I chat with Jared Pappas-Kelley about his new book, and it’s context around whatever it is that seems to be happening in the world right now. To Build a House that Never Ceased is a collection of writings by Pappas-Kelley, seeking to take apart ideas of solvency in art and building on his other recent book Solvent Form: Art and Destruction. Following a tradition of artist writers, the collection presents an opportunity to reflect and re-examine existing thoughts—bisecting and dissecting the metaphorical rooms of writing, to see how they might collapse or build something new. We talk about his new book and it’s connections between The Winchester House and Gordon Matta-Clark, we also chat cultural exhaustion and Jack Halberstam, and what the problem is with the term contemporary in the art world. We also discuss his new publishing imprint invert/extant press, our mutual love of Auto-destructive art and Gustav Metzger, as well as our dislike of gatekeepers, and how instead we should support and collaborate with those still starting out. These ideas and others are framed around the current era of social justice movements like Black Lives Matter, and of course the global effects of Covid 19. 

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Dec Ackroyd: I suppose the first question ought to be somewhat topical and since we’re coming to the end of it, I may as well ask how have you found lockdown’s impact on your creative output? 

Jared Pappas-Kelley: Are we coming to the end of it? It’s been really exhausting. In a selfish way it allowed me to finish editing and proofing To Build a House that Never Ceased and I am also now in the final stages of another book project called Stalking America. But I think the thing it has highlighted for me were the things that already appeared broken. Like Covid-19 put a lot of the systems that we had been struggling with collectively on display so you couldn’t really ignore them anymore and certain things suddenly didn’t seem as important when up against a pandemic, but it also underscored some of the same issues with what’s been happening with Black Lives Matter, this general exhaustion and collapse. These separate things are not happening in a vacuum. 

I wrote about some ideas from Jack Halberstam in this new collection and it’s the idea that we had all been basically running on empty when the pandemic hit and that it has perhaps allowed us to see this, so as a metaphor, maybe we should thank it, but as a reality it has been horrible and really sad. Writing before all this happened, Halberstam noted, “Even as we are drowning in the more, the extra, the also, we are stuck with systems that commit to less, to expediency, to rigor and to discipline.” And that really resonates with how I was already feeling. He talks about the James Bond film Skyfall as a metaphor for our times, where even James Bond looks exhausted and needs a break from all these systems and anxiety—noting that Bond uses his presumed death as a vacation of sorts—and meanwhile I am using a pandemic to attempt to meet my obligations and deadlines… something is wrong with that. 

Halberstam: 

What is this exhaustion that saturates both leisure and work time in an era of collapse? Why does our James Bond, the Bond of 2012, find himself tired and disoriented while previous Bonds have been hard to keep up with let alone hard to kill? Have we, at the beginning of the 21st century, expended all creative, natural, spiritual and political energy so that, like the over stretched economy, humanity is twisting in the wind, too tired to move, too exhausted to stay still, too selfish to die? 

Sorry, that was a bit long for a first question, I guess it’s something I’ve been sitting on or stewing about during all of this. Reconsidering how we operate or what was broken already. 

DA: That’s a fair point, “the end” was maybe hopeful yet the wrong turn of phrase. It’s good to hear you’ve been creative during this time though. This idea of using a something horrific like faking your death, or a pandemic has got to be some sort of dark comedy! But I understand entirely where you’re coming from, would you consider that evidence of just how broken the way we live is? Do you just see everything returning to business as usual or are you more hopeful that there might be a drastic societal shift? 

JPK: Well if you look around, there is a lot going on, and it would seem like on all fronts at once in many ways. But in the lead up to these things happening, it looked a bit like the walking dead as you looked around, people were really running on empty, or what are they saying now with covid-19—that it makes zombie cells, like something was just waiting for a spark on underbrush? I think things need to change or have to in many ways, and I don’t know how much of a role in dictating the terms we might ultimately have, but at the same time don’t underestimate the force to maintain the status quo… The ability to make it look and behave the same even if what is inside is completely gutted. Sort of the mirror image of something like Artaud’s body without organs, but now packed with even more stiff upper lips. That could be the new slogan, “now with up to 70% more upper lips!” But there is an arrogance and entitlement in that… don’t talk about how you are being killed or disenfranchised or how things around you are failing or breaking down. Mustn’t grumble. It’s a shaming, phrases like “man up”. 

DA: Kind of like the “Britain soldiers on” shit from Children of Men or something. It’s a difficult thing to broach, this idea of how things can change, how people can be reached in that sense, that idea of what we have now is all we can live with, which is a massively depressing prospect, but it’s seeming like there’s some glimmer of hope, even after the momentum on the left seen in Corbyn and Bernie’s backing has burnt out, but that’s sort of reflective of that continuation you’re talking about in that they’ve been replaced by Starmer and Biden respectively, so to the left it reads as that “neoliberal business as usual”… 

JPK: Strange, that’s the second time Children of Men has come up recently… that probably means something? Yeah, it’s a bit scary, but also, I’m optimistic… or trying to be? Although I don’t really know what optimistic would look like in the current situation, that’s bad right? 

DA: One of the reasons we initially bonded was through a mutual love of “destruction” namely discussing the Auto-destructive art movement, you talk a lot in this book about the Winchester Manor and Sarah Winchester’s constant tearing down and rebuilding etc, would you like to elaborate a little on what it is that really attracts you to destruction as practice? 

JPK: Sarah Winchester or the Winchester house is one of those stories that lets you see two impulses as wrapped up into one action, and also I think as a metaphor shows a way that art often operates. I framed this in terms of an idea of solvency which has a sort of dual meaning in terms of making fixed or secure (a business is solvent) and well as dissolving or undoing. After Sarah Winchester’s husband and child died, the story is that she spoke to a medium who told her that she was haunted by the spirits from decimating the indigenous populations in the clearing of the American west by Winchester rifles, and that if she ever stopped building on her house she would die. Keep in mind, this is a very folktale version of the story. So the story is that she began building onto her home in an attempt to build a house that never ceased, so that when a room was completed, it often was simply torn down or cannibalised to make room for new construction. The more I began looking at it, the more it became clear that art was engaging with this sort of destruction even if it was simply the clearing away to make room for creating. 

And you brought up Auto-destructive art, which was the brainchild of Gustav Metzger. He wrote a short text for a collection of new manifestos I am currently putting together, and it was probably one of the last things he wrote before his death, but his approach was about making something visible in the world that we might otherwise overlook. He saw it as a way of making all these destructive forces in the world visible through his actions of destruction in art. 

DA: Like that Donnie Darko line ‘destruction is a form of creation’ or something along those lines. I feel like there’s something very human in that idea of clearing things away to replace them with something new, constantly revisiting, erasing, revising and so on. You always seem to be doing this yourself, revisiting older works, be they your own or those of other people, do you consider what you do to be rooted in collaborative practice? 

JPK: Yes, pretty much everything I do is collaborative in some way, although not always intentionally. I enjoy holing up and working by myself for hours at a time, but also really need that give and take with other people and other ideas, or in a broader sense it is all collaboration with the world as we find it. That is sort of the idea of the publishing press I’ve recently launched – invert/extant, to be able to flip or rethink what already is here. But about collaboration, that is something I’ve kind of always instinctually done… sometimes I would work with people in name only as a collaboration as it gave me a bit of the latitude to approach these ideas. 

DA: Could you go into invert/extant a little bit more? It would be nice to hear about some of the people you’ve got on board? 

JPK: Sure, I have a new collection of writings by Bill Dietz who is a sound composer and the co-chair for the Music/Sound MFA at Bard, as well as a book called Art is Autism by Zak Ferguson coming out. I’m also working on a collection of writings by artist and writers talking about their work in their own words and that book will be called Transmissions 1 and will also be showcased online and so far includes artists like: Maureen McAdams, Douglas A. Martin, Steve Finbow, Ang Bartram, Paul Curran, Pam Booker, Jordan Rothacker, Mary Edwards, Chris Zieschegg, Chris Kelso, Gary Shipley, Love Kolle, Marc Beattie, and Liam Gillick has expressed interest as well as Bracha Ettinger. It should be an amazing project and timely. Also, the manifesto book should be coming out late next year and includes people like: Simon Critchley, Jack Halberstam, Thomas Hirschhorn, International Necronautical Society, Michael Lent, Jean-Luc Nancy, Santiago Sierra, Geert Lovink, Lev Manovich, Gustav Metzger, Rebecca Brown, and Dennis Cooper. We will be putting out a call for novels and manuscripts next year, and that info will be available here.  

DA: One of the lines that really struck me in your most recent book was in the essay “Thinking on Contemporary” in which you state, “Contemporary as a term often goes unquestioned in art, functioning more or less as a placeholder without understanding what it designates.” We’ve talked at length before about pseudo-intellectualism and snobbery in the art world, I often feel like a bit of a fraud at shows when people start talking about shit I just don’t understand, do you feel as an artist and particularly as a lecturer you’ve got a responsibility to open this often insular world up to people? 

JPK: At some point contemporary became a distinct category, but we don’t really consider what that means, and it is often a throw away term. People think it means that it is just art of now, what’s happening now-ish—and that’s a very passive view, but there is more to it as a sort of ideology and the thinking around it doesn’t go much deeper than that. So, I became interested in what people like Hito Steyerl, Simon Critchley, or Giorgio Agamben had been saying, but there is something much deeper at play and I wrote about that a bit in this book. 

At shows or exhibitions, I think everyone gets a bit like that, especially at openings. You get to a point, or at least I did, where you begin to realise that those conversations aren’t really for your benefit or about art. The person is just trying to show off, or uncomfortable and blowing off steam. Give yourself credit, you’re not a fraud, it’s more about them and usually they don’t know what they are talking about either, so I tend to just sort of listen and see where they are coming from or find an excuse to move to another part of the room. 

I don’t really understand this gatekeeper tendency that people get, as a lecturer I’m not interested in that. For me it’s about opening doors for students whenever I can or looking at what sort of barriers people are actively putting in place to keep themselves in a position of authority. There needs to be more of this multigenerational crossover, and that’s probably why I often work on projects with people who were my students in the past or to develop these pools of approaches and ideas that make things happen or people who are doing intriguing things. 

DA: 100% agree with that, some of the most fruitful relationships for my own practice have been with my generationally older tutors. Would you consider the overuse of academic language to be problematic at all, in terms of gatekeeping etc? 

JPK: Oh definitely, it’s used to control access to who is invited into a conversation, but at the same time I’m guilty of this. Not in trying to gatekeep with my ideas, but like my last book had a very narrow focus and I remember when people like my mom or casual friends were like, “oh you wrote a book, can I read it?” Er, yes but it’s very densely written… I try not to get too academic and in reality, a lot of academics wouldn’t really acknowledge what I do, but then that makes it this whole other thing. What is it? I actually frame it more in a legacy of really rambling conceptual art. The books are a sort of poetic installation for inside the reader’s head or world building as a collaboration to what’s already there (inside a head). That was the goal with this new book To Build a House that Never Ceased, to make something that was more informal in a different way, and in places at least, more conversational but that opened something up with the reader. And this is a really broad place that ranges from artists like Gordon Matta-Clark or Thomas Hirschhorn, but also the idea of questioning the term contemporary, or dick pics culturally… their significance, Brexit, or the Winchester House in San Jose. And how does this relate to this thing we call art? 

DA: As an aside here I’ve just remembered; so my undergrad degree is in CLM Contemporary Lens Media, and I’m constantly asked “what is that then?” so that really illustrates your comments on the use of the word contemporary. 

But also, I think we’ve got to draw distinctions between gatekeeping and opting for a, maybe, obscure subject matter, right? Like my issue with gatekeeping is the sense of belittling you get, and this is massively prominent in the art scene “oh you don’t like X? You’re just not clever enough” etc, whereas your writing is simply unpacking an unusual subject, it borders on philosophy crossed over with popular culture, sort of a trans-Atlantic Slavoj Žižek. If it’s any consolation my parents tend not to get my writing, or my frames of reference either. 

Have you got any other ideas for future books in the pipeline? 

JPK: I’d actually be really into a course of old-timey lens media, like with those archaic cameras where a person needs to sit still for an hour and with glass plates and toxic chemicals. Do they offer that? What would contemporary be… on your phone? 

Oh nice, I’ll definitely take that as a description of my writing. Thanks. Yes, I’m just finishing a new book called Stalking America that I am hesitant to call a novel… more like a fake memoir merged with installation art like I mentioned before? I was thinking a lot about Alain Robbe-Grillet when I first started working on it, but obviously it is nothing like that… but was an interesting way to calibrate my thoughts as I went into it. It’s also a bit about boredom and what perception does when allowed to be bored… which is something that we don’t experience in the same ways these days with social media and screens everywhere. Ha, I’m not selling this very well am I? Now, I’m at that stage where I’m just getting ready to shop it around to a few publishers, so wish me luck. 

Other than that, I have been working on a series of simplistic but enigmatic drawings called Portents. I’m playing with the idea that they are to be installed as full size wall drawings that function almost like an oracle where the order and those included are selected through chance operations. I have a show of them coming up, but because of the logic structures they will be different every time installed.

Images: Owned by Jared Pappas-Kelley 

Children of Men image: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/wZ9J-dxEgY4/maxresdefault.jpg