on polar bears and passion: the Rat interviews Cindy Loehr

RATSALAD: So, I have been thinking about your work & how it addresses loneliness/longing/love.  What strikes me is that you are very good at taking these things seriously, while taking received language & imagery about them not-seriously.  My friend Stephanie once said that the problem with the holidays & other culturally valued occasions is that though the interpersonal pipelines stay at the same gauge, the things we want to put through them get really big & can't fit.  Like maybe trying to put a polar bear through one of those bank teller vacuum tube systems.  Sender, putative receiver, and bear all only stand to get frustrated, and yet there's a faith in and loyalty to the system that won't allow for stepping outside into broad & open space.

Religion, spiritual work and therapy have their pipelines: sacraments and masses, confessions and prayer meetings, scheduled sessions, careful notations of dreams & drawings.  All of which work considerably better than no-pipeline. None of which will successfully transmit the polar bear.

So I guess I bring this all up because I feel your work, let's say the bluebirds, is simultaneously wondrous & pointing out its falling short as a wondrousness-provider.  The birds are magical, sleek and glitzy on their pedestals, but their song says they're not going to do the work for me.

In medieval aesthetics, there's a recurring concern to cast art as a means of pointing to something else, not as an end in itself.  The beauty of the art object does its job by pointing to Beauty; if it does not do this, it fails by tempting its viewers to idolatry.  (have you read Eco's Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages?)  (Why not do both simultaneously: be beauty and point to Beauty?)

Maybe this happens with love, or self-help, or therapy, or religion: getting stuck on one level or another: this person is only my pointer to Love and thus matters less as a real human being.  This one person is my love and there is no need for Love.  Level-shifts, getting stuck between levels, failing to see levels as only a way of talking about something ineffable and more unshakeably present than any concepts or word-play.

So, Cindy: not sure at all how this works as the beginning of a conversation, but would love your thoughts.

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CINDY LOEHR: I would like you to read this recent submission to the love letter collection.  I think it is the best submission I have ever received.

I will write more in response to your email later.  Those things you say about love speak directly to what I'm thinking about right now.  You hit the nail on my head.
Read the love letter submission now in a new window.

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CL: To start, I've always thought of art as a kind of lure, I think this might share something with the medieval aesthetics you are talking about.  A kind of bait and switch to a more complex meaning.

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RAT: Tell me more about bait and switch.

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CL: I always think of how the audience encounters a work, because the receiver is crucial in developing the content of the work.  If a message from the work isn't received by the viewer, the work short circuits and never fully realizes itself.  I think an art work is a triangle with the artist, the art object, and the audience occupying the three vertices. The meaning is created in the in-between space.

I know how short attention spans are these days and how fickle interest is, my own included, so I deliberately court the audience with different sorts of lures: iconic imagery, dramatic forms, glittery materials, moving components, etc.  I want the audience to be enticed. It's a courtship ritual I put on for the audience.

Hopefully these lures will spark the audience's interest, which ideally translates into a longer than 5-second experience with the work.  Once the audience is engaged, the content unfolds over time, a more complicated message than what was initially advertised.  This is where the bait and switch comes in.  The beautiful glittery bluebirds of happiness sing a song about depression.  A monumental fiery tent holds an abstract oration.

This difference between image and text, form and content, creates a tension in the work, a space that resonates and eventually collapses with the audience's experience. The tension, conflict and recreation of meaning in this space is important. After the person leaves the exhibit, I hope that an image will stay with them, a memory landmark to lure them back to mentally revisit the work.

One line of the Bluebird Burden song says  "We are only vessels, delivering these words."  This line points to the particular and perhaps peculiar relationship I have with sculpture as container for content, something for content to resonate through and off of.  I wonder how this view of sculpture might parallel how some religions consider the body. A place for the spirit to manifest.

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RAT: It occurs to me in reading your description of how your sculptures act as vessels of meaning that the parts of humans which are expert at hunting and gathering are not the same as the parts which are expert at deriving meaning from experience.  So in order to get across what you want them to, your sculptures have to attract and hold the busy hunter-gatherer for long enough that the meaning-maker will have time to register other levels of content too.  Ideas procreate & as artists we are orchids and bees both.

Tell me a little about the contexts in which you have shown your work, and contexts you can imagine, but have not yet tried.  Would your pieces work in a church/ in a shopping mall/ in a parade?

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CL: Of all my projects, the love letter collection engages most extensively, and naturally, beyond the art context.  It draws hundreds of thousands of visitors and love letter submissions from all over the world.  The success of this project in large part satisfies my desire to work outside the art world.  I also have the  "don't give up" magnet project, another ongoing project where invited distributors give away  "don't give up" magnets to people they meet, free of charge.  These magnets end up in homes or offices, inserting themselves quietly but persistently in the lives of all sorts of people.

As far as the sculpture installations go, I would love to see them in other contexts - a church or shopping mall would be great - but for now my priorities are with the development of the work.  If someone would offer an opportunity to put my work in a non-art context, I would be interested, but the complications of negotiating that for myself is outside the scope of my schedule right now.  I think there might come a time later in my career when I could pursue these possibilities or where such opportunities would present themselves to me, but for now, I want to stay focused on the work in the studio. The art contexts are there, and are supporting me, so that's where the sculptures are located now, and I'm happy with that.

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RAT: Do you find yourself wanting to know more about what your viewers see/feel in the work?

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CL: I think the audience's reading of a work contributes to its meaning, so putting the work in the world is the beginning of a kind of  "call and response" ritual for me, and an important part of how I think about the work.

I do feel like I get enough feedback on the work at openings, through reviews, from mentors, colleagues and word of mouth, to satisfy my interest.

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RAT: I just realized I didn't ask you about the love letter you mentioned at the very beginning of our exchange & I am wondering what brought it, specifically, to mind?

More generally, could you say a little bit about how you read the Love Letter Collection as a whole body of emotional evidence?

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CL: I received that love letter submission I forwarded to you right at the time I received your first questions.  There wasn't any reasoning behind sending it.  I was just floored by the language and needed to share it - perhaps an attempt to dilute some its power. That was actually the first love letter submission I've shared outside the traditional posting process of the love letter collection.  I don't think I'll do it again, because I broke my own rules there. But there was something in this letter and about my state of mind at the time that pushed me to get it outside myself right away. In addition to sending it to you, I also sent it out to some other people, including some friends, collaborators and mentors.

This kind of "sending out" is actually a good example of how I work and how I think.  I make my art suspended on an ephemeral but strong web of discussion and support with a select group of people. I really should come with an attachment saying "This artist is brought to you by:" with a listing of about seven or so people I hold very close in my life at the time.

Sometimes these people simply receive what I send.  And sometimes they respond. They don't necessarily affect the content of my work, but they definitely enable its existence. 

Back to your question: if you are interested in talking about the love letter collection in terms of emotional evidence, my question for you is: What do you think the evidence points to?

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RAT: About 2 weeks since I last wrote- your challenge to me to address the love letters has been with me off and on since then- I went back and looked at the ones I remembered most from my first reading of the current collection: the sister-to-brother letter, the why aren’t you dead letter, the one signed with a “bisou,” and the garlic bread.  Not sure what sort of Venn diagram includes all these forms of address in one overlap- but it occurs to me tonight (at the end of a long day) that the overlaps might be formed of urgency & also of language born outside habitual patterns of speech.

There are those which feel like self-conscious Love Letters (to be delivered with longstems); there are those which feel like last resorts of communication between people who see each other regularly but don’t talk; there are those to be lobbed over a wall and then run like hell.

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CL: I was recently interviewed by a woman from London about the Love Letter Collection. I like the idea of closing out this interview with an excerpt from another:

> Has writing a love letter become a dying art?

Definitely not. Take a look at the love letter collection and you will find ample proof. I think there will always be a compulsion to write down feelings of love/desire, both good and bad.  The form has changed - handwritten letters to typed email - but the intent and content is the same.  Technology changes, human nature doesn't.

I think the main reason people write love letters is to literally try to get the feelings "off their chest."  I like that expression because it recognizes the physical manifestation of strong feeling, and the attendant need to treat it.  I'd describe the feeling of desire as something like having a vacuum cleaner on full blast in your gut.  Writing down the feeling can help a person get some distance and relief from it.  

I think that writing a love letter is essentially a self-centered activity. It's trying to explain yourself to yourself. If you send the letter to the person it's directed to, you are literally putting your feelings onto that person, in a way asking them to take some responsibility.  If, instead, you send your letter off to the love letter collection, you put these emotions into another context entirely, without involving the person you desire in the complicated morass of your emotions.

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