Halloween always seems to start with the question, Who should I be? rather than, Who am I? After speaking with Marnie Weber, it was apparent that some of our biggest fears are of exposing the self. The masks we create in defense being all the more terrifying than what is within. For close to 30 years, Marnie Weber has centered her practice on looking inside for the characters and stories to enact. Her honesty about the sentimentality and romance at the root of her work fearlessly sets it apart.
Her latest project,Eternity Forever, incorporates film, installation, collage, and performance—including the death of one band and the birth of another. Set in Los Angeles’ Altadena Cemetery, this sixth installment of West of Rome’s Women in the City program, Weber reaches a new scale for her work giving life to her vision of a feminine brand of horror.
Richard GoldsteinYou grew up in Connecticut. Did that shape your fascination with the occult at all?
Marnie WeberDefinitely, there’s a long history of Spiritualism there. On a personal level, I spent a lot of time in nature, just hours and hours, to fictionalize what I was seeing in nature. With this new work I was very much inspired by the old fashioned Halloween parades in New England. Kids would dress up into costumes and parade around. There’s a real sentimental feeling to this new work in regards to Halloween characters and monsters.
For me, one of the highlights of my life as a kid was dressing up in those Halloween costumes and parading around. I thought that was just wonderful, I could just live and die right there. As an adult, I thought it would be interesting to include a parade of monsters at the end of the film. I thought it would be nice to do a combination of the old sentimental Halloween costumes with Bosch and Brueghel characters—demons that have come exorcized from within me, that I’ve then befriended.
RGCould you describe the piece a little bit because it is a lot more than just a film. It’s more of an experiential thing with the installation performance.
MWThe overall show is calledEternity Forever, and there will be a screening of the filmThe Eternal Heartplus a live score from my band The Spirit Girls. We’re going to play the soundtrack to the film. There’s going to be a graveyard walk-through with monsters and spirits from the film wandering about in the graveyard. The film will be shown in the Mausoleum. And at the end of it, everyone will go upstairs to the gallery where I have a series of collages of graveyards which I’ve shot all over America and Europe. Those collages are inhabited by creatures I’ve created as well. And so, it’s a lot of different mediums combined together to create a whole theatrical experience but in the realm of contemporary art.
In the movie, I play an old silent film character with the heavy make up and the curls. Silent film stars always have this very vulnerable naïve quality to them, but I wanted to make it sort of a sentimentalizing of a horror movie combined within the silent film era, but with my own sound track which makes the film feel contemporary. So when you’re watching it you see the slates that look like they’re from the silent film era, and slowly color emerges and sound and you’re not quite sure what time period you are in anymore.
RGHow do you move through it all? Your process incorporates so much with making the collages and the film and the sculptures. How does it all come to be?
MWWell, my studio is near the Mausoleum and I often go to the graveyard for inspiration and contemplation. One day, I discovered there was an art gallery that sits defunct in there, so I felt this would be a great place to show my graveyard series that I’ve been working on for years. So it started really with those collages, but the idea with the monsters started previously. I’ve always liked really friendly feeling monsters, like the kind of monsters that need to be rescued and taken home and taken care of rather than the ones that are going to scare you. I realized that these are things actually coming out of my subconscious. In befriending these personal demons in the work, they became really living, and I felt that they were part of my family after I started making them. I shot the film at Cal Arts with a group of honors high school film students that came from all over and applied for this program called California State Summer School for the Arts. These are really exceptional film-making youths, and they participated in making the costumes and in the filming. It was a really amazing experience for me to be able to make the work much more youthful and naïve. So I think the film really shows that quality, I mean my work is always somewhat child-like but this almost feels more teenager-like than a lot of the earlier work that I’ve done. So it was definitely inspired by the people I was working with.
RGThat’s an interesting point because a lot of gothic style is a youth-centric phenomenon, and it’s interesting how it’s a trend that kind of bubbles up around teen culture.
MWWell back in the old days during silent horror films these were adults making these gothic horror films and the history of gothic writers—Mary Shelly, she was fully an adult when she wroteFrankenstein. And that’s another important point, in contemporary art the men have owned the monster imagery for years; I think it’s nice that women start working in the realm of monsters. That’s really important for me.
RGI was going to ask you about that, especially considering what you said about taking care of the monsters. People have said that you take a feminine approach to horror. But I’m not sure I would say it’s horror…phantasmagoria may be more it, which has more of a romantic tie, a romantic tradition.
MWYeah, I call it sentimentalized horror. But romantic horror would be a good term, too. I think it’s because monsters are viewed as having incredibly masculine energy and then in the movies the women tend to be victims. I want to bring down the masculine energy of the monsters and make them more vulnerable, so they don’t overpower the woman. In my film, it’s more about her love for them that makes her go into this realm of madness.
RGRight, it seems very sweet. There is a point in the movie that bringsSnow Whiteto mind, when the monsters circle around you and put flowers down, just like the Seven Dwarves.
MWYeah, that was a bit fairy-tale-like but it’s actually from real experience. The way I see my movies is that things pop out of my subconscious and then later on I analyze where they came from, and I think that’s where it came from, like a dream.
And we haven’t even talked about the whole father thing in the film…that’s classic fairy tale. He’s not the evil father; he just doesn’t want to have anything to do with her sweetness or appreciate it. But the irony is, he keeps asking for sweet potatoes, but then he won’t take her peaches, which are feminine in form, while his sweet potatoes are masculine in form, so a lot of that is just happy accidents.
RGIt was interesting, when you were talking about your role in the films, it kind of made me think there is a certain level of camp, would you say?
MWOh yes, definitely.
RGIf camp is something that releases you from a certain stereotype, does it work in the same way for you? Like if you put on a certain kind of personality do you have the feeling of reclaiming it or recreating it?
MWYeah, I hadn’t thought of it in terms of camp. Well, camp is very theatrical and naïve in a way, and I wanted to make the text very camp, very overblown, over-sentimental, and over-romantic which is all very camp itself. So then I would say it is somewhat camp, but in a very honest sense. Camp never strikes me as really genuine. Mine is definitely a genuine approach to exploring things like death and love. The work is much more emotionally porous than typical contemporary art, but I take it to the extreme like that. It’s very extreme in terms of its sentimentality and romanticism.
RGIt’s interesting how your work has maintained a really solid core over the years in the subject matter.
MWI am really committed to poetic narrative pushing the boundaries of how art is represented in galleries. I’m not going to let that all go for formal things. That’s why I like to put costumes on mannequins and call them sculptures and project film in an installation where the audience feels they are part of a scene in a movie. I show my sculptures as props rather than sculptures. I just think the role of the artist is to push the boundaries of what they think art is, and a lot of theatrical devices are a good way of doing it. And of course it all comes from years of performance.
RGDo you think that is something unique to L.A.? I mean, it happens here in New York, but is that something that has a lot of gravity for activity out in L.A.?
MWYeah definitely, for my friends who are artists there is a real theatricality to a lot of the work that is produced out here, and I think a lot of it is living in a land where people are involved with the motion picture industry and they don’t necessarily grow up. I think a lot of people come to Los Angeles to not grow up and to live in fantasy, and so it really lends itself here to that and also there’s an incredible access to materials and costumes and props. No one bats an eye when you are looking for strange things in stores, so I think you can just sort of never grow up out here in California.
RGHow would the piece change in New York if you brought it here?
MWWell, I really want to bring it to New York, no doubt about it. I think a lot of the themes are so embedded in our unconscious through fairy tales and then later horror movies that I think that people would respond to it. Also, I think that people are beginning to look for more emotionalism in contemporary art. And the reason why I work in this realm is because of the years in performance—being on stage and wanting to get a reaction from people. I really like to feel some emotion coming from the viewer. So, the work really lends itself to that.
RGDo you think that what drives you to be more honest is that there is too much irony in works now?
MWYeah, exactly. And I think the irony is fear-based irony, and I don’t ever want myself to make fear-based work.
RGWhat do you mean by fear-based irony?
MWWhere people step back and put on a mask and say, This really isn’t about the spirit, this really isn’t about emotion, this is really a formal object with nothing behind it. And sometimes I think that there’s a fear of exposing oneself…and I don’t have that fear because of the performance years. But I think people should really question their own work and question themselves, if they are really producing something from within rather than something that will look good, or even more grossly, what will sell.
RGThere was theGothicshow at ICA Boston and theHell Boundbook.
MWThat was Francesca Gavin’s.
RGIt seems like Goth has been around for a while so what do you think is causing people to say, Oh this is New Gothic, what is attention getting about it now? Or why are we looking towards it?
MWWell, I think it’s been around longer in the lo-brow art circles. A lot of theJuxtapozartists are fully gothic, and I think the contemporary art world has been shying away from it because it really does push the boundaries sometimes with what you see in the galleries today. But maybe now, the boundaries in the galleries have been pushed to the point where gothic work can be expected in a high art context. It can be appreciated in a high art context, especially if it’s done in a theatrical manner.
RGMaybe because it has been seen more as a commodity, just Pop.
MWA Pop thing, yeah. Well, I think the Mike Kelley show at Gagosian in New York was really inspiring for me because it had a lot of that, a lot of Gothic theatricality, and also a lot of historical Americana imagery. I really think that opened up a lot of doors in people’s minds just to see what could be in a gallery space.
RGAnd how was it working with West of Rome, I mean they aren’t a typical gallery space, right?
MWRight, they just do roving shows. Emi [Fontana] just said to me, “If you were to do a show, what would be your dream show?” And gallerists don’t typically say what would be your dream show; What can I do for you? People are more about what’s going to be in the show. Emi’s is a different approach to viewing the work. It really opened me up and made me feel more free. So it started out as just a collage show in the mausoleum, and then it blossomed into this huge spectacle.
RGYou have a new band emerging out of this performance, right?
MWI wanted to simplify my life, so I thought it would really be fun to do a noise band because if someone doesn’t show up it’s not going to screw up the whole thing and we wouldn’t necessarily have to practice like maniacs like we do with Spiritual Girls. So, I started off transforming my life in thinking about the Amish people and how their lives are so simple. It’s sort of an Amish inspired noise band called Fäuxmish, but of course everybody says Amish people don’t use electricity…so I didn’t want it to be like, wink, wink, joke, joke, but it was more about the philosophy. Since I had done so much work with Spiritualism, it’s been like a natural step to explore a different American spiritual group through the music. So we’re going to play a show December 9th as part of the West of Rome thing, so it will be nice to transition into a new band without feeling the loss of the other band.
RGThat’s cool. So it will kind of emerge out of the project.
MWYeah, yeah. And then actually I think the new band will be featured in the next movie and I’ll carry it through and I think maybe the Spirit Girls will reemerge again one day as the Spirit Girls Cover Band or something. But it’s nice because I can just really live in the realm of fantasy here with all these stories I make for myself and try to keep myself entertained.
