INTERVIEW: How Whistleblower Reality Winner’s FBI Interrogation Became Powerful Theater

Tina Satter’s performance work, Is This A Room: Reality Winner Verbatim Transcription, is hands down one of my favorite theater works of all time. Coming to the Walker Art Center this weekend, Is This A Room (as its subtitle states) takes the verbatim transcript of the FBI’s June 3, 2017 interrogation of Reality Winner, a USAF veteran who leaked a secret NSA report on Russian election hacking to The Intercept. It’s a powerful piece: funny, suspenseful, frighteningly relevant. In advance of this week’s performances, I facilitated an interview between Satter and Winner’s mom, Billie Winner-Davis, in which we filled in the blanks (literally: the many redacted sections of the FBI transcription were rendered on-stage by blackouts) about why Reality is in prison today, how Satter and her company interpreted the transcript for the stage, and Winner-Davis’ reaction to having a pivotal moment in her daughter’s life turned into art. Truly an honor to be part of it.

A sample:

PS

In the year since you premiered this work, we’ve gained even greater awareness of the role and power of whistleblowers, thanks in large part to the recent House impeachment hearings. I wonder if the work resonates differently now, 12 months later, for either of you?

TS

It’s horrifying how relevant this remains, because Reality remains in jail, and the facts that she was sharing are so taken for granted, are in the public debate. I was screaming at NPR when Fiona Hill was testifying, saying it’s just a fact that the Russians did this, and I was going, “Reality. Reality.” It’s just beyond an attention to whistleblowers. What Reality was alerting people to has remained more relevant than ever.

BW-D

I scream at my TV quite often, too. It’s been frustrating, since day one, how little empathy, how little attention has been placed on Reality and her case. When the whole impeachment whistleblower thing came up, everybody was saying the word whistleblower all day long, every day. And I’m just like, “Yes, what have we been trying to say? Now will you listen to the value of what a whistleblower can hold?”

Now we go back to the whole dialogue about, was it really Russia that interfered with our election or was it Ukraine? Again, 

“My daughter is in prison right now because she released a document with proof of Russian election interference. And I can’t believe that now in America we’re going back to a place where people are even doubting, was it Russia?” —Billie Winner-Davis

I just want to scream. My daughter is in prison right now because she released a document with proof of Russian election interference. And I can’t believe that now in America we’re going back to a place where people are even doubting, was it Russia? It’s sad, and it’s infuriating. I live in a constant roller coaster of emotion.

READ THE WHOLE THING.

Learn more about Reality Winner at Stand with Reality.

Announcing The Ostracon, a new blog funded by a Warhol Foundation/Creative Capital Arts Writers Grant

I’m excited to share news that writer and curator Nicole J. Caruth and I are recipients of a 2019 Arts Writers Grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. The yearlong grant will fund the creation and development of a new collaborative blog called The Ostracon, which will launch at theostracon.net in the first half of 2020.

The Ostracon will look at figures and ideas outside the mainstream of contemporary art—from public policy, indigenous rights, and folklore to community organizing, historic preservation, environmental science, journalism, and food justice—that may offer insight into new forms of making and art that’s more responsive, relevant, and connected to the way we live now as individuals and communities. Taking its name from the pottery shards used in ancient Athens when voting to ostracize community members, the site aims to celebrate, instead of push out, voices from art’s periphery. 

Press:

ARTnews
Artforum
e-flux
Glasstire
Stanford Department of Art & Art History

Interventionist Typography: Erik Brandt on Five Years of Ficciones Typografika

As a longtime resident of Minneapolis’ Powderhorn Park neighborhood, one of my favorite dog-walking routes was past graphic designer Erik Brandt’s house on 36th Avenue. The allure: an ever-changing panel on the side of his garage that every day or two featured a new poster (or three) by designers and typographers from around the globe. As a neighbor and friend of Brandt’s, I was also one of the earlier writers to pick up on the project, dubbed Ficciones Typografika. I interviewed him about it in 2013 on my personal blog, Eyeteeth, and wrote a more comprehensive essay on it for the now-defunct Medium design-focused site re:form a year later. When it came time to finish the project—after 1,641 posters installed year-round from 2013 to 2018—Brandt graciously turned to me to contribute to his just-released monograph on the project. Published this month by Australia’s Formist Editions, Ficciones Typografika: 1642 includes photographic documentation of every poster—including some amazing work by the likes of Iman Raad, Ed Fella, Anthony Burrill, Sarah Boris, Bráulio Amado, and friends like Jasio Stefanski and Ben Schwartz—as well as an essay by Ben DuVall and a new interview I conducted with Brandt.

It was a wonderful project for the way it joined the global and the local, the physical and the virtual (it had a huge life online, thanks to Brandt’s dutiful documentation of all aspects on a Tumblr site and related social media), the high and the low, and I’m honored to be involved.

Brandt and Formist have generously allowed us at the Walker Reader to excerpt this interview on our design vertical, The Gradient. Read it here.

Eyeteeth's greatest hits: Sigur Ros, Galaxie 500, and John Yang

From 2003 to 2015, I ran Eyeteeth, an art blog that combined quick hits with original essays and musings. Occasionally, I’ll find an old post and resurface it here.

“In the age of derivatives, reasserting an original: John Yang's Blindman's Bluff”

Back in July 2010, I stumbled upon familiar-looking graffiti: a sleepwalking boy stenciled on a boxcar in Minneapolis. I’d seen it in Berlin years earlier… and somewhere else that I couldn’t quite recollect. In this piece, I tracked down this ubiquitous image to an album cover by Sigur Ros, the Icelandic band, which apparently used a photo by the late John Yang without permission, according to his daughter, Naomi, half of the late-’80s indie band, Galaxie 500.

Interview: Meredith Monk on #MeToo, Trump, and Recurring History

Meredith Monk—the 75-year-old composer, vocalist, visual artist, and educator—has performed at the Walker more than a dozen times since 1974. With this week’s performance of Monk’s Cellular Songs, I wondered: how can Walker Reader contribute new, engaging ideas about an artist who’s been so extensively written on?

Monk is known for many things, but chief among them are: her wordless vocalization style (she believes the voice is an instrument and that words often say less than phonemes), her Buddhist practice, her role as a pioneering woman in a male-dominated world of experimental music and art. Many of these aspects of her long, impressive career have been covered already, in a video by Tate Modern, a Meet The Composer appearance, an On Being interview, scholarly essays and interviews (including in the Walker’s 1998 catalogue Art Performs Life: Merce Cunningham / Meredith Monk / Bill T. Jones), in Lion’s Roar magazine, and in numerous videos with Buddhist practitioners. What could I possibly add to that rich, important history?

In the end, I went with a traditional format—a standard interview—but hopefully it stands out for the timeliness of the discussion: in these tumultuous times, how does this celebrated artist stay balanced, and how does her work address this instability? Long by Walker Reader standards, the 3,500-word discussion covered her own reaction to #MeToo, and her experiences being a woman coming up in an experimental art scene dominated by men—

—to her rare decision to include words, instead of nonverbal vocalizations, in her newest work, Cellular Songs:

I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed doing it.

Related: I’ve long admired Monk, going back at least as far as the Walker’s 1998 exhibition Art Performs Life, and while I didn’t mention it to her, our connection was a tiny form of reunion: back in 2001, I send her a letter asking her to be part of my conceptual art project Signifier, Signed… She complied, mailing back my “autograph” written in her hand, something I truly appreciate and treasure.

Catalogue: Kaz Oshiro in Collecting on the Edge

I’m excited to have been commissioned to write an entry on Kaz Oshiro for the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art’s new exhibition catalogue, Collecting on the Edge (Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 20178. It’s my second time writing about the LA-based Japanese artist: in 2012, I interviewed Oshiro for the Walker Art Center on the occasion of his inclusion in the exhibition, Lifelike. The entry is also online as a collection record for the museum.

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How Can Contemporary Art Be More Inclusive of Native Voices? (walkerart.org)

"Why is Jimmie Durham the artist—or, at least, one of very few artists—selected for a major touring retrospective? Why isn’t more art by Native Americans collected, contextualized, and presented by major institutions like the Walker, the Whitney, and MoMA? And why is there so little representation—both within the staffs of contemporary art institutions and in the critical art press that covers them—of Native American, First Nations, and indigenous peoples?"

The traveling exhibition Jimmie Durham: At the Center of the World has reignited longstanding questions about the artist’s identification as Cherokee, sparking numerous critiques by Cherokee artists and curators and defenses by Native and non-native curators alike, from Ashley Holland and America Meredith to Paul Chaat Smith and Anne Ellegood, the Hammer Museum curator who organized the show. But while much has been written about the controversy itself, which is sure to intensify as the exhibition tours to New York and Saskatoon in coming months, it tends to eclipse a larger issue: the dearth of opportunities within the contemporary art field for Native American artists. Responding to this situation, I organized a Skype conversation with a range of Native artists and scholars. The discussion, co-organized with and moderated by Sicangu Lakota artist Dyani White Hawk, was published on Walker Reader today, October 12, 2017, as a text conversation plus audio interview. It features:

Kathleen Ash-Milby (Navajo Nation), an Associate Curator at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) in New York. 

Jeffrey Gibson (Mississippi Band of Choctaw), a New York–based mid-career multidisciplinary artist. 

Luzene Hill (Eastern Band of Cherokee), a multimedia artist based in Atlanta, best known for conceptual installations addressing the issue of violence against women. 

Candessa Tehee, PhD (Cherokee Nation), a Tahlequah-based artist based and ssistant professor of Cherokee and Indigenous Studies and coordinator of the Cherokee Language Program at Northeastern State University

Read "How Can Contemporary Art Be More Inclusive of Native Voices?" on Walker Reader. 

Jeffrey Gibson, IN NUMBERS TOO BIG TO IGNORE, 2016

The Digital Non-Visitor (Art in America)

The October 2016 issue of Art in America is dedicated to "The Digitized Museum: Technologies of Engagement." I was one of "eight specialists [asked] to weigh in on new technology and the museum experience," along with Peter Gorgels (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam), Katrina Sluis (The Photographer's Gallery, London), Sree Sreenivasan (City of New York, formerly of the Metropolitan Museum of Art), Lev Manovich (City University of New York), Maxwell Anderson (New Cities Fondation), and Orit Gat (Rhizome). My text:

They call it “flyover country,” but to be less judgy, let’s just say: the Walker Art Center isn’t exactly at—or near—the center of the art world. New York is one thousand miles away, Beijing well over six thousand. Despite this geography, the Internet puts us in the thick of the discussion about culture today and what it means to make, present, and contextualize art. But the rationale behind our digital publishing isn't to increase the Walker's relevance to the art world: it’s to increase art’s relevance to people around the world.

Since its founding as an art center in 1940, the Walker has been in the publishing game. Exhibition catalogues and periodicals like Design Quarterly, helped put us, and our ideas, on the map—or at least in libraries, bookstores, and museum shops nationwide. Today, our reach is far more expansive thanks to online publishing efforts that bring original artist interviews, curatorial essays, short documentaries, and our previously printed texts to desktops, smartphones, and tablets anywhere in the wired world. Relaunched in 2011 as an ever-changing news-style publication, the Walker home page emphasizes our evolving thinking about our audience: that is, thinking that equally values virtual and actual visitors, those likely to visit us in Minneapolis and those who might like to, but due to geography or economics, can’t.

But simply being online doesn’t bridge all geographic gulfs. To matter, our stories—usually surfaced via social media and competing with that terrain’s unique kind of clutter—need to be at least one of three things: relevant, surprising, or unique. To this end, some of our content is pegged to issues in the news, and topics people are talking about online. Our ongoing Artists Op-Eds series, for instance, invites artists such as Ron Athey, Dread Scott, and Natascha Sadr-Haghighian to sound off on pressing matters like Michael Brown’s killing, the Mediterranean refugee crisis, and the “post-AIDS” body. In a 2013 blog post, published just after Edward Snowden’s NSA revelations, designer Sang Mun wrote about the protest typeface, ZXX, that he developed after working as a CIA codebreaker during his conscription in the Korean army. Other stories feature the unexpected. For instance, our design director interviewed the media director of the antigay Westboro Baptist Church—a group in Topeka, Kansas, known for its hate speech—about its sign production studio. And our coverage of a Minneapolis design team’s “Refugees Welcome” storefront sticker campaign sparked interest from the White House. Some posts provide exclusive experiences: the first read of a curatorial essay from our Ordinary Pictures exhibition catalogue, say, or free online screenings of commissioned moving image works by Uri Aran, Moyra Davey, Shahryar Nashat, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, among many other artists.

So far, what we do appears to be working: our local online visitorship remains steady, while nearly 70 percent of site visitors are coming from out of state—and a third from international locales.

A Black Metal Logo for the Walker Art Center

Dubbed  the "Dark Lord of Logos" and the "Paul Rand of Metal, " prolific logo designer Christophe Szpajdel is best known for a style now copied by countless death-, black-, dark-, white-, gothic-, and Nordic-metal bands: dense, rhizomatic, with gestural flourishes that alternately conjure images of moss, talons, corpuscles, or decay. Fittingly, he's designed logos for bands from Pyre, Vultures, Human Remains, Vomit of Torture, and Sadistic Passage. During his visit to Minneapolis as part of the Walker Art Center's 2011–2012 exhibition Graphic Design: Now In Production, I asked him to do one more logo: that of the museum itself. He obliged, creating a Walker logo that combines references to Art Nouveau and plant life in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, with a touch of black metal thrown in. In my video interview he discusses the logo that now graces Walker t-shirts and totes and, briefly, the Walker homepage. 

Can Art Change the World? And Other Musings from the Pages of Adbusters

As associate editor of the Vancouver-based countercultural publication Adbusters from 2003 to 2005, I contributed stories on art, media, and culture each issue, from profiles of artist-activists (including Emily Jacir and Allora & Calzadilla) to think-pieces (including "Divinity for the Reality-Based Community," "Anarchy in the RNC," and others). I was guest art editor of issue #51, entitled "Art Fart" and featuring cover art by a then little-known UK street artist, Banksy. Among my contributions was a survey of top figures in the contemporary art world—from artists Thomas Hirschhorn and Rirkrit Tiravanija to curators Hou Hanru and Robert Storr—to address the question "Can art change the world?"