JENNIFER PASTOR june 1996  

Jennifer Pastor is a young Los Angeles sculptor already known for making overstatement look subtle.  The following interview was conducted in her surprisingly spare studio, located in El Segundo, a working class town best known for its techno-apocalyptic landscape of oil refineries and factories.  When we met, Pastor was in the final stages of preparing  for a solo show that opens at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art in June, and moves to L.A.'s MOCA later this year.

SUSAN KANDEL     Tell me about the Four Seasons, the project you're working on for your show in Chicago.

JENNIFER PASTOR It's kind of convoluted. One inspiration for Fall was actually Audubon's Birds of America.  I've always been really influenced by "man and his dream" sort of themes, and so the idea of making all the species of American birds at actual life size, this pioneering thing, I just love that.  And also the bracketing of nature, this wilderness in the background and contorted compositions of freshly killed birds in the foreground.  I looked at that book every night for hours. This project was really influenced by one print of crows on corn, which looks a little like a rape scene because the corn is, um, in various stages of undress in the husks.

S.K.     Uh-huh.

J.P.      And the corn silks are incredibly sensual, and being ripped apart.

S.K.     Is there more?

J.P.    Well, I've also been attracted to bird carvings. There are all these incredibly anal restrictions in official bird carving competitions, and the judges are ornithologists and other bird carvers, so the whole

thing is very particular in terms of how the feathers and anatomy are done.  But there are no rules for the construction of the bases.

S.K.     They're totally bizarre.  I like the Brancusi-esque effects.

J.P.      Yeah.  The bases are unbelievably inventive because there are no rules there.  I thought it was such a beautiful metaphor for sculpture, that all these people would be working towards a single goal, this very regimented carving of a bird, and then you'd find this multiplicity of resolutions for the bases, which is just wild.  You know this golf course out in the Valley, in Reseda or something?  They have this monument in the front.  It's a giant golf tee with a gigantic golf ball on top of it.  I mean, huge.  It looks like a full story, but maybe not. I think it's a water fountain, but anyway, just thinking about this huge thing on top of this tiny strand or leg or something, made me think about what my work is about -- trying to get like all this information into this singular structure.  So, anyway, I've been going to these local bird carving competitions, and they weren't that big of a deal and my interest was waning, but then I had heard that there was this international one and it happened annually in Ocean City, Maryland.  And so I went there this year and last year and it was unbelievable. Thousands of carvings.  Just unbelievable. Besides all the wood in these carvings, there are small amounts of other materials such as copper leaves, used as devices to levitate the birds, these sort of foliage moments.  God knows what the relation is, but at some point I decided that the thicket of corn stalks would be made out of copper, and that would be Fall.

S.K.     So how many stalks?

J.P.      There are four. The corn isn't exactly monumental, but definitely way over scale, sort of ripe, maybe like county fair corn or Chernobyl corn -- only ten feet tall, but chubby.  I couldn't figure out how to do them technically until I found these engorged kernel corns, decorative corns, around the holidays.  I took small molds from sections of them, and stretched them to get the proper diameter.  I cast parts in plaster, put those on armatures, and then there were huge empty spaces that I carved with clay.  Then I cast the whole thing in plastic.  I didn't think it would be so much carving, but it actually took almost a full six weeks to carve the four.  The point was that I really wanted each ending, each tip, to be perfectly individuated and different, really different.

S.K.     I see I don't have to ask you about your obsessive nature.

J.P.      When I was working on them, they were white.  The plaster was white and the clay was white and I was looking at the white walls, and I had made these sea shells, which were going to be Summer, and they were in white fiberglass, and it was this totally abstract space.  It was like being in a snowstorm, and it seemed really something, just very abstract or sublime or weirdly meditative, but I always knew my intention was to cast them in hollow yellow material and then when I cast them,  they were so corn.  They were just corn.

S.K.     You couldn't believe they had become--

J.P.      Corn.  Yes.

S.K.     What, then, about the relationship in your work between fantasy and the real? You have this realism thing happening, but it's so overstated -- so detailed and so gargantuan and so patently ersatz -- that it verges on magic.

J.P.      Maybe choosing realism is about avoiding decisions based on style or aesthetics, about trying to stay pure a little bit.  Like, for instance, when everything in the studio was white, I just thought, wow, all this whiteness -- it looks so fantastic.  It looks better.  The surface is more fascinating than it will be when it's yellow corn, and green leaves, and whatever.  But, at the same time, I don't want this surface because I think that if I follow through and paint the surface, the structure will be more abstract.

S.K.     So how does the surface look to you now that it's morphed

from abstract to hyper-real?

J.P.      It looks a little bit less palatable.  It's been really hard to paint the shells these pastelly colors and it was really hard to paint the cornstalk green.  It's like letting it get a lot worse before it gets better.

S.K.     So the shells are Summer.

J.P.      Yes, and I 'm really happy with them.  They're very sexy.

S.K.     How is all this going to be installed?  In a single room?

J.P.      Yes. The shells are going to be free-standing.  And filled with water -- artificial water.  And Winter -- two thickets of snowy trees -- will be mounted on a large expanse of white wall so that the whole thing becomes sort of snowbound. It's about dissolving the wall.

S.K.     And about the coldness of the gallery space?

J.P.      Yes.

S.K.     So you've got four stalks of corn, and four seasons.

J.P.      Yeah, and originally I was going to do four seasons in four weeks.

S.K.     And why not?

J.P.      I was really interested in the number four.  I wanted four and seasons to have equal play.  The number four is more of an abstract formal notion, you know, the amount of things in a relationship.

S.K.     Freud said every sex act involved exactly four people.

J.P.      I also wanted to break down the way that I've been making sculpture before, which has been this huge sort of singular thing.

S.K.     What about the endless art historical variants on the theme?

J.P.      I wasn't really thinking of any of them particularly, but I liked the holy grail-type subject matter, you know?  We have nature, still life, the body--

S.K.     Right.

J.P.      You can't possibly take it seriously.  The repetition, the history, the symbology, all this kind of goofy stuff -- there could only be a certain amount of the investment because it's so silly, embarrassing even.  I'm still a little embarrassed by it, to tell you the truth.

S.K.     All your work has that embarrassing quality.

J.P.      Yeah?

S.K.     I mean, in a good way, because it borders on kitsch.  You're obviously playing with over-the-topness.  But where or how do you draw the line between excess and bad taste?

J.P.      I have a good friend who lives in South Korea and I visited her a lot there and she had a refrigerator that had a little stamp of the four seasons on it, just symbols of the four seasons.  And that really stuck in my head because I guess kitsch is this universal thing that everybody can consume.  It's multi-cultural like that.  It's like that pubic hair piece that I made, the collection of pubic hairs.

S.K.     I haven't seen that.

J.P.      It's just a book of pubic hair that I've been collecting

for years, locally and from my travels, anonymous hairs, and it's called, The Family of Man.  The Four Seasons are like that, and I guess kitsch is like that.  Audubon is very similar to all this, a silly sort of exalted.

S.K.     I wonder to what degree you're conjuring narratives, however vague, and to what degree you're concerned with spectacle, pure effect -- which is the level upon which kitsch operates.  I'm thinking about how some people took your earlier Christmas flood piece, with its huge torrent of cascading, waterlogged Christmas trees.

J.P.      Well,  I guess I feel a little defensive about narrative.  There's an obvious narrative in that piece, and I remember that Richard wanted to show it in January and I just said no way.  It's like oh, God, we're washing Christmas away.  And it's awful, awful, but so obviously there.  There are artists I like who really do funk around with narrative, but I have to say that I don't spend too much time there.  Sometimes I draw a lot and write while I'm figuring out what project to commit to.  And I remember it was this really nice moment when I was sure about making that piece, and I wrote down, "Natural disaster hits artificial nature on seasonal  holiday." It's oh-so-clever, whatever.  But if that's all there was, it would be sad for me.

S.K.     Right.

J.P.      I was so happy with that piece because it was full of fissures, unexpected places to go.

S.K.     Is that how you think about sculpture?  How does your work engage with the discourse around sculpture, or is this something you even think about?

J.P.      I don't think there's really much interesting contemporary discourse about sculpture per se.  Or anyways from my experience.

S.K.     Not in twenty years, I guess.

J.P.      I don't read a lot of art magazines and stuff anymore, but having been teaching for the first time this year, it seems like I just start to talk about sculpture and it's a communication failure, just to talk about sculpture. For me, good sculpture is about what I'm calling fissures, possibilities.  Like those mazes on Howard Johnson placemats where you take this direction, it doesn't work;  you take that one, it doesn't work either.  You keep coming back to the center.  It's orbital or generative that way.  You can sort of enter it and then get dead-ended and then re-enter it, and get dead-ended.  If the work has that effect, the subject matter is arbitrary.

S.K.     Is there anybody working in L.A. or anywhere,  making sculpture or anything else, whose work does that?

J.P.      Richard Rezac's work.  Ginny Bishton's drawings.  I want to peel them off the paper and tattoo them to my chest and own them, like that. And Claes Oldenburg's drum set.  I never saw that before.  I might have seen it in a reproduction.  I think it's in a private collection.

S.K.     I hadn't seen it before either.

J.P.      I saw the retrospective a few times.  I saw it in Washington and I saw it here a couple of times.  There was allot of stuff there that wasn't of interest at all.  And there was a lot of stuff that was just generally interesting, but that piece just knocked me off my socks.  I could feel myself devouring it, every square inch of it, my God, so many unexpected connections and everything about it.  It was one of the most beautiful, weird, smart sculptures I ever saw.  Yeah, I love that piece.  I took my class to see that show.  And I was like, OK, we're almost there.  You've got to see it.  Oh, here -- it's coming.  It's coming up. Get ready.  I was so excited.  Then we get into the room, and...nothing.

S.K.     Oh, an Oldenburg sculpture.

J.P.      Yeah, so what.  And then I realized, oh-oh, there's no way to communicate it.

S.K.     Your work is so labor-intensive.  Every element is minutely rendered, fanatically even.  How important is the process?

J.P.      The only importance whatsoever is that the piece needs it.  I've said this before:  if I could purchase it, or if I could find it, or if somebody else could do it for me, great.

S.K.     It's surprising that so much effort is gone to, but it's not so much about craft.

J.P.      Right.  I don't care how I get to it, but I have to get to it without compromising and normally that means  sweating it out.  I'm thinking more and more I've got to find another way because I can't continue like this.  This time, with the Four Seasons, I worked with a coppersmith, but I couldn't let go.  I was there with him every waking moment.  He couldn't believe it.  And I wouldn't let him make one decision.  I mean if he could have -- if I went out to lunch and he got it exactly right by some weird mind bridge -- I'd say, yes!

S.K.     What would it mean to think about your work in terms of special effects?  There is something very filmic going on here, almost like these are elements of set design in some lunatic cinematic masterpiece.

J.P.      Oh, gosh.  That would bug me.  But I suppose it's completely fair.  I mean, I'm going to have to enlist the aid of a miniaturist to help me with this moth -- the moth is Spring -- and he specializes in making models for films, so it's on the edge of that all the time.  The difference between this shell and show biz, or Las Vegas, is almost imperceptible.  But if you notice the way it sits on the floor, it has a slight lip here, and wants to fall over.  I really carefully designed it like this, so that it wouldn't quite make it in Caesar's Palace.

S.K.     What I like is the sumptuousness.  You're not afraid of seducing the audience on the level of vision.  There are all sorts of subterranean conceptual levels, but there's this willingness to let people be swept away.

J.P.      Yeah.  And I suppose that you could say that a prop couldn't do this, because you could unravel it instantly.

S.K.     Well, also, the other thing is that your work is about space and experiencing yourself in relation to a thing.  It's about a bodily engagement with real things that has nothing to do with how we experience cinematic illusion.  Did you ever read On Longing by Susan Stewart?

J.P.      No.

S.K.     It's this book on narratives of the miniature, the gigantic, the souvenir, and there's a fourth thing that I can't remember right now.

J.P.      That sounds nice.

S.K.     It's all about what Tom Thumb weddings, tall tales, circus freaks and miniature books do to bodies -- and it seems like this is precisely what your work plays out.  The miniature and the gigantic are opposites, but both are equally monumental because they have the ability to transform the bodies that surround them.  The miniature makes the body gigantic while the gigantic transforms the body into miniature.

J.P.      My work is monumental only in terms of time.

S.K.     What does that mean?

J.P.      The scale is pretty chintzy when you consider the time that went into the work.  Also, my sculptures don't have that much bulk to them, even if they take up a lot of space.  If you dismantle any of them, it's a bit terrifying.  It's like, that's it?  That's all there is? For all the baroqueness, they're minimal.   There are bits and parts that fit together by number, and there's nothing expressive about it in the end. They're pretty wispy.  There's almost nothing there.

S.K.     Well, that's certainly true of the moth.  Spring is going to be so small.

J.P.      It's going to be actual scale for many moths. I was so afraid of not being able to resolve Spring.  When I saw the three other seasons together  -- the shells, the corn, the trees -- I thought, damn, if it weren't for that pesky fourth thing it would be really humming.  I knew I had to make it, but I didn't want it to change existing relationships too much.

S.K.     And how does it change things?

J.P.      I think it's the most abstract gesture because hopefully the intensity per square inch will have a disproportionate weight in relationship to the other sculptures -- like an inhalation or a punctuation, it holds its quarter.

S.K.     Right.

J.P.      It's this perfect, unbattered life, an impossible moment -- you know these things only live for a few hours in the adult stage to reproduce.  It's going to take weeks and weeks and a lot of skilled hands to get this right.  I'm trying to make a breath.

S.K.     What kind of moth is it?

J.P.      It's going to be a little bit of a hybrid.  I read somewhere for every species of moth there's something like seventeen thousand species that they haven't uncovered yet, so I feel like I have complete license here.  It's not like birds where some ornithologist is going to come in and scold me.  Or corn.  I mean showing this in the Midwest.  That's going to be lovely.

S.K.     What do you see when you step back from your own work?

J.P.      I sometimes feel like it's a little perverse spending so much time and investing yourself physically and financially and wasting so much stuff.  Tons and tons of garbage. All this investment to make this one thing right.   I obviously appreciate objects because a lot of my research material comes from other people's objects and other objects in the real world, but at the same time when I realize how I'm spending myself, I mean I'm here all the time, neglecting relationships, neglecting everything.

S.K.     Are you living in your studio while you work on this?

J.P.      No, I'm not sleeping here now.  I was for a while, but not now.  But I might as well be because I only sleep five hours a night.  So ultimately I think that the thing that I measure my sculpture against is real objects in the real world.  So if it doesn't have a purpose or a life of its own in real time and space then it doesn't have any right to exist.  I think that's a harder thing to resolve than having to resolve it in art terms only.

S.K.     So are you trying to work out an ethics of artistic practice?

J.P.      I don't want this just to be a perversity.  I'm not naive.  I know I'm a little bit obsessive, but I'm not psychotic.  But still, being a prop is not enough reason to make this kind of investment.  That's what I'm saying.