The Ambiguous Archive: An Interview with
Michelle Citron
[pdf]
Brian Price and Meghan
Sutherland
Meghan Sutherland: One of the things that strikes me
about your work is that it feels deeply caught up with theoretical ideas, and
philosophical explorations of those ideas—which is to say, open-ended explorations—and
it’s also very personal and intimate. Obviously, a lot of it deals with life
experience and personal histories, with autobiography. I wonder how you
understand the relation between theory and personal life in general, and in
your work.
Michelle Citron: There’s a strange tension in my work,
because I’m driven by these intellectual issues and the work has such a strong
affective component. And sometimes I think that the intellectual is a defense
against the emotional. Or it’s a way to hold it, so that the emotional doesn’t
become sentimental—it doesn’t just flow over everything and suffocate it. But
even though I say that, there’s always some strong emotional or body motivation
for everything that I do. I don’t believe that art is an intuitive process.
It's a mode of inquiry. But even that has an intuitive component to it….
Brian Price: It seems to me that your work comes
out of a really important moment in the history of feminism and film theory,
one in which theory and practice seemed much more allied than they are today,
for some reason. It strikes me as relation, or a practice, that has not really
been able to sustain itself.
MC: In the 1970s, feminist theory was really critical. There
were two realms. There were people who were doing work in the academy, and
there were independent scholars. The theoretical arguments were also being spun
out in art, though. And a lot of the work that was being spun out in art was
really connected to people’s lives because art usually involves some kind of
object, and you bring it into a room and you show it to people and you get
feedback. So here, theory entered into a dialogue with the community through
the object of film. The dialogues taking place tended to involve intellectuals
and academics. So at some point they became unanchored, while the films themselves
stayed anchored. But there were also bad films made. I really don’t want to
idealize [this period], all those films. But what was going on intellectually,
in theoretical writings, directly fed into the films, and fed into Daughter Rite, too. What’s a progressive
aesthetic? Without it, the films wouldn’t be as rich as they are, and thanks to
the films the theory had a way of being grounded in the social world outside of
itself, which kept it more lively. And that’s about the body. And I think about
the body as a social body. I talk about my work as being theoretically driven,
but it’s also attached to the body, which is in the affective realm. These
films were attached to the social body. It’s a more complex level than just the
theoretical one.
MS: Is that why you don’t write theory? Your films, and your
online interactive work, feel very much like rigorous theoretical work. In some
way, you seem to do that kind of work, but you do it through your filmmaking.
Is it the aspect of art involving communal reception that’s important to you
here?
MC: It is. It’s so complicated. Part of it is that there’s an
ambiguity to the art object; there’s an ambiguity to the images. And that
ambiguity is very productive for me. When you write, there’s less of it. You
can write in an ambiguous way, certainly.
MS: A lot of people have tried it!
MC: Or not tried it—been successful at it! But I think what
you’re doing is analytically working through something, which comes out of my
work as a scientist, I think. I have a hypothesis—which is a theoretical
hypothesis—and I’m exploring and experimenting with it, and I might come to
some conclusions but it might also open up five other areas that are
unanswered. There’s something about that ambiguity: it’s easier to get to that
place through art than it is through writing. Writing comes with more
expectations about what writing should do. But also, the mediums are so
different. Images are ambiguous. That’s the whole point of the first chapter in
my book [Home Movies and Other Necessary
Fiction]. There are these images running down the center and then there are
these two discourses that dialogue with those images and they illuminate the
images, and they open up those images to reading, but ultimately the images
cannot be confined by either of the texts. That ambiguity seems very important
to me. I wish had another language to talk about lived experience.
BP: I wonder if your concern with ambiguity is what draws you
to work on CD-ROMs, with more interactive digital media. Does medium matter to
you?
MC: I’m having very complicated feelings about working in
digital right now. I just had a conversation with another artist about doing an
exhibition on durability. The fact is that the interactive material is not
durable. I’ve always been really attracted to film because it’s always been
concrete and tangible; you could hold it in your hand and smell it. To find out
which side is the emulsion you would taste it with your tongue. It’s very
physical in a way that is very appealing to me. The only reason that I went to
digital is not—I actually hate digital, including the fact that it’s so
ephemeral—is that after writing the book I became so interested in the idea
that we construct our narratives. Where does the narrative take place? I’m
trying to create these works that live in fragments, in pieces, until they
enter the audience’s mind—the narratives are constructed in the space between
the art object and the audience. And I’m trying to get the audience to reflect
on the construction of our narratives, and I have this idea about how this
process of fragmentation and narrative cohesiveness is really fundamental to
the way we move through the world and the way that we understand our existence,
our memory, and all sorts of things. The digital seemed like the only way that
I could do it, but there is something very dissatisfying about it.
MS: It’s funny that you mention that because I was looking
back at Home Movies and Other Necessary
Fictions and I was thinking about how it makes the book, and the
traditional book format itself, into a kind of prefiguration or paraphrase for
what you do with the Internet. You might read some of one page about your
childhood, and then open up another page and read a narrative about Kodak and
the social history of home movies, and then go back into this very intense
personal story, these heartbreaking passages. It actually does all of the
things that the infrastructure of the Internet, as a medium, is supposed to do.
MC: It actually does. When I finished the book I thought,
“there’s really something going on here and I have to explore it.” I was really
glad to take it back to images. So the interactivity [of Mixed Greens and Jewish Looks]
made sense, although most of what is in those pieces was shot on film and then
put onto the Internet. But I know that you can do it in books, and I’m thinking
that the next thing I want to do is a book again. But to explore the same
issues about fragmentation and narrative within the context of a book in a
different way.
MS: How do you see images fitting into that? It was really
interesting to me that you mentioned you think images are more amenable to the
openness of thought, that their ambiguity is a more hospitable environment for
your thoughts. For philosophy this has been regarded a most horrid prospect, at
least historically.
MC: Because they can’t explain them?
MS: Because images are too elusive. Images have always seemed
very dangerous. There is a very short tradition of philosophy that’s not
scopophobic, at root. So what you’re describing here is really interesting to
me, and I wonder if you could say more about how you understand that capacity
of images to carry your ideas in their ambiguity.
MC: Can I say more? You’ll have to ask me another question.
BP: Well, for example, Alexandre Astruc, in “The Birth of the
Camera Stylo,” imagined that with the advent of the 16mm camera, the Descartes
of today would lock himself up in his bedroom and record his philosophy on
film—which has to do, in part, with an idea that one could record an idea in
movement rather than translate that movement, which is itself an idea, into
language.
MC: How does one create work that opens up a space for the
audience, or the reader? I think that images do that in themselves. They allow
for a dialogue between the viewer and the creator of that image, or between the
spectator and the image itself. I’m not trying to make an argument. I’m trying
to make an experience that has a strong intellectual current so that people
will think about not only the experience but the ideas behind it and how they
relate to their own lives, which is different from making an argument in order
to convince somebody of something.
BP: I’m wondering if we might come back to the question of
durability and ambiguity, which is also a question about the archive. In Mixed Greens, you’re interest in
creating an archive—or archives. The archives that you create are clearly meant
to document, but how do you reconcile this desire to document—to understand the
life of someone by the objects that they’ve left behind—with your mutual
interest in the preservation of ambiguity?
MC:
Well if you look at the screen, there are these stories that are told by
different characters—my father, my cousin, my other cousin—that contradict each
other. In Jewish Looks (www.barnard.edu/sfonline/cf/jewishlo.html.), there’s a mythic story that my
father tells but it’s a totally different story when my father tells it, from
when my aunt tells it, or when my cousin tells it. You can’t ever know exactly
what happened. In Jewish Looks, I
explicitly point that out, whereas in Mixed
Greens, I present these different stories, and there are forty-eight
stories, so if the right juxtaposition occurs, you’ll get it, and if it doesn’t
occur you might not get it. So I try to put the impossibility of full
understanding into the piece, to literally inscribe it into the work. And the
hope is that people will see that and realize it, but that doesn’t mean that
you stop searching for it.
BP: It’s an interesting problem because we tend to think of
the archive as a stable environment.
MC: It’s totally unstable. There’s this thing that I talk
about in Mixed Greens. Like anyone
who does genealogies: how do you find your family? So I find this archivist who
has been keeping a massive genealogy of the 5,000 Jews in Ireland; 500
families, maybe 700 families. And he tells me to go to the records office in
Dublin—where the birth and death certificates are—and look for alternative
spellings of my name. It never occurred to me that there would be alternative
spellings. During the Irish War of Independence, the IRA burned down the
building where all the archives were taken during the civil war that happened
after the English were thrown out. And so all of these archives were burned. So,
I finally go and I find out that my grandfather’s name was Zitron, spelled with
a Z. His birth certificate says Aaron Zitron. I found a report card from 8th grade when he was kicked out of school and it said Aaron Citron. And then his
marriage certificate in America said Abraham Citron, so there’s no consistency.
Lives are so inconsistent, so why would we assume that archives wouldn’t be the
same? It goes back to this idea of how theory and life are totally entwined,
and how archives and life are totally entwined. I’m trying to create work that
is talking at a meta-level about ambiguity in these different spheres.
BP: I was struck by the icons of vegetables in Mixed Greens—the menu options—by how
playful they are and yet how serious it, Mixed
Greens, is.
MC: It’s totally playful. Here’s what I found out. So there
are these eleven siblings. My grandfather was one of eleven children, and they
all had different last names for very complicated reasons. I have one uncle who
used Zitron with a Z in Ireland, but every time he went to England he used
Citron with a C because he was a gambler and he didn't want to get caught. I also
think that he had a woman in Dublin and a woman in London and didn’t want to
get caught. Then I had another uncle who, during World War II, changes it from
Z to C because it meant that stand closer to the front of the line during
rations. So, how do you sort all of this out? It is funny. It inherently has
wit or something. It’s also interesting to me the way that identity was marked
in my grandfather by his name, his constantly evolving name. I pulled together
all of these pieces—a birth certificate, a marriage certificate, a death
certificate, my father’s birth certificate, his marriage certificate, my birth
certificate. You know, I finally get this stream of paperwork and I send it
back to Ireland and I create a note explaining why this name changed all over
the place, and I include this photograph of my grandparent’s tombstone in
Ireland, where their name is Citron with a C, even though their child’s name is
spelled with a Z. And somehow, that narrative is acceptable to a bureaucracy
and they give me the passport. So how do you explain something that is about ambiguity?
MS: That changes the way that I think about Mixed Greens as an exploration of database
narrative. It makes me think of what you said earlier about how dismayed you
are with the ephemerality of the digital right now. While most people think of
database narrative as interesting precisely because it gives the reader some
freedom or some agency—and in some ways it does, and that is also what you’re
interested in across much of your work. But what is illuminated here is that Mixed Greens stages a kind of a
performance of the archive. You do perform the work. But also, as a performance of the archive—a laying
out of things, some items that you can explore, all of them snapshots that can
be understood, fictional or not, as documents of people’s personal lives—what
comes forward instead is a feeling of how uncontrollable this material is, and
the sense that you are just barely missing the connection that exists between
these stories, that you as viewer might fail to be able to comprehend a link.
MC: Yes, but don’t you think that that replicates the
experience of an archive?
MS: Yeah, I do, which is why it’s changing the way that I
think about Mixed Greens. It’s not
necessarily about agency. It’s about the failure of a certain agency.
MC: You can create that narrative from the fragments, but you
can also miss the fragments and not get the narrative. There is an element of
failure to it that is really critical.
MS: It’s an interesting problem of the medium—the failure to
hold together or to be in one thing, or to last. That’s an interesting problem
that the work itself poses.
MC: I know. It’s the issue of durability, which I feel very
conflicted about right now—and it’s unresolved. It was always important for me
to have these concrete objects, but maybe it’s not important. I have this house
in Wisconsin that is on a piece of land that is 450 million years old. It’s
really a rare place to be and that seems very durable to me, but it isn’t.
BP: What doesn’t disappear? This is a problem that filmmakers
seem to be especially concerned with, since film disintegrates. But of course
painting disintegrates, too.
MC: There’s a difference between mutation and disappearance.
So, there’s a real problem with the digital: you can’t archive it. The
equipment you play it on, the software, the operating system is ephemeral. It’s
a theater of performance more than it is like film.
MS: But the Internet is not an archive.
MC: The Internet is not an archive. I’m at the beginning of
something I’m trying to understand. So I can create this art project about
durability. I kept thinking that what seemed really important was like a seed
from an heirloom tomato. There’s a kind of durability in biology that has to do
with flexibility, as opposed to Teflon and iron. And I don't know if it is
analogous in some way to the Internet, but it might be that the durability there
is not about stasis. It might be about fluidity and flexibility and
adaptability. If that’s the case, maybe the Internet does have a kind of
durability, but in a different way.
MS: Along these lines, I wonder about your metaphors about
food, the heirloom tomatoes, but also the metaphors about food in your work
more generally.
MC: Food is really important. I need psychoanalysis to
understand this. My mother was a horrible cook. I mean, really bad—1950s food.
My mother’s idea of food was spaghetti with warmed cheese whiz on top. So I
grew up with very bad food, but there’s also something erotic about food. When
I was young, and I learned how to bake from my grandmother, I would bake things
for boys all the time. It’s where displaced sexuality goes—right onto food. And
its very physical and it's the body and I cook. This isn’t theoretical. It’s
very real. There’s something about growing my food and then making a meal out
of it. It’s the most nurturing thing that you can do. I think that’s so
specific to my own psyche.
MS: The emphasis on food in your work is always about
mixture, or parsing out pieces. In American
as Apple Pie you have these slices that you can choose.
MC: It’s about sitting down and eating meals. I just had a
conversation with someone about computer programming who said that they start
with a recipe. It’s about ordering. It’s about building.
MS: Or mixture, or flexibility. But it changes states,
depending on what you do with it. There is a kind of unpredictable alchemy and
durability to food. You can preserve it. You talk about canning.
MC: So you think that I have all these different outlets for
exploring the same issue?
MS: When you cook at home, there’s flexibility and the
changing of states.
MC: Well, yeah, that’s what cooking is. It’s chemistry. It’s
much more than chemistry.
You’re right.
It’s a metaphor that’s very similar to the process of fragmentation and
narrative cohesiveness. And it transforms itself.
MS: And you. It becomes you.
MC: That’s right. You eat it and then you are it.
BP: There’s also a different way here of thinking about the
durability of one’s work—how it gets handed down, like a recipe—stable, in some
sense, and yet always modified, not the same.
MC: It’s not the same, right. But there’s something else
about endurance that I have been thinking about. It has to do with the young
woman who came and talked to me afterwards [after Citron’s talk at Oklahoma
State University]. We had this conversation in the context of a class and in
some way her life—in a teeny, teeny way—was changed in that moment. And that’s
what you want teaching to be, right? This makes me very sad. My father died not
so long ago and the whole issue of how he endures through me is a way of
thinking about the durability of art. When people watch Daughter Rite they can go off and talk to their parents. It’s not
about the object. It’s about what the object motivates in the lives of the
people who come in contact with it. It’s hard for me to talk about—and I don't
mean this in a sentimental way at all. It’s hard to know what makes work
interesting. I think it only happens if it’s an inquiry into something that’s
really critical. It’s not about expressing yourself.
Michelle
Citron is the Chair of the Interdisciplinary Arts Department at Columbia
College Chicago. She is the author of Home Movies and Other Necessary
Fictions. Her media works include
the films Daughter Rite and What
You Take For Granted... and the
interactive narratives As American As Apple Pie, Cocktails & Appetizers, Mixed Greens, and Leftovers. Information about her work can be
found at: www.michellecitron.com.
Brian
Price is an editor of World Picture.
Meghan
Sutherland is an editor of World Picture.