2013 Artist-In-Residence Jules Rosskam speaks with artist and Ultra-red member Robert Sember on engaging community as an artist and teacher, and representing identities as both a mirror and rebuttal. Rosskam premieres GHOST TRIP, a new collaboration with Madsen Minax on Saturday, December 14.
Robert Sember: On your website you refer to yourself as an artist, teacher, and activist. What does it mean to be a teacher, to think of oneself as an artist, and be engage as an activist?
Jules Rosskam: That’s a great question and potentially disorienting for me, because I'm questioning right now whether I'm going to continue teaching. Just putting that out on the table. I guess “artist” is the title that I'm most comfortable with. Because from as early as I can remember, I thought I was going to be an artist; this is what I'm going to do with my life. As a little kid I was always doing art, although I thought I was going to be a painter, which is what I did through undergrad. And then I never picked up a paintbrush again! So I thought I was going to go into the fine art world, and then upon graduating college realized that my social insecurities or social awkwardness would keep me from being in the art world and to sell myself in the way that you need to. Of course, funnily enough I turned to video and film, which is not any different really, but it didn't occur to me at the time. I think another reason I turned away from painting was because of my political concerns with the world. I couldn't really figure out how to have a conversation with art and politics in painting without being didactic. I also did these enormous paintings, and had no space and no money and all of that. I had made videos as a hobby.
My grandmother had given me a video camera for my bar mitzvah, and I was always recording things. It was actually a way that I dealt with my social anxieties, was to be behind the camera all the time. But I don't know why it never clicked that that could be art or that could be a career. I mean, I think partially it's time-specific. It wasn't now, where everyone has a camera and everyone has iMovie, and you know, I meet 16 year olds and they're like “I've made 30 films!” and I think, “Oh my god, I don't even know how to talk to you”. But it wasn't something that I took seriously and it wasn't something that our larger culture took seriously at the time. Anyway, I think video ended up being a place where I understood how to be political in a particular kind of way.
I lived in Brooklyn and ended up working for the now-defunct Dyke TV. I literally just happened to live down the block from the organization and stumbled in one day, and started editing for them. Then I ended up being one of the people running Dyke TV, and it was there that I made my first film “transparent”. I really just wanted to make a documentary and didn't have any idea what I was doing but I just decided to do it anyway. So I made this documentary that was about trans men who bore children. And what's interesting is that Dyke TV is where those three identities— artist, activist, educator— all meshed. Because I came in as an artist, and Dyke TV was started by members of the Lesbian Avengers and therefore very political, and I started teaching production. So all of those things sort of came into being, that triple identity, at Dyke TV. And it was through teaching other people how to make films that I learned how to make them. I was teaching people before I had really done anything myself, which was kind of strange.
I had gotten excited about community media education a few years prior to that, while doing an internship in Chicago. At the time, the Chicago Parks Department had this really amazing program, which is not around anymore, where each parks building had an artist-in-residence. I was working at the Center for Communication Resources in Cabrini Greene, and teaching kids 6 to 18 how to use computers, how to do linear editing— this was just before digital editing started. So I was teaching people how to edit reel-to-reel. And it was there that I got a taste for community education and community-based activism. I was trying to teach the young people some basic media education skills. Largely that you could actually make images of yourself. Seeing the way that people were getting inspired, inspired me, and I think that led me to Dyke TV, and in many ways Dyke TV solidified my identity as a political artist. And I guess now, though I didn't necessarily see this then, teaching is an activist project. I think education is political, but I also think being out in various ways is also an activist project. And the fact that when I teach I have no interest in working in any kind of canon, and my project really is to always, no matter what I'm teaching, introduce people to things they've never seen or heard. This is also a political gesture.
RS: So when you say you're thinking about stopping to teach, that's just in the institutional sense of having a teaching job?
JR: Yes. It’s hard because I really love working in community education but the problem is, when I was working at Dyke TV, I wasn't making any money. I couldn't, I was working three other jobs just so I could work 20 hours at Dyke TV. I don't have the same amount of energy I did 10 years ago. It's a hard thing to figure out, where to position oneself in relationship to that. I've taught at really big public universities, and now I'm at Hampshire which is this very elite liberal arts college. And I have very conflicted feelings about that. In some ways, on some levels, it's been one of the most rewarding places because my students are so invested, and I have so many queer students and I have students who are really excited about what I'm teaching and it’s not a constant struggle to get them to be open to new things. But then I wonder, are these the students that really need me to be helping them? I don't know, I kind of go back and forth.
RS: That resonates strongly with the current crisis in education, which is merely a symptom of a larger crisis. Expanding student debt and the inflation of education costs are symptoms of the crisis. And the conditions and ideologies of freedom to which education is attached are also very much at crisis as there is an increasing recognition that education is organized to maintain and reproduce the class system. No wonder we're asking ourselves how we function as teachers in this world and where to focus our labors. That said, your work is investigative and exploratory. It is a project of learning. You work investigates how we organize community in response to the strategies and structures of power that shape subjects, subjectivities and our collective efforts. This task is systematically unpacked in your work. I see you grappling with that age old and absolutely necessary question about the relationship between history and the practices of the self. For example, in the first work I saw of yours you presented conversations within and across generations of feminists and queer activists who grappled with critical concerns. They did intellectual, affective and political labor together. It is a homage to the power of teaching and learning. That density of concern and engaged, creative labor comes through in the richness of the self-statements that people give in the statements they make in your work.
JR: That's interesting. I think that makes sense in the way that I end up making projects as I’m doing the research. Or the research and the process of making are all integrated. And the choice to have the final project reflect that whole process is both. I think you're right in the sense that it is connected to teaching in a way that I hadn't previously thought about or I wouldn't have put it that way, but I think your read of that is accurate in the sense that I am interested in making the process transparent. Both in terms of the ways in which moving images construct truth, and as a way to say “Here's the way this thing was built, and you can see this, and then you can do it. You can watch me starting over here and then you can watch me explore the thing and we can go on this journey together.” And so that also becomes a process of engagement.
RS: Very much so, and a reminder that we arrive at truth through the mediation of language and other tools. What we end up with is something that cannot be known separate from how it is known. This process of making is generative not only of the objects of our creation but also the social relations, structures, ideological systems and institutions. If teaching and learning are viewed in this way they become remarkable venues for the expression and investigation of contradictions. It is for this reason that I find the classroom a vital space for practicing, collectively, shifts in relations and production. Which reminds me of another connection I’d like to make between you work and processes of pedagogy. As we look at your work, we watch you change. We’re watching your story emerge through a sustained and entangled series of dialogues between others stories, conceptual framework, and histories of struggle. This results in statements of self-reflection, invitations to identification, and also the very complicated task of seeing your own life as lived in a relation of accountability to a constituency.
JR: That's a difficult and constant battle. I got asked to write an essay for The Transgender Studies Quarterly and it's a 'notes from the field,' section so I think a lot of artists are writing for it. I’m specifically writing about my latest film Thick Relations which I finished last year and has had a lot of problems in terms of reception and has been rejected from nearly everything, but has shown at a few places. So I was writing about my experiences of screening it at some identity-specific film festivals and the difficulty I've had, even with other works, in those spaces. What I find often is that – I'm going to make a broad generalization, which I know is dangerous, but I'm going to do it anyway – most of the people that attend LGBT festivals or identity-based festivals in general are going because they want to see themselves reflected in some way. They are – we are desperate for representation, right? And so you don't often get an audience that would consider themselves film savvy or particularly interested in film as an art form. They are interested in art as a tool of activism or more simply as a mirror. And those are totally real and valid concerns, but because my film work attempts to intervene in the rigidness of film genres and is non-traditional in the form that it takes, it can be difficult for audiences. And this last film in particular seems to be incredibly difficult for people. And so that is just, it's just a battle for me because I do find that I leave those spaces thinking, “I never want to go back here again.” And feeling very misunderstood by my community, for whom I'm making this work.
RS: Just this morning I heard a report on the first gay and lesbian couples to get married in New Jersey. One of the people interviewed states that now that marriage is legal in the state of New Jersey, I can ask for nothing more. “What else could I possibly want?” she concluded. If we stop and take stock of what this conditions of acceptance and equality entails I think there will be far less celebration. Which is maybe a bridge to the notion of 'utopia' that you are working with at this point. In the case of “marriage equality”, utopia is a condition of inclusion, which rests on a politics of equality, acceptance, acknowledgment, and respectability as opposed to other conceptions of utopia, which demand a certain kind of breaking. In this case utopia is not realized but imminent, if that even. What does it means for you to be resurrecting this project, which of course has had many iterations already?
JR: I'm still trying to be comfortable with taking up a project of utopia, because for such an extended period of time I didn’t want to engage with it at all. Then I had a realization a few years ago that my work was pretty much all about making community, and conversation and dialogue and space, and that this was potentially a utopian gesture. So I realized what bothered me in regards to conversations about utopia was the tenses. They're about the future, about getting somewhere, elsewhere. And for a lot of reasons that felt problematic and didn’t resonate. I'm not so interested in thinking about the place of utopia, but I'm interested in utopia as an active space, and that's sort of how I turned more towards performance; because it's ephemeral. I'm particularly interested in what happens between people, in the potentiality of human connection. In that sense, I am interested in the ways in which the quotidian things we already do are utopian, or can be spaces where utopia exists. Be that what we're doing right now, or sharing a meal together or having sex – from the totally banal to the ecstatic, it's that thing that happens between humans, that opens that space for, as Judith Butler might say, my undoing, or, your undoing, and it's in the process of the undoing that we can actually remake ourselves. And the remaking is the stepping towards that utopian, and I think the undoing is utopian also. It's the thing that happens where time and space collapse and perhaps I lose my sense of myself - the boundaries of my body - but as a way to come back to my body. It's not about leaving the body behind or leaving myself behind, but as a way to sort of get beyond those boundaries in order to actually be re-grounded, or re-embodied - in a different kind of way. And that sort of expanding and contracting I think is that utopian moment or that possibility - the way to transcend the oppressions of our lives without having to transcend them by thinking that “it will get better, later”. It's like, no, I think it's important to be engaged with our everyday lives and figure out ways to intervene in the place that we actually are. Because otherwise it becomes about salvation, it becomes religious. And that is a way of actually not being in your life, in thinking “oh, it's going to be better over there”. And it's also problematic in the sense that, maybe you can wait for it to get better, but these people can't wait for it to “get better”. And so how do we figure out how it's better now? And, you know, better is also maybe a problematic word, but how do we figure out how to, you know, connect to one another and to acknowledge the things that we already have and the things that are already happening that allow us to exist outside of the systems of oppression and domination.
RS: Another thing I'm hearing is the notion that instead of responding to what we lack by waiting for the intervention of an external agent, we operate with the knowledge that we already have what we need and must figure out how best to use our resources.
JR: Right, and I think it's a way of not saying, “OK, yes, living under capitalism in incredibly oppressive and it creates all sorts of limitations, and I just can't wait for capitalism to implode”. Well, OK, it will eventually, and it's going to be a very long time for that to happen, so I'm not going to spend my life waiting in my chair talking about how bad capitalism is until I die and then capitalism still outlives me. How do we make those daily interventions while living under capitalism.
RS: : Zizek distinguishes between what he calls the 'regulative' – how we act now – and the 'constituitive,' which he identifies as the communist future. He suggests that we have do what we do now with the possibility that our actions may actually be only legible in the future. That is, we cannot simply measure our efforts by our failure to realize this future. This is a prophetic space in which the texts we're producing today, the revelations within those texts, are to be interpreted only in the future. Thus we must live with the faith, that this future is possibly not something we can fully envision. This formulation again underscores the pedagogical roots of our efforts. The project is to try something and see where it takes us. We learn from that. Hence the actual making of the film is the knowing of the film. I know this future, this communist ideal, perhaps, as I'm making it. I am reminded of Paulo Freire’s notion of 'world making' in which pedagogy is not simply the movement of knowledge through the economy of exchange. Literacy is actually a process of reconstructing or reorganizing or re-knowing the world and making it different.
JR: The film I just finished, “Thick Relations,” is very much what that process is all about. Taking some of Augusto Boal's 'Theatre of the Oppressed' and translating it to film and thinking about getting this group of people together and saying, “Who do you want to be? This film is about you, but it doesn't have to be you now. You can bring parts of you now and you ten years ago and also the you that you want to be because it's the rehearsal for the everyday. So we're going to spend 5 weeks making this film of this character that's based on you, and you get to try out being some ways that you don't know how to be yet, and that has the potential to then show up, after the film is done, in your everyday life. You know, one of the performers said, “Something that I want to be is -” I can't remember exactly the language that he used, but basically 'nicer'. He could be a little bit harsh, and he said “I want to be gentler, so I want my character to be that way.” And I don't want to take credit for it, but I think that was part of his process of starting to be that person, which he is much more now in his everyday life. It can be an incredibly transformative process. A silly or unimportant example is the 'fake it 'til you make it' motto. Which is what an ex of mine would always say about being in art situations where you're supposed to be schmoozing and I would say I'm just too shy, I can't talk – and they would always just say 'fake it 'til you make it'. Act like you are this way until you actually are.
RS: And at the same time, do you really want to be the type of person who can function in that space?
JR: Absolutely! No. You're right. I mean, going back to what you said about the state of queer politics, we're humans so in some way we want to be recognized, and yet I have no interest in the mainstream, I have no interest in being legible in there. And yet I'm human, and so I want to be seen.
RS: Right. This question of the human central to the work I am doing with the House and Ballroom scene. It is a concern that emerges from the incredible violence, the terrorism, as Cornel West would call it, of slavery. In the post-colonial, white supremacist world in which we live, this question of the human must also be the question of difference. It is a questions of accountability, a critical ethical and political accounting for our implication in racism and other forms of oppression. How do we assume this task and not have it be like 'T' in LGBT.
JR: In name only! Yeah. So I'm curious about what that process has been like for you in terms of the constituency with which you're working or making work about or in tandem with, and how you then measure the work that you're making. Is it measured in relationship to the constituency and at what point, if ever, do their concerns override your concerns?
RS: Right. So the work is always done as part of a collective. It is not necessarily systematic, is often messy, and necessarily contentious. Most interesting are those places that no one really knows what to do with. For Ultra-red the long-term working with and through these collective investments is a pedagogical undertaking. We also ask how “aesthetic operations,” a mindfulness repetition, rhythm, pace, theatrically, and formal procedures, facilitate the long, sustained conversations within and between constituencies that are the hallmark of effective organizing. We experiment with different approaches to organizing these encounters. It is a process of testing and learning. It requires a tolerance for failure and a commitment to an opened investigation. I experience the ballroom scene as having its own commitment to repetition as it convenes, competes, reflects, and develops variations in its work. The work is not necessarily done in the interests of the new, although that is prized. In many ways it is done so that we can listen again and again and again, with the understanding that returning to an investigation can shift things.
JR: Right, in some way. Thinking about that in terms of my process, I am compelled to make the things I am compelled to make because I don't understand them. And I want to understand, and I am compelled always to investigate further, and further, and further, to understand. I mean, I think that relates back to being Jewish. Growing up going to Hebrew school – as Jews, our goal in life is to learn; always pushing. Once the question is answered it's answered and there's nothing left!
RS: The next question!
JR: Right! So questions are always much more fascinating to me. I don't really care what the answers to them are. Generally. I'm interested in having a conversation about what the answer might be but I'm rarely interested in getting to what the answer actually is. Also because there’s usually not really an answer, at least not a singular one. Because that goes back to the truth with a capital T, and does not seem to take into account time. Maybe the answer is this today but tomorrow it's a different thing! I have a really good friend who's actually one of the performers in Thick Relations who's gender is always changing. “Today I'm this and tomorrow I'm that”. And does not want the answer to ever be static.
RS: You know, this is a big rupture in the ballroom scene, with those older trans folk in the scene saying, “We fought so you could have access to all of this, and now you're just doing this”. For example, when I am with youth groups we often start by sharing our names and PGP (preferred gender pronoun). The repetition of that process affirms the unfixing of gender. For some the PGP is constant, for others it changes frequently, for some is both and all, and for others is measure the long road of transition. It appears as if gender is becoming increasingly differentiated. There is a plurality in place of the binary. I am not sure if its true but it feels like this is what is happening. There is great deal of violence accompanying this process. Just a few weeks ago, for example, on the same night, a young trans-woman and member of the Ballroom scene was brutally beaten in Harlem—she dies a few days later—and a young trans-activist and member of the Ballroom scene was prevented from walking in a woman’s category at a ball. These events reverberated through the community. It invited us to re-narrate the history of the Ballroom scene and how it takes up the contradictions of its times and its practices. The Ballroom scene is always in dialogue and is in many ways a rebuttal to dominant regimes of identity. But it is also a scene dominated by gay men and it reproduces within the scene some of the oppressive structures found elsewhere.
JR: Is there ever a tension in terms of working in a collective or working collaboratively with folks who maybe don't identify as artists or in terms of, “OK, you're committed to a particular process of working together, and you as an artist have particular aesthetic concerns that aren't the concerns of others or that feel maybe at times like you can't reconcile the two”. I don't know if that ever comes up for you, or if so how you deal with maybe – this maybe is coming back to that question that we started with about 'artist-activist-teacher' – how those things become reconciled with one another.
RS: I certainly do have – not so much with Ultra-red, probably because we're dispersed, so we don't actually see each other all that much and seldom reach the point where we’re irked by each other. We’re also committed to our shared project and respect each other and the work we’re doing in a respective cities. We are immersed in our local investigations and our conversations often lead with accounts of this work. Thus many of our ideas and decisions are made through these narratives of experience. This form of dialogue is helpful as a way of hearing and reconciling with each other. The Ballroom Scene is contentious and bound by deep allegiances and affections. The intensity is surely due to the fact that there is so much at stake.
I'll give you a very precise example. Paris is Burning is a symbol of exploitation as well as a cherished historical document. Many in the scene consider it a beautiful film with historical value both in what it documents and what it leaves out, as well as in the memory of how it was made and how those who collaborated in the making with the film felt both violated and honored. Another film is currently being made about the scene. This is another technically beautiful film about the community but not necessarily with the community. It is going to undoubtedly produce the same debates and the same ambivalence. I think these are symptoms of a tension between the economic of popular culture and art and the collectivity of the Ballroom scene. To my knowledge it is one of largest and longest-enduring arts collectives in the world. So much of its cultural work arises out of its collectivity. Yet the market economy of the art world requires the individual genius. The cash and credit flows in that direction. How do you present collectivity, how do you circulate it? It is far easier to make a spectacle.
Robert Sember is an artist, researcher, and member of the sound art collective Ultra-red, which organizes projects around constituencies involved in migrant rights, the AIDS crisis, fair housing, and anti-racism.
Image: Film still by Jules Rosskam
