Conversation 05: Chelsea A. Flowers
We return again after a brief hiatus with the Pressed Coffee Conversation series. This week we are very excited to welcome Detroit based performance artist Chelsea Flowers! Chelsea is a very smart and witty friend of ours and we reached out to her to catch up on her work as well as future projects. Chelsea’s participatory-based art utilizes subversive actions and appropriations of popular culture in an effort to disseminate how “otherness” is fabricated in the social sphere. She often makes use of comedic tropes, performance, participation-based activities, as well as installation and nostalgic objects in order to achieve these ends. Whether it’s layering laugh tracks over the Reagan family featuring Karaoke-style script, or a participatory game session, the fundamentals of Chelsea’s work deal with extremely harsh realities. We wanted to welcome Chelsea and ask her how working in the age of COVID has been, plus catch up with her on other recent activities.
– cameron
Still from Chelsea A. in F Minor, courtesy of the artist.
Conversation with Chelsea A. Flowers (Transcript)
This conversation has been briefly edited.
Cameron H.: Hi Chelsea, thanks for doing this interview with nox library—we really appreciate it and we’re both big fans of your work.
How’s your week been?
Chelsea A.: Thanks for having me. It’s been alright, kinda busy but you know, the usual. How’s your week been?
CH: It was good. I went to the UP again for a fishing trip with my family. We got one fish, but other than that it was...I guess busy but not eventful.
CF: That’s cool.
CH: So this is a question you brought up to me, and I think it’s a really important question. Since your work is dealing with performance, and you’re a participatory artist, I’m curious to hear your thoughts and hear you talk about what public art spaces will look like in the age of COVID and post-COVID?
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CF: ...hello?
CH: hi.
CF: Oh okay, cool, just wasn’t sure if you’re still there or not. It went quiet.
Wait, so, my thoughts on it or both our thoughts on it?
CH: I wanna know what you think first.
CF: I’m not honestly sure yet. That’s what I think is so interesting. I think that there’s this denial that we can go back to how things were, or there’s this overcorrection with all these virtual platforms. But there’s still the participatory, or the performance, and I don’t think I’ve seen that successful, yet, during COVID, and I know that I haven’t been successful with it when I performed during COVID. So art spaces...I don’t know. As far as performance goes, I think that there won’t be a mass of performances anymore, or there will be a mass of audiences and then performances? Maybe there’ll be multiple with time slots, but I think that that still feels really convoluted. So I don’t know, I’m just curious what other people’s thoughts are.
CH: You mentioned you performed during COVID. Was it all virtual?
CF: It was all virtual via Zoom. I did four or five performance events from April until July? Or August…
CH: So you didn’t think it was successful? The Zoom medium?
CF: No, not exactly. For me it’s the immediate reaction of being able to see people, and see what their response to a question of what the work is. Not having that—at least on my end, like when I talk to people they’re like “yeah it was cool, I enjoyed it”—without that, the authenticity feels like it’s missing. So on my end it doesn’t feel like it’s successful, but when I talk to others they’re like yo it’s cool. So maybe on the personal end for me, it feels unsuccessful.
CH: That makes sense. I was thinking that some of your video works do well in the digital space. Maybe instead of direct, in-person interactions, you could make short films or stand ups, but that’s just what I was thinking. That’s really particular to you and less about performance art at large.
I wanna get into the role of comedy and games in your art. I remember we were talking before about Bertolt Brecht and how he thought of epic theater as a way to demystify these often abstract issues that we can’t really properly identify and narrow down. And he thought that in his theater, because of these very real social conditions that cause misery, he utilized comedy to bring these social issues out in a way that’s more digestible than the cold, harsh truth.
CF: Yeah, I definitely remember that conversation, it was a very interesting conversation.
That’s really why I do comedy. I feel like I started taking this role of comedy just because it was my first year of grad school, and I was told by people that they felt like they were being shamed in my work, that they felt like it was too aggressive, even though I still thought it was funny. And it’s not about being “polite” or accessible for people, but if it’s too aggressive and you’re missing the joke, well then is it me? Is it you? Or is it both?
So that’s where comedy, at least for me, where I really picked up on comedy because I wanted to navigate this harshness but then also still have it be digestible...sometimes, but also sometimes I just didn’t care!
CH: That’s what I was gonna say. When I was going through your work and thinking about other works I’ve seen in the past, you’re confronted with these things that are presented like late night comedy shows... but the information and the content of the work is the complete opposite of that. It’s all very absurdist in its presentation, too. It’s this contradiction, and you’re uncomfortable being presented with it, and I think that’s really successful.
CF: Thank you. I think that it’s definitely something I’ve been trying to navigate. I was in Austin a couple years back, and I wasn’t there for comedy, it was a residency. I would go to these comedy clubs with this format of being really harsh, but like, within an art context, and it just didn’t really work at all. I bombed really bad my first few times in comedy clubs, but in art spaces it really worked. So thinking about comedy in the art context, it’s very different from comedy in a stand-up comedy club. It’s funny how they work and don’t work with each other.
Video still from The Conversation, courtesy of Chelsea Flowers
CH: I’m wondering if there’s a way that these two comedy spaces could be bridged?
CF: I think that would be really interesting, I’d be really curious. I think since after some really harsh words from the audience a couple years back, I haven’t really done stand up in a comedy space, only in an art space, but I’d be curious to try to go back and see how it functions, if it does.
CH: I want to talk about the recent work that was in ArtMile Detroit—the city-wide exhibition during the COVID-19 shutdown. The work is called The Conversation, it was with one of nox library’s base affiliates and comrades, Lorena Cruz. My first reaction was that it was really absurd and weird, but ultimately, again, it gets to this contradiction that the subtitles layout, and we were talking about earlier that it’s not goo——let me rephrase this. There are these very oppressive forces at work, if you will, noticed in your subtitles, but when you watch the video, it’s this very hysterical and absurd laughing behavior over things that aren’t funny and it’s really jarring. I thought the work was really smart and quite subversive. Could you talk about how this art makes this idea of “comedy” or laughter into a kind of twisted form of itself in order to highlight issues that are the opposite of funny?
CF: Yeah! If I’m remembering your question—I forgot so quickly—can you repeat?
CH: Yeah, sorry, that was a loaded question. Basically, could you talk about how The Conversation, that video, makes “comedy” into a twisted, mutant form of itself? How that becomes a tool to highlight issues and what we’ve been getting at: digesting things that are really not funny at all and quite terrible.
CH: So this piece is my most recent work. For some context to it: I wrote it back at like, 3 or 4 in the morning at the end of 2019, and then in 2020 I actually made it. It was, yeah, really jarring to think about, and to think about how what I wrote would physically manifest. I think in my mind, when I was creating it, that it wasn’t funny, but literally laughter is the only response that I have left in my brain to f*cking absurd, societal situations—the human condition, you know, it’s like here we are in 2020, it’s f*cking absurd. So I think that’s where my brain was at when I made it, that it wasn’t really that funny but laughter was the only response I had left.
CH: It’s sort of like the Myth of Sisyphus.
CF: Can you repeat that myth for me?
CH: Sisyphus is condemned by the Gods and has to push a boulder up a hill just to watch it fall for all of eternity, and then Camus poses the scenario: imagine Sisyphus happy in that moment, or for our purposes, laughing?
CF: So thinking about that, I was thinking about slapstick, because slapstick is this idea about failure. It’s this repetition, this repetitive action, but with the same outcome. So how it’s absurd, borderline ideas about insanity, but yet again, something about that repetition makes it funny. So I also thought about slapstick as well in creating it. But also, do we learn from slapstick? The question that I would pose is that I hope we do f*cking learn from slapstick, but here we are in 2020, I don’t know if we have yet or not! I don’t know.
CH: I have a hard time believing that people will learn from history, because history is always being mythologized. There’s this American myth of history and we have to kinda get to the real history and the facts.
CF: That’s real.
Video still of Lies I Told My Therapist, courtesy of the artist.
CH: Any upcoming things that you’re processing?
CF: I have a show coming up in December at the Neon Heater Gallery. Originally it was supposed to be an installation in their space, but now it’s just going to be on their online platform. Once again I’ll be doing performance, and these topics are really heavy topics. Like the video that you saw, The Conversation, has a really elaborate installation that goes along with it. So I’m trying to figure out, how do I still maintain the weights of the piece, but not in a physical space—what happens when you take away the physicality of the work? That’s what my brain is trying to process.
CH: With that work in particular, the scene was very absurd in itself. It was like...I don’t know how to describe it. It was tinsel, it was really kitschy, it was stuff that you would get at the dollar store to throw like a “nice” party or something.
CF: Yeah! So that’s built out in the actual installation, and I have so much tinsel, and I recycle or try to recycle it all. I have an absurd amount of tinsel.
CH: It reminds me, aesthetically, of this certain type of television. Like late night shows, B-comedy, often not that funny but people still watch it because they just got home from a grueling day’s work at midnight and that’s what’s left on TV.
CF: All that there is left? Yeah.
End.
Based in Detroit, Chelsea A. Flowers is an artist who holds an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art (2017), and a BFA from Denison University with a concentration in Black Studies (2013). She has shown work at various galleries including; The Muted Horn Gallery (Cleveland, OH), Wave Pool Gallery (Cincinnati, OH), ACRE Projects Space (Chicago, IL), Public Space One (Iowa City, IA), Fjord Gallery (Philadelphia, PA), and Front/Space Gallery (Kansas City, MO). She has expanded her skills and research by attending ACRE (Steuben, WI), Real Time and Space (Oakland, CA), Unlisted Projects (Austin, TX) and Art Space is Your Space (Cincinnati, OH) residencies. Her practice explores subversion to popular culture and how “otherness” is created through social and cultural critique of her environment. She explores these ideas through comedic troupes, physical play, nostalgic memorabilia, and participatory performance.
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