Interview with Nancy Davenport

by Bernard Yenelouis

Bernard Yenelouis:   In your work preceding The Apartments you created fictions, using photographs with texts, which involved elements of the fantastic, often with elements of absurdity and humor. In particular I am thinking of the Accident-Prone series, which involve scenarios which could be in a Tex Avery cartoon: a figure in a rowboat about to be overtaken by an enormous ship, another figure at a cave entrance facing an enormous bear, and so on – scenarios of hyperbolic doom, with an exaggerated scale and a strong sense of the improbable.

The humor in these images is in their improbability (although no doubt someone somewhere was run down by an ocean liner, and no doubt a bear has attacked a hiker and so on); in The Apartments there is an equally strong sense of hyperbole but also stronger fears, of attack, destruction, catastrophe, emerge as well.

Nancy Davenport:   All of the images in the Accident-Prone series depict a frozen moment before catastrophe – either right before an accident occurs or the suspension of a dreadful fall. For me, the repetition of these suspended moments of crisis was about this impossible category. The images and texts were meant to be implausible and self contradictory – as the whole category of Accident-Prone is absurd, imposing this logic on what's completely out of control or senseless. The contradictions inherent in this category, I thought, were very interesting in relation to fabricating the unpredictable digitally.

The Apartments were also about an impossible category – all of these actions taking place in the same style architecture. And like the accident work, this series was intended to evoke a sense of ever repeating crisis in terms of the medium of photography- questions about the medium which are being refocused and newly posed now in terms of the affect of digital technology. With this work, I also wanted to emphasize a particular conflict or ambivalence I felt – a conflict between political idealism, individuals and institutions.

Each of the pieces in The Apartments reference specific photojournalistic images from the late sixties, early seventies. This iconography of revolution embodies both failure and idealism in a very concentrated way. By referencing these famous images and re-contextualizing them within this particular architecture, I intended to downplay the sensationalistic quality of mass media and reflect the dilemma of desiring social and political change in a culture where only totalizing ideologies hold sway.


“Bombardment”

BY:   Along with the photographs of The Apartments, you also showed two screensavers, made from video footage of protesters. These seemed crucial with the photographs: the apartments in The Apartments are monolithic and generic, with an almost structural sense of claustrophobia, whereas the screensavers added voices and a sense of urban space, in dissent and in counterpoint.

ND:   I made the screensavers from footage that I shot while participating in various protest marches and demonstrations, and the actions depicted are, I think, equally iconic and generic as the references in the photographs. In terms of the screensavers, when I was looking at my footage, the monotony of conventional protest strategies, together with the repetition of generic chants and nostalgic symbols, struck me as really very sad and significant. By isolating single protestors as screensaver loops, I intended to embody my very conflicted feelings – between strongly believing in the necessity of protest while at the same time acknowledging that certain strategies of contestation are exhausted.

BY:   The Apartments are all from New York City, of common style, and of a slightly earlier period – late 60s, early 70s. That was also a period of great social upheaval: the attacks at the Munich Olympics, bombings by the FALN, the Weatherman Underground explosion on E. 10th St., the SLA in California – in addition to the numerous anti-war protests and race riots across the country. New York City at that time had a reputation for excessive danger. Am I reading too much specificity into determining a time frame for the buildings as well as the potentials for attack, in your photos? While not historical directly, the images, along with the screensavers, allude to a period of unrest and dissent.

ND:   I did intend to raise questions about what has shifted since this period of dissent – in terms of the relation between the individual and the social body. Not all the buildings I shot were from the late sixties/early 70's – but many were. These white brick apartments have been described as 'no style modernism'; they are generic, formulaic, institutional looking... they materialize an ambiguity between public and private space. At the same time, they still refer to certain ideals of transforming urban existence. For me, they very beautifully embody a conflict between economics and utopian ideals. So, I wanted them to function as a grid or a backdrop of failed modernism where I could map out and reference these moments in history. The juxtaposition of these references – all in the same style architecture – was not intended to dissolve the critical distinctions between these moments in history, but rather to consider the paradox of what they share. All of these actions presuppose the institutional condition of public space and architecture. All of them have an incredibly complex and interesting relationship with the violence that maintains institutional space.

BY:   Trying to understand the political elements to the work led me to consider the work of Guy Debord and the Situationist International, in particular the Situationist idea of detournement, which was defined as: rerouting, hijacking, embezzlement, misappropriation, corruption. My suspicion is that you would not readily commit yourself as a Situationist per se, but I perceive a parallel focus in critiquing urbanity as well as modernity in this work.

ND:   I wasn't specifically thinking of Debord or the SI when I made this work. I think that the history of the SI is generally relevant to anyone referencing the history of '68, the displacement of images and recontextualization... but I wasn't taking up the idea of detournement specifically, in the way that a lot of artists did in the 1980's.


“Mayday”

BY:   The other work that comes to mind, at least in terms of structure – collaging two disparate images together – is Martha Rosler's Bringing the War Home from Vietnam, however her work is explicit agit-prop, whereas your work seems much more oblique – in such terms.

ND:   Martha Rosler has certainly been important to me as an influence and Bringing the War Home from Vietnam was an important critique. But when I made and exhibited "The Apartments" – it was pre-Sept 11 – I wasn't addressing a specific, topical issue, like Rosler with Vietnam. My work was intended to be conflicted and express an ambivalence that is obviously not there in Rosler's series. It was my intention to question the internal workings of the medium, my sources and political engagement in a non-didactic way.

BY:   Could you discuss your use of montage – in particular the seamlessness in sandwiching disparate images that you do with Photoshop. (In surrealist montage, or in overtly political work such as John Heartfield's, or Martha Rosler's, montage is used in an obvious way – the image is broken up, shattered, distorted).

ND:   Yes, I think there is a significant difference between the type of rupture in historical models of montage and the smooth continuity possible with digital montage. There is certainly rupture with seamless, digital manipulation. Jonathan Crary has written about a relocation of vision – how it is becoming severed from the observer. But what's also interesting is the coexistence of older and newer forms of vision and how this affects the way we make sense of the world. My intention was to try to explore a territory of both continuity and rupture. The Apartment images are seamless in relation to the history of collage and photomontage, but they're not seamless in terms of a digital trick – they're very clearly manipulated in terms of color and in a lot of cases spatial relationships. The idea was to register the affect of the digital and seek its dimensions in the disorder and complexity of historical memory. What I mean by that is that in order to evoke some aspects of this co-existence – this "old newness" or digitization of older media – it made sense to me to digitally mimic a seamless photo-realistic space with content that was about rupture and repetition at the same time.

BY:    Is there any discussion to be had about your appropriation of news media, in your staging of scenes?

ND:   All of the elements in the photographs I shot with specific sources as models, specific iconic documentary images. For example, Revolutionary (day) references famous images of Kent State '70, Terrorist 1 references Munich '72; Bombardment references images of the Israeli invasion of Beirut, etc. The recognition of these specific sources varies greatly and is obviously subjective – especially because the actions I shot are very much displaced. I didn't want a flat, instantaneous recognition – I chose to embrace a certain ambiguity in order to evoke a tension between recognition and misrecognition. I don't think it's essential that viewers immediately recognize these gestures, although I do think that most of the actions depicted register as familiar or even stereotypical.

BY:   Could you discuss your relation to cinema, and also your use of video?

ND:   Actually, I feel that my work is more concerned with the medium of photography and that the use of video with the screensavers was kind of an unusual choice for me. I am working on video pieces now, but they all use and manipulate still images. But in terms of my previous work, it was important for me that they function as screensavers and not simply video loops. Because I was working with footage from protest marches and demonstrations, I wanted these pieces to occupy the in-between, marginal site of the computer terminal, the most vital site of recent political organization and dissent. So, as screensavers, the protest begins when there is a lull in computer activity or when you stop working and becomes endlessly repeating nostalgia until you click the mouse again.


© Bernard Yenelouis 2003