appropriated or found content? 

IL:  Yeah, the tumblr is about 99% found content, although more of my stuff is showing up there recently. And although it is found content, I'm very invested in the images either conceptually or formally, so it isn't just a blog that presents random images. I try to create a link through each image I post, and therefore a broader overarching narrative arises, and it is essentially one that parallels my own work and the things I'm thinking about while I make work. I'm kind of trying to explain my work through the images of other people's work.

SK:  That's rad: a loosely formed narrative based more on associative qualities rather than an imposed…or at least, strict linearity. And, because it's on the web, when someone doesn't like something or doesn't get it, they can skip it, or not "like" it, but it provides enough ease of access that viewers can return to it frequently. I look at it all the time and recently went back through the pages. I couldn't find the beginning, because I started to feel full of images, and my eyes started hurting. That's a constant problem for me when I am doing a lot of computer work: it makes my eyes hurt. No painting ever made my eyes hurt--except op art paintings. 

IL:  Yeah, exactly. And if they don't "get it" in terms of having a narrative they can always just look at the singular image. That's cool too. And also, I don't expect everyone (or anyone I guess) to be able to follow my loose associations between images every time. Some connections are based on esoteric, personal interpretations of what I'm posting, or the mechanisms that I know the artists are using that aren't overtly apparent in what gets posted. 

SK:  It seems the concept is more in the medium than in any of the content employed. 

IL:  I'd actually say it's about half and half, if not more on the image! Of course the structure of tumblr is great for providing a platform for these types of associations to occur. You do mean tumblr as the medium, right?

SK:  Yeah. 

IL:  And not the medium that is depicted in the images…

SK:  I think about both the nature of the light from the screen and the web-based medium of tumblr, as well. Hard and soft technology.

IL:  Haha, okay, then yes, it's an at least equal 33.3 split between the platform, the image, and what the image is depicting. At least! Haha. 

SK:  I think maybe the clearest statement of what you are doing comes from the posts of open books, scanned book pages, someone's hand holding an open book, a folded page, etc. It dematerializes the book into information when it seems like such a pillar of thought. The book posts are my favorite and talk about the type of reading you have of images, as well. Can you talk about the book stuff for the tumblr? 

IL:  Yeah, I love those images so much! They function the same for me as install shots of art shows do. You have the work, the context, and now this thing, i.e. the JPEG that contains all these levels and types of information. It starts to get murky when a piece gets posted, and then following that a spread of a book, with a picture of the same piece that was just posted. You have all this information to deal with, and then there's that tension between image and object that I love. 

What is being addressed? The piece? The image? The context? The dissemination point? All of it?? I love recursive mechanisms, so I try to employ them in the things I post. 

SK:  Digital Blinky Palermo's. 

IL:  Basically the breakdown of image information. I’m not thoroughly familiar with his work, can you explain that?        

SK:  A lot of his work, his abstractions, were very much about abstracting the surface with paint and then abstracting the painting with object-hood and dematerializing object-hood through the abstraction, etc. They are basically monochromes, but, I read an Artforum review of them once and the writer said that Palermo created things that were both successful paintings and successful objects, which, perhaps is not exactly what you are doing, but not far off. I think you’re working more toward intractability, a more uncontrollable product, less static than the reviewer's reading of Palermo perhaps. The measure of "success" is different in your work and you seem to be more interested in finding the failures in the ways we understand images. 

IL:  That's true then, there does seem to be some overlap in our thinking, and yes I am interested in the failure of images, or more specifically, the potential of images, which would include their failure, but I also can't escape the feeling that JPEGs exist as objects to me, despite other people saying differently. And although the format of tumblr is conducive to seeing them simply as images, I think divorced from their context and authors, they become objects in this weird way. Maybe much to the chagrin of the image-makers who I took them from. Oops! 

SK:  No apologies. Boohoo. 

IL:  I'm not sorry. Those are my images now. Although I do try to set click through links to people’s websites or articles about them to create a bigger net of information and association.

SK:  True. But, it still seems that the images are free in many ways, free from context, free from cost, free from authorship. What do you think your role is in that relationship? Do you think you author your blog? Are you more of a guide? Where do you think you fit in, especially as people repost your images? 

IL:  Well, like I said, I do try to create an overarching narrative, and since each image is posted in conjunction with the image before and after, I do think I'm the author. But at the same time, I'm fine with them being separated from the context of the tumblr. Images are fun like that. And even if you don't follow, or don't want to follow the narrative that I say I'm creating, you can obviously see that I post a lot of the same kind of imagery. Like the book spreads for example. The images that I post usually reflect ideas and events that are happening in my own life as well, so maybe it’s like a time stamp in that way? 

And I do feel like my tumblr is an extension of my working practice, one that both informs ideas that I work with, as well as reflecting them. So I am maybe a little more invested in it than others. But at the same time, realize it's just a blog. 

SK:  Definitely. It makes me think about the Joy Division logo from the cover of Unknown Pleasures, which I have seen reworked every which way. Sometimes, you find a weird bootleg version at a thrift store and it's distorted on the t shirt. Recently, Arabic script replaces the words joy division (I don't know what the Arabic says). And, the original logo itself is appropriated. It is some kind of reading of the waves emitted from a dying star, which seems appropriate to be reworked in this way. 

But, like the blog, it's just an old band, an old t shirt and we must constantly admit that we are a bunch of nerds. Like the [Steven] Parrino quote: “Art of this kind is more cult than culture.” 

IL:  Ha! Yeah I like the “Jah Division” reworked image that has the Rasta colors behind the Joy Division logo.  

SK:  Awesome. It's kind of amazing how people will latch onto something like that and rework it in so many different ways. In an interview with Matt Keegan, Milton Glaston talks about the enduring nature of some of his logos. I think, in the end, he sort of admits that he doesn't know why they've lasted so long, but his work has come to define NYC in a graphic way for the last 50 years. I<3NY, that was him. 

I was thinking about the idea of an enduring image. For Glaston and I<3NY and New York Magazine and the Bob Dylan cover, the images had to appear on products, but then they were stolen, or, just became public property in a way. Glaston marvels at how Canal Street is all I<3NY everywhere and he had no more control over his creation. Awed, but not scared. And, I wonder, even with digital reworking or the “impoverished image,” there still seems to be a haunting presence, that of the enduring image. (Garfield or Bart Simpson or the Joy Division logos are some other examples I can think of) 

IL:  Well, I think there needs to be a distinction made between logos and images. They're not exactly the same and they function almost completely different. I definitely am not thinking about the images I post as being logos by any means. 

Of course impoverished images have a history of becoming logos, but that is different as well. 

SK:  I think it's an important distinction to make, but, I suppose where they overlap is in an iconography of a time, a place, a generation, music, etc.

And, in a sense, you are doing the opposite or deconstructing this stuff. Making the Internet the time and place, but with an iconoclastic sensibility. 

IL:  Yeah, although the images I'm using are not that wide of a scope. I think I stay within the realm of art, so I'm skeptical to think that any of those images could become icons in any capacity. 

I feel like I'm utilizing these images for my own purposes, so maybe in that sense it feels a little iconoclastic. Like I said, these images are mine now, more or less. 

SK:  Where does this function as an archive and where does it not? 

IL:  Well, there's a little archive button at the top of the page. It functions by clicking it with the mouse. ;p

SK: Shit, I never used that ever.

IL:  You should. It's rad. 

SK:  Yeah it is. Damn. Can you format your page so that it looks just like that all the time? Maybe I wouldn't want that.

IL:  I'm not sure; I'm no computer programmer. I think there's probably a template out there. You can also view it like that on tumblr Mosaic.

SK:  Do you think tumblr drove you into painting? Or, at least, motivated some of your ideas about painting? 

IL:  Haha! No. I think it made me think about painting though, and made me think about abstraction in a different way. It made me wonder about the state of images and objects and their dissemination. Which makes me wonder about the primacy of those things, and how they function in conjunction with each other. And I also wouldn’t categorize myself as a painter by any means. 

SK:  Well, with the steal tube sculptures, I have seen you display those several different ways: someone made an image of them in a snowy desert, there was an animated GIF of it in different positions on your flickr, with tennis ball, sans tennis ball--they're quite mutable. As with most of your work, there's a little more intentionality than just exploring randomness or the construction of a form over an absurd number or permutations. With you, there's a joke, there's something on the sly, while also being compact and not opposed to the multiplicity of possible outcomes from something like the tubes. I guess what I am asking is how do you see the primacy of the object or the image, primarily in your work? It seems like you use humor or deferment a lot--even with the tumblr, it is an endless stream, constantly updated. 

IL:  Humor is just something that seeps in (or out maybe?), but I'm not sure about which one takes precedence over the other in my work, if they do at all. I like to think there isn't an internal hierarchy with that stuff, but I'm not sure if that is true or not. I mean, I'm not sure which takes precedence, the image or the object.

I like to play with both of those things as a way of generating new images or objects. I ask myself a lot what a sculptural version of an image would look like, and vice versa. It's actually really formally motivated. 

SK:  There's something awesome about pitting the two against one another. It's like setting two images next to each other. Inevitably we want to see a narrative and juxtaposition can be one of the funniest things ever. Or how cardboard cutouts of people are super strange. I have been scared by those in a dark room. 

IL:  Ha! It has enough information to be one thing, but isn't exactly what it says it is either. Cool! 

SK:  That line is hilarious that you sent me. Do you think that's why people get tattoos? 

IL:  Which line? 

SK:  “Artists have a hard time...” [actual line lost, because neither of us could remember it during the editorial process].

IL:  Totally!! 

SK:  Especially [mutual friend]’s cinder block tattoo. I feel like that dude wanted to make himself an image and an object with that one. 

And your On Kawara tat. And [second mutual friend]'s camp fire tat. Even my rectangle. When I flex my sweet muscles it changes shape and feels like an object. 

IL:  Or little Pete's Petunia tattoo? Just kidding. 

SK:  Ha! Maybe the best example is Popeye's tattoo of the battle ship. When he eats his canned spinach, steam shoots out of his tattoo boat. 

IL:  Or maybe Japanese men and their pillow girlfriends? 

SK: Pillow girlfriends! Images are really affecting, it's amazing, and they seep in. It's really amazing and a little scary, because they are so ubiquitous. And I think Cady Noland spoiled us a bit, too