Photo: Cy Amundson. Emily's Dorm Room, 2013.
Rawson Projects is very excited to announce Cy Amundson's forthcoming installation in the gallery, Emily's Dorm Room, which opens on Saturday, November 23 from 7 – 9 pm and runs through January 19, 2014.
For immediate release:
Rawson Projects in conversation with Cy Amundson about his current installation 'Emily’s Dorm Room', a six week residency in the gallery by NYU sophomore, social and cultural analysis student, Emily Leger-DeMane.
Rawson Projects: First let’s discuss the context and scope of this project. Perhaps you can give an idea of what you envisioned when you first conceptualized this work. What do you hope will happen in terms of interactions among Emily, viewers, and yourself?
Cy Amundson: The context is the easy part: the gallery, a social stage, the art world, and the now well-trodden, arguably tired, subset therein most readily identifiable as relational aesthetics. There are of course actual dormitories in this city, many, so the significance of this one is contingent on the otherwise mundane structure being posited, reconstituted as a simulacrum in an aestheticized environment, put in a situation that conspicuously deliberates over relationships of the real to the staged, voyeur to object, private to public; relationships that might otherwise involve some degree of criminality (read here window peeper) for the spectator to indulge in. Identifying the subject and object within this context is a somewhat more slippery proposition as the delineations between viewer, occupant, narrator, and participant/s are transient. As to what I hope to come of this ambiguous interstice, I would say that the resulting aftereffects are unpredictable by design.
RP: As you said, the idea of an occupied dorm room in a formal gallery space opens up a lot of issues. The structure is constructed so that the viewer is outside looking inward to someone’s private space. This has the effect of disrupting the viewer’s understanding of public vs. private spaces and the various power dynamics associated with that dichotomy. What do you think is interesting or desirable about this gesture? Why a dorm room in particular?
CA: Well I think you may have more or less answered the question with the question there, although the privacy relationship is somewhat less one-sided than you suggest. The object of the voyeurism in this situation is also the subject of the habitable space, its occupant, and, in this capacity, she controls access to it. She could shut the door. As to the question of why a dorm specifically as opposed to any other situation: student housing is a sort of existential space that we all (and I use ‘we all’ here in reference to a demographic that predominates the constituency of art openings) can relate to; that of a hopeful, possibly (certainly in some sense) naïve, wondrous, stoned, indulgent, and self important existence. It’s the place where we cement the notion, however mistakenly, that we are creatures of great insight and promise. This is the place where, for those of decent middle class upbringings, we nourish treasured illusions of sovereign independence and free will without repercussion. To be so bold as to supply my own analysis, there is a metaphor to be drawn here between this sort of insular and self-important living to the solipsism of our cultural institutions. Not to be entirely cynical about it; I feel a great deal of nostalgia - I imagine I’m not alone in this - for the sort of existence where the aforementioned juvenile enthusiasm and optimism flourishes before graduation into the less sheltered economy of living. This construction is meant to grant a kind of access, with implicit permission by its occupant, to a psychological space that has been denied by time to most of us.
There is an additional sense in which the specific choice of motif relates to temporality. The sophomoric space of the college dorm room, because of its relatively brief stint in our lives, necessarily alludes to the future of its occupant. More specifically it points to the yet unrealized culture towards which this young cultural analyst will one day be aiming her critical gaze. There is an amusing preponderance of apocalypticism in aesthetic theory. As is true of the dogma of any doomsday cult, what is particularly laughable is the presumption that the cataclysmic event should come to pass for some reason within one’s own lifespan. The prevalence of ‘ends’, ‘afters’, ‘deaths’, and ‘beyonds’ in the titles of culture writers of note (that without fail for those writing in this century fixate robotically on the internet as a marker after which human relations are irrevocably changed) hints at an appetite in the culture of cultural consumption for a rapturous decimation and/or resurrection of culture that is apparently host to some pathogen or malignant original sin necessitating a restorative purge. Of course it’s flawed to imagine ‘culture’ as some object outside of ourselves, and perhaps it is more accurate to think of this death wish as a perversion we share with culture that leads to our fetish for its demise. To be fair, these ‘ends’ are titular in nature; they are designed to perk a generalized and primed interest in upheaval. What these theses are more reasonably speculating towards is the nature of the change, rather than the nature of the demise, that culture will endure. These speculations are concerned not with how the game will end, but in what ways the rules will be modified for the next match. Emily’s youthful contemplative domicile is meant to allude to the possible and necessary paradigm shifts yet unknown to our vantage.
RP: In addition to this work, you also have an on-going painting practice. What motivated you to depart from painting? Do you think there is an overt relationship between this project and the painting, or is this new project meant to exist independently?
CA: That’s true. I’ve also got an ongoing stamp collecting practice that eclipses the breadth of all of my creative endeavors. That’s a lie. I do, however, have my hands in a wide variety of projects at any point; some of them come to the fore, others recede, some get backspaced out of existence on the notepad of my phone as I chuckle to myself walking down the sidewalk. I got a letter in the mail today from the Westminster Kennel Club soliciting advertising in the program for the upcoming show at Madison Square Garden; that could be a project. I’m working on an album of pop songs at the moment, flying childhood friends across the country to play guitar because I’m kind of a hack, painting pet portraits in exchange for session drumming, all of which is accompanied by heartfelt and lovesick lyrics produced while my wife was in L.A. for months during which time, instead of making art, I sat nightly at the piano crafting chord changes like some ghost of Randy Newman (although I think he’s not dead yet, no?). Nobody is going to buy this album. I’m also working on a series of murder movie soundtracks with collaborators. We’ll probably sell a few of those. All of this is to say that I do work in different modes. I don’t think of them as being mutually exclusive even if they are apparently disparate. But yeah, painting, I love the medium. It's an indomitable form. It’s like the dirty poor kid you grew up with that all the cool kids picked on (when I was coming up his name was ‘Grubby’) who didn’t give a fuck and is now living a fulfilling life, fat and happy, getting laid, despite all the abuse. It's also a problematic form, and many artists harbor a secret guilty desire to master it. Ironically it’s the painters that fixate on refinement that regularly produce the least interesting work. The maestro is a pretty dull proposition; at least in the contemporary condition. I can only remember seeing one really great Man Ray painting; very charming in its lonesome good fortune. I digress.
Cy Amundson (b. 1976, Menomonie, WI) received his MFA from Yale University in 2001 and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Emily's Dorm Room will be the artist's first solo exhibition since his 2007 show Some Things I Thought of That You Didn’t at David Krut Projects, New York. Recent group exhibitions include M O N S A L V A T, Bureau, New York, 2013; People who work here, David Zwirner, New York, 2012; A Lettuce Slaughter in the Woods, Real Fine Arts, Brooklyn and Dave Miko in the Company of Friends, Lichen Locked Lagerstatte La Brea, Mitchell Algus Gallery, New York, in 2010.
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