Art on the Edge with Banks Violette

[MUSIC] Hey, this is Eugene Rappin and you're listening to the "Styles Like Ice" podcast. [MUSIC] Hi everyone, this is Eugene. I am here with the artist, Banks Violet, who is our guest today. And this is a bit of a departure for our podcast because I think he's the first artist on the podcast. So we are not going to be talking about fashion exactly, but Banks has done some work with fashion. But the real reason he is here is that this is a bit of a moment in history because I fell in love with fashion and started "Styles Like Ice" on the premise that fashion can genuinely speak with other forms of culture, fine art in particular, and music. And Banks Violet has been sort of, his art is very much informed by the type of music that I also listened growing up in a lot of her four members listened. So the kind of a dark, gothic beginning of "Styles Like Ice" is very much in the same realm. So he or she, this is why we're here. We really need to hear to talk about culture in general. And of course, Banks has worked. Welcome Banks. Hello. Nice to have you here. And we just started chatting on Instagram some time ago and decided to do this recently. So I've been aware of your work since around mid-2000s, to late-2000s. I'm going to say 2006, 2007, 2006 is when "Styles Like Ice" began when I launched it. And one of the members was an artist by the name of Slater Bradley. And I think you were guys that seem gallery together, right? Yeah. And he was also doing, I've actually lost touch. I don't know what's going on. But he was also doing very well. Yeah. So he was doing art that is also very much tied to music and new subcultures. And he said, "Oh, you will like Banks. Like, you should definitely take a look at his work." And I remember, I think the first thing I saw was I think it was a version of a misfit skull drawing that he did. So that was must have been like late-2000s. I want to say, I'm in 2000s. And you kind of came in and out of my consciousness, which I think is mirrors the way from what I understand you've been in and out of the art world. That's a very diplomatic way of describing it. Yeah. Yeah. Depends on circumstances which from I understand you usually have to do with drugs. Yeah. But anyway, equal measure of date, they're sort of equally paired. Yeah. So, and I, you know what, who better to do a podcast about art and this whole intersection of art and music and fashion? Because at the end of the day, I think, and this is what I really want to talk about. I think we have so many conversations about the work, but we don't really talk about the values that are behind the work, right? So when you talk to someone and they're like, "Yeah, I listen to industrial. Cool." And you ask why and you don't get much of an answer, you know? And the why is, I mean, at least for me, and I don't want to speak for you, I will ask you about all of this. And for me, it's about a dissatisfaction with the world that the bourgeoisie has built, you know, kind of anger angst about the unfairness and the duplicity of the society we've been thrown into without our choice, really. And the reaction against that. And on and on and on. And that's what I think looking at your work, that's what the first thing that comes out for me. But anyway, I wanted to, first thing I always ask is like, biographical, you know, because we all got where we are, right? That started in our teenage years, probably, which is when we start make first feeble attempts to understand the world. So I wanted to ask you about that. Yeah, I mean, I'm from where we're having this conversation, where I'm sitting while we're having this conversation. I'm located in the North of New York, which is where I'm from originally, which is usually when you say upstate New York to somebody in New York City, they sort of instantly imagine that you're describing, I don't know, the Hudson Valley or the Cats Council or something like that. But the area that I am is manifestly not that it's Western New York. And it's in this weird sort of little pocket where it isn't easy to access. It isn't easy to get to New York City. It isn't easy to get to Buffalo. It's barely easy to get to someplace like Syracuse, which is probably the largest urban area to me. But when I was growing up, there were other people in some more circumstances who chose to respond to those circumstances by creating little pockets of bands and venues and record labels. And then those little cells interacted with other cells and created larger things and then sort of went out into the world. So that was, you know, I'm sort of, that was my experience with subcultures, which I think is sort of like part of what you're talking about. Not just not background, not just where I am physically, but you know, how I ended up wherever I am. You know, that it's that combination of being in a small area, being deeply dissatisfied with being in a small area and using whatever means are available to you as a inarticulate teenager with very little power to affect some kind of broader change. And that change takes the form of creating a community. And it's a community that is entirely structured around resisting all those things that you you cannot stand. And growing up in, you know, Reagan's America, there were kind of there were a lot of things, you know, to be deeply, deeply disgusted with. So yeah, that's that's a very general rambling kind of description. Yeah, that's that's that's kind of my background. Yeah, yeah, no, I and do you remember anything that's particularly where like you said, growing up in Reagan's America in this sort of, uh, was it a conservative place for you to grow up in or is it a mixed place because I know you just mentioned who we were talking like that. Carnal is pretty close. But otherwise I imagine, you know, it's it's it's sort of, you know, there, there are a lot of other counts that, you know, kind of map onto if it goes a model. It's a small liberal college town in the middle of an area that is absolutely not that. So it's a Madison, Wisconsin. It is a Ann Arbor mission. It's a Chapel Hill, North Carolina. It is it's an area where like, yeah, there, there's a very large international student population and, you know, incredibly university, all those wonderful, wonderful things, except it's in the middle of a deeply fucking economically depressed area of Western New York, where there is no industry. There are no opportunities. You know, so there's kind of, you know, I said this before, there's there's a joke about this area, which is that unless your town has a university or a prison, you're pretty much shit out of luck. And, you know, that is absolutely. Ethica is very fortunate in that it's got a small college, which is an ethical college, and then it's very large Ivy League University, which is Cornell University attached to it. So yeah, there, there, the world comes to this place where people generally skip over and that's great. But then there's some downsides to it in that this town is in a lot of ways very similar to like, I don't know, a West Virginia mining town, you know, where you have a company store and a company that holds the strings and, and, and, you know, defines the terms of how everybody experiences their day-to-day life. Yeah, so that's that's that doesn't answer the the Reagan thing. Yeah, it's about that. Yeah, it's one of the other things that existed. You know, I'm saying New York has always been a place that New York City is it's warehouse, it's less fortunate. And along with the universities, there were also mental health institutions. So when those collapsed, And the funding was taken away from that. And those people who were receiving care had nowhere to go and sort of flooded into these local communities, the areas alike, ethical or serious saw a sort of skyrocketing population of people who are experiencing profound mental illness. And there was no safety net coming from the federal government because fuck it, pull yourself up by the bootstraps if you're what? It gets a friend at who is previously homeless. How does that work? Nobody bothered to explain that. So if that was sort of the immediate experience of growing up and, you know, here's what America looks like. There's this rhetoric about self-sufficiency and, you know, all this horrible shit. It is sounds great if you're very, very stupid, right? But it doesn't work if you're looking at somebody who is, you know, experiencing severe mental illness or has been institutionalized in some other respect or, you know, that disjunked. So, you know, ethical isn't distinct in its experience of that, but because it is so a kind of little microcosm, you know, isolated for the rest of it. It's the rest of, you know, Western New York. Yeah. It ended up highlighting that in an extraordinarily dramatic way, at least for me as a kid growing up. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, my first assistant is from Cooperstown. So, you know, it's a very familiar story from what he has told me. And it seems in places like that, there are two ways to go, right? You either find a scapegoat and the Republicans have been incredibly good at creating the scapegoat narrative. Or you do understand that this is all a bunch of propaganda and you just go completely the other way, right? And I think that's what you subcultures used to before. Sure. Channeling, you know, you're not crazy, you know, you're not stupid. You see clearly through the propaganda, but where do you go if so many people around you buy into it, you know, oh, it's the blacks. It's to choose. It's the international conspiracy of the elite and the old Democrats, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. And that's what really, that was the most important lesson that I took away from subcultures. It was a way, you know, to simultaneously, you know, orient yourself against these things that you could see and identify were transparently broken, right? But also create this entire alternate model or means to resist that by creating, you know, not just the culturally or digesting, but the distribution system for, for, you know, engaging with a larger audience by like starting record labels or making t-shirts or whatever. Like this was like, everything is broken. So fuck it, but not in this realistic way, but fuck it. We're just going to do our own thing over here. Yeah. And that is on one hand, yeah, that's a really simplistic way of like reducing enormously complex problems, but sometimes it works, you know. Yeah. Well, what else is it's in anger to do? You know, you're not. Yeah. I mean, I went through the same thing in my own way and I think, I mean, so many of us have and this is why counterculture exists or exists. Ed, I don't know. We've got to speak it in the past tense by now because the triumph of new liberalism has been so complete in terms of popular culture, it is kind of astounding and we will definitely get into that. There is no question, but I want to continue with your work first. And so you said you were, what are you playing music or what were you doing? I played music, you know, played in a few bands and you know, played shows and put on shows with friends and that kind of stuff, but you know, mainly did like album cover art and T-shirt art. And at certain points, sort of figured out that like my strength was not necessarily playing music even though I enjoyed playing it, it's just I don't, like there's only, there's a limit to how many aptitudes you can pursue. And that was just when I was in sort of oriental, whereas with like making drawings, like that was like, fuck, here's the thing that I do, you know, and part of, you know, those like punk rock or hardcore or metal or whatever, like, they're such visual things, you know, being able to contribute to that by producing imagery that goes along with that and sort of, you know, sort of filling out the details, you know, of how this worked visually, you know, that's, that was how I could contribute to that. You know, so it's, it's, yeah, but I, you know, from being involved with record labels and venues and bands and all that, like at some point, like I think, you know, small enough operation, everybody wears all the hats, you know, so that's my experience for that. Yeah. And how did you end up as a fine artist? What was the trajectory between that and ended up in some of the best galleries in New York City, the Whitney Museum, Moabee, Swan and so on? I, you know, I dropped out of high school relatively early and left home relatively early and, you know, this entire time, like I, you know, I had this ability to make drawings and I had this weird thing with it. You know, my, my mom was raised essentially by a single mother, you know, in the North Carolina and the Blue Ridge Mountains in the North Carolina. But my grandmother was an illustrator who illustrated, she was part of the King Feature syndicate group of artists who did like, you know, syndicated comic strips and she also did things for the Wizards and she did all sorts of stuff. She was a very successful, you know, illustrator was able to support my mom while she was growing up, all which is to say that my mom, when she was presented with like, oh, here's my kid who likes making drawings for her. That was, I looked like I was making a very fucking practical decision about what my life. It was like for her, in her experience, it was like, oh, my son is like a dentist or a lawyer. It just, you know, so when I was like, I'm going to go to art school. That didn't look like, oh, I'm pursuing something in practical. It looked like a very practical decision. So, you know, that's when I went to art school, my intention was for it to be that, for it to be practical. I wanted to be a graphic designer or an illustrator, something commercially oriented. I had no experience, no exposure to certainly not contemporary art, much less, you know, really modern art, fine art, that kind of thing. And then when I was in art school, I had that wonderful experience that you hope for everybody in school, which is you get exposed to new shit and your world expands. And so I went in, pursuing it as almost a vocational kind of thing, you know, going to be this sort of tradesperson who just makes drawings as my trade. It sounds fucking terrible, but like, I got exposed to other stuff and I got exposed to the idea of, oh, this is what art is and this is how it, this is the function it plays within within society, which I did not understand that before. That was a blind spot. And then it was, yeah, it was very easy to just segue into like, this is what I want to do because it felt really co extensive with how I was describing some cultures earlier. It is a way of organizing and affecting the outside world and some kind of direct and immediate sense. And, you know, that was, and it still is, that is what I find attractive about the idea of producing contemporary art and engaging with an audience. And, you know, yeah, it's, it's co extensive to that, that first experience of manufacturing culture as a 14 year old who's pissed off at, you know, how broken things are around you. Yeah. Yeah. And I wanted to ask you, so you already then you were in New York City and this is like late 90s, early 2000s, right? Yeah. Yeah. And from what I read about your work, it sounds like you became successful fairly quickly. Uh, yeah. I mean, it's, it's, I, you know, I went to undergrad, I went to grad school straight afterwards. Yeah. When I was in graduate school, I did a two person show it an offer, profit in Brooklyn And. with the gauras that I ended up working with for a long time after after I got out of grad school. Saw that show in Brooklyn inviting me to do a solo show. So I already had a solo show lined up before I graduated from grad school. I got out of grad school. I did that show that kind of went out into the ether. Nobody paid attention to it. That's fine. It was great because I was able to make a bunch of mistakes in which is what I think you should do. And then I did another show in it. That also kind of just went out and just sort of disappeared. But I learned from it. And some people saw it. And I was able to get some attention. And I started working on, you know, all this is always a sort of constant process of refining or changing and responding to different information and all that kind of stuff. So I was working on your work. And one of the curators for the Whitney Biennial for 2004 came to my studio and saw that and invited me to do this installation. I was working on and have it at the Whitney. So it was, you know, it seemed like it was a very fast kind of thing. But there's, you know, there were a couple shows, you know, there's I think like basically three shows where there's no attention given to it. And you know, so it was it was fast. But I was also working fast at that moment. It compressed the timeline. Okay. Yeah. It wasn't one of those like you do your first show. People go fucking nuts. There's a waiting list and yeah, it was it was a little bit spread out. Yeah. Well, I think it's I think it's a good time to talk about the work specifically. Right? Because for now it all sounds and we're going to put up some visuals obviously. You know, on our Instagram when we release this. But, you know, what was the work? What were you doing? What were the references? How did it how did the manifest in the final artwork and so on? The first few shows that I did funny enough were really heavy on painting. And you know, it was it's one of those painting has this kind of authority to it in a way that other mediums don't they just look like art. They can't be anything but art like sculpture. You can be like, oh, maybe it's a bench, you know, like a drawing is maybe it's intended for something. A painting is is declaratively a capital A or object. So in a very kind of parasitic fashion, my first few sort of, you know, public things were very painting focused because it allowed me to try to insert this vocabulary that I thought was really important, which was stuff that I'd called from, you know, subcultures and black metal and, you know, hardcore and all these kind of things, but present them in a way that was like beautifully crafted and would, you know, it was this idea of like seducing people into a dumping of inspiration they wouldn't necessarily find themselves relating to, you know, because I like this marginal set of information. I'm trying to translate it to a larger public, you know, and how do I do that? And way way to do that is by you know, parasitically deploying beauty for lack of a better description, you know, it's a good thing for the devil posture, you know. So yeah, and that's just very broad strokes kind of what those things looked like, but the idea is behind it where something entirely separate, but that's kind of the shell. Yeah, elegant angst. Yeah, I mean, it like it's, it's, you know, trying to get somebody to sympathize with like, Hey, here's this horrific event. How do you do that? You know, in some way, it's in there's something very interesting about establishing beauty as like a circuit that creates a kind of complicitous relationship to something that like if you see yourself in this to some degree, then there is the possibility of culpability down the line. Like instead of being like, look at this thing over here, this is exterior to me. Instead of being like, oh, this is something I'm capable of. That is a much more interesting position, which which sounds like, you know, I'm arguing in in favor of cynicism, you know, because it is a cynical position. We're all fucking monsters. Sorry. The thing is like, I don't think it's cynical. I think it's actually the opposite of that. I think it is inviting, yeah, I think it's a type of vulnerability actually and inviting people to say, Hey, we all have a dark side and part of civilization is managing that, right, on some level. So I think I want, you know, let's get specific because I think what you're talking about is like one of your first big successful pieces, which is the church, right? Sure. Let's can you describe it for the listeners? Sure. Yeah. I mean, in a lot of ways, that sort of synopsis is this. I mean, these are the ideas I'm going to describe are themes that I've explored in a lot of other things and be in our constant preoccupations of mine, but in a lot of ways that the church was sort of the first successful instance of me sort of presenting this out in the world. So to answer your question, this was a installation I did at the Whitney Museum. I believe in 2005, and I collaborated with a band from Norway, specifically a musician named Story Rook, who was a participant in this very kind of seminal criminal event in the history of Norwegian Black Metal, right? There was a murder that took place in Oslo, Norway, and there was a getaway driver for this murder. And that getaway driver was this musician Story Rook. And that's a really important point to make. I did not collaborate with the murderer. I collaborated with the accomplice to this murder, right? And again, that goes back to this idea of complicity and trying to create a situation where the audience is an accomplice to do this and something. So the show itself was a big empty room, black room, and inside of it there was a big giant black polish stage, and on top of it was the skeleton of a burnt church. And the church had been made out of wood that I'd individually cast in salt that was bonded with polyurethane. So it was this kind of white ghost of a burnt skeletal church that had this kind of crystalline ghostly quality to it because it was sort of white and translucent. And then in this room, there was a soundtrack that was provided by the musician that I was describing Story Rook. So you walk in and you don't need to know anything about, you know, like Norwegian Black Metal and that the series of church arson's that took place, you know, in the early history of this specific subculture in Norway. And you don't need to know the history of the musician who's playing this music. Instead, you just have to respond to this beautiful seemingly fragile kind of sacred space, right? And the interesting part of that to me is that it isn't yes. And on some level, yes, it is very specifically about these series of events that took place in the 90s in Norway, but it also connects to, you know, Casper David Friedrich in German Romanicism and sort of, you know, destroyed churches in that pictorial tradition. And these things aren't just about, oh, here's this one instance, and we can treat it as as alien, but instead as part of a broader continuum that has a historical set of antecedents, has this contemporary instance that I'm presenting to the viewers, and it has this this ideally broader resonance, which is the audience seeing themselves within it in that, in establishing the sort of complicit circuit for lack of a better description. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and hopefully that complicity, like you said, makes us reflect on ourselves. So a more philosophical question for you in that case, do you think beauty is amoral? Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's, it's, in amorality is a really, really important word in this that I think that like it's not immoral, it's not moral, it is the absent, it's the void state of that, and that there's, there tends to be in response to this almost this kind of abyschemic panic, you know, when you aren't given a series of hand, hand, you know, there isn't a pathway out for you in response, whereas like here's this thing that is all the terms surrounding it are resolutely moral, but in its interpretation, that burden of that shifted over onto the audience, and it is delivered as an amoral kind of summation, and then do with that as you will, like, and I think there's something very interesting about that. Yeah, yeah, it's like I'm being very vague, but yeah, no, no, no, I, well, to me, you're not, because I think along the same lines, and I think we are in a very small minority. And I think that's important to point out, you got me thinking about two things, one is So this Belgian designer, Driswan Nutt, he just launched a foundation in Venice. It's very beautiful. - And the first, and the theme of the first exhibition is something like beauty is the only true form of protest. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. - And I was like, and everyone is thinking praises of that theme, and I'm like, "Hmm, I don't know. "Is it because to me beauty is also a moral." Like, I, surely, I don't know how effective beauty as protest. - And it's also one of those things where it's like pretending that beauty is somehow a term that is trans-historical, trans-cultural, just is this thing, this monolithic thing that you can refer back to without being like, "Well, shit, what constitutes beauty? "Who gets to define beauty?" Like, what ideology is being expressed under the blanket term that is beauty? Like, this isn't a benign word. Like, this is a word that has been used to bludgeon many, many fucking people hideously over, you know, my time on Earth. So like, it's, I find that one weird, and I saw that too. I've seen images of, you know, the installation there, and, you know, it sounds great. It's one of those things. It sounds great and bold and sweeping and wonderful, and then you like dig into it and you're like, "Yeah, no." - Yeah, it's if you really start, I agree. And, well, I hate to say it was one of the problems with the fashion media, we're not very reflective, but just the fact that no one seems to have stopped and thought about this, and I thought, "Mmm, I don't know." I know the intention is good behind it, right? - Sure. - To be the reason, but I feel like this wasn't thought through especially today, especially under, and yeah, I, you know, especially in the Trump administration and all the ugliness that surround us, and I agree on some level, you know, Trump and everything about him, it's not just immoral, immoral. It's a kind of ugly, right? It's, you know, we can say that everything around it is ugly, and I feel like you're not wrong when you say that, at the same time, like, and I get the temptation to say, "Oh, we're gonna use beauty as a tool of photos, "I just don't think it's, I don't think it's effective, "and I think it's a problematic thing to say, "if you really think about it." - Yeah, yeah, no, no, I agree. - Yeah, absolutely. - And because there's so many examples, we have an art history where beautiful things were used for, you know, aesthetically pleasing things were used for ugly purposes, right? - Yeah. - And that work, church and the explanations for the work, it also reminded me a little bit, and I read in the one of, in the New York Times profile about you around 2016, 2017, they mentioned that the one of the reasons I think you moved, I think I, because your dad wanted to study with the Vladimir Nabokov. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - And the whole point of Lolita, right, is that he makes a pedophile very aesthetically appealing. You know, he's very charming, he's very urban, he's very well educated, he's very cultured, right? - He's beautiful. - He's beautiful, yeah. And at the end, he's like, no, no, did you forget that he's a pedophile? - Yeah, and that is an astonishing fucking thing. Like that, and that's something I find really interesting. Like that is much more interesting than that sort of like, bland assertion of beauty as this sort of motive force, when you're like, no, no, no, no, no, no, like it is much more complex than that. Like in that, that Nabokov example of like, this is, I am deploying beauty as this thing, as this mechanism to seduce you into identifying in the most immediate way possible with something truly fucking hideous. And if you have that capacity within you, and we all do, then it is morally incumbent upon you as a citizen of the, you know, a member of the species to be super dramatic to police yourself, to constantly question what, why am I doing this thing? Like in, in, in, am I doing it for selfish reasons? And like, I think that's great. I think, I think we benefit from, I don't know, hating ourselves a little bit more than we do. Like, I'm gonna have to be self-hatred. I think it's great. (laughing) - We can add the podcast right here. Like, what's a bang? - No, no. Another aspect of your work that I wanted to talk about is this kind of, you are a member of the species by you are, I am too, even though by immigration, but we're both Americans. And there is a lot of kind of, (laughing) Wow. We are, I mean, look, I think one of the things, that is responsible is to recognize. You know, we are not part of this shit, like whatever is going on right now. We would definitely counter that. And yet we are, - Beneficial citizens. - Which makes us direct immediate beneficiaries of so much awfulness. - Yeah. - And it's, that's the part of it where it's like, you know, that sense of moral distance, I think is really fucking dangerous because it skips over the like, no, you, by existing in this situation, you were benefiting from this. And being conscious and aware of it and trying to do something to correct that is a moral obligation for not to be historic, on like about the entire thing. But I think it is a really important thing. And when you get to be like, well, I know, I disagree with this. Cool. And yet you still benefit. It's like being a taxpayer and going, cool, my money is going, instead of to, I don't know, fixing infrastructure is going to bomb refugee camps. Like, and that is the dollar that I spent, you know, or in many dollars that I spent, doesn't give a shit what my moral position, the alignments happen. Yeah, it's like, I'd be, I'd be happier with bridges, but here we are. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It's exactly part of what I was getting as this. So there is a lot of kind of a deconstructed, inverted Americana in your work. And I want to talk about that is, you know, your preoccupation with that, where does it come from? And what is it that you want to say with this work? Sure. I mean, so I am, I'm, as described before, I'm from Athika, and you know, this is where I was raised. My entire family is all from the South. You know, I'm the only person in my family does not have a Southern accent. And, you know, they've both sides of my family have been in the South for many, many generations. So there's all sorts of fucking ugliness that goes along with that. And so I was raised with, my parents are wonderful people who are deeply sort of progressive in their worldview, but they sort of came out of backgrounds where they're appalled by the history of their families. So I was raised with like this sort of, you know, in the North, in upstate New York, very, very cold, very, very far away from Southern accents with the stories about kind of, well, here's your family and this is where it's from and all this kind of stuff, which is, you know, that's one sort of, you know, brick and the wall for lack of a better description, but like, you know, this sense of like, oh, there's this history to this country that is fucking complex and is dark and is, is cause for shame, you know, and is this thing that has to be chewed on, you know, for you to understand yourself. So that's a part of my understanding of who I am from a very early age, you know, of, you know, familial history. And then again, going back to sort of growing up in Reagan's American, watching like cool, you know, like fuck you, you're on your own, but we're gonna call it self-sufficiency. And we're gonna say that that's how you. You know, all these things sort of combine together and then just, you know, being associated with self-cultures and kind of lessons that you were in from those where, you know, it's like, oh yeah, you thought it was bad, but check this out. It's way worse than you thought. Like, so all those things in aggregate sort of work together to a, you know, I heard this great line. I think it's an Arthur Jaffa quote recently, which is like, yeah, we, we all, America is demonic, but we all love it. Like, which is a thing, like, I'm a drug addict. Like, I'm a recovering drug addict. And that role, that is the best description of my relationship to this country, which is deeply fucking awful and toxic. And I go back to it again and again and again, expecting a different set of results. But I don't get that because I'm a fucking addict. I'm not a fucking addict. Yeah. I see that in some of you recent work and I be that zik constructed American flag sculpture with neon lights that we're also going to put up a visual. That really. And there was, I think there was like a, like a black sack next to it that's reminded me of like, Abba Grabe. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, those are sandbags that are just sort of props that are like, so some of the, a lot of the stuff that I use uses the sort of the vocabulary of theater, you know, so like, these are props. These are, you know, contingent structures that exist just for like, you know, like a performance or stage or things like that. And, you know, looking at these, I don't know, sort of social media feeds of like, maga people who like have these, they're the people who are deeply in love with AI nonsense. You know, so the AI aesthetic is like heavily coded in the maga direction. And how many of these fucking people have like pictures of like white America with an American flag except because AI being AI puts like the wrong number of stars on it with the wrong number of stripes. The patriotism, you know, I mean, there's a code of how you're supposed to treat the American flag, right? Like, yeah. And they look like a trumpet out of these people have like it cut open and uses a suit lining and like, it is just this pure instance of postmodernity, like the performance of patriotism utterly divorced from any true content or like any core. Yeah. So like, fuck it. I've got my AI flag as my profile pick, but it's got like 50 stripes because I don't shit and I don't know any. Yeah. Yeah. And it's also it's it produces a phenomenal amount of a catch. Yeah. Oh, God. Yeah. It's incredible. It's incredible. But like the part like there's a, there's a, you know, I think it was Trump's first term, you know, him sitting with some kids. It was one of those photoshoot things where it was attempting to humanize him and put him next to children and as a consequence, it ended up being deeply fucking terrifying because that is the individual who should never be around children because you can tell how utterly sociopathic he is because there's no like, oh, it's kids. Like you can see this person eat the children. If the room was a lot. And he was like drawing, he was coloring on a, it was a coloring book and he was like coloring in an American flag because of course he is. And he gets the colors wrong. Like so he gets the flag. So it's like him like sitting and being asked like what's your favorite Bible verse? And he says to Corinthians, you know, like all of this is such a hollow performance. Of course. And it's purely its catch, but at least catch has like some kind of like, you know, it's embarrassingly sincere. This is a pitch that is embarrassingly insincere. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and also I mean, part of, yeah, I guess like, Kitch can be cute. A lot of it is like cute. Right. It's not beautiful. And this is just sheer uglyness. Oh, no, no, like, yeah. And it's sentimental, but like this is cynical. Like so it's like, we need a new term to describe this. True, true, true. Because it's Kitch, but it's also the opposite of Kitch. It's not sentimental. Yeah, it's not cute. It's not cute. It's not cute. It's, but it is Kitch still. So we need a new term. Yeah. Yeah. You talked about being a recovering drug addict as far as America goes. And I, you know, I don't know what I would put myself into, but I will say that there's always been an narrative that I subscribe to because maybe for my own like mental, you know, for my own sanity is that, oh, yeah, you know, America can be an awful place, but there is this undercurrent of common sense from the common folk that serves as an inevitable self-correcting mechanism as the arc of history, you know, is long what Ben's the word justice. Since the first Trump administration, I no longer believe in that common folk, you know, is the more common sense that has such a part of American mythology, right? The common sense, you know, Thomas Paine, right? We kind of one of the founding documents of America is called common sense, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The first kind of like mass piece of media. That is exactly the biggest best seller, right? Yeah, yeah. The first instance of like a mass media success was fucking common sense in here we are. Yeah. Yeah. And so I can also see that reflected in you in your work, you know, there is there is a sense of loss. There is a sense of ruin. There is a sense of closing of possibility that I also see not just on a political level, but on the cultural level as well. You know, we are live in the time of death of counter culture in the time of optimism, in the time of where neoliberal, neoliberalism, you know, this just this unabashed pursuit of profit at all cost. It is complete disappearance of culture as a value. Yeah. Yeah. Or culture, the only value of culture is to make money. Yeah. Yeah. It purely has an extractive proposition, but as a thing in and of itself, as a value in and of itself, like, hey, fucking ambiguity is necessary to the human experience and this is what art provides. Yeah. Well, thanks. We're not good. We're not good at ambiguity. Like this is, that is gone. That is completely gone. And that's like, that is the thing I love the most is why I love art because I have this opportunity to encounter something that we've space for me to make up my own fucking mind. Like there is an ambiguous space within an art object that allows an audience to have a role when they're interacting with it and gives me credit for being an active thinking human being. It is a profound kind of generosity. Yeah. And when you shut that down and turn everything into illustration, advertising, propaganda, things that communicate in a mechanically sealed way that disallow for an ambiguous space for an audience to find themselves because you have absolute contempt for that as an idea because there is no value you can extract from that ambiguous core then fuck we're doomed. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like that's, no, I think that's that's totally valid. But I think that has also penetrated the fine art world. One of my next sub-stack articles will be about how the labels for artworks in museums are now literally telling you what to think, closing that the ability of ambiguity that you were talking about. Yeah. Yeah. That to me is profoundly disconcercing. Yeah. I mean, the fact, and I like I always feel bad because it's, it's artists are artists and God bless them and it is a difficult fucking job on the best day. Yeah. So it always feels pretty shitty to be like, well, you know, this art sucks and it's reflective of this. But you know, like the fact that for the past seeming decade while there's been this glut of money and we're now watching it collapse and watching people sort of wake up from this cocaine hangover, at least in the art world, um, Yeah, it's been, yeah, this sort of, you know, the most conservative shit possible, like figurative painting. You know, like you do not get much more conservative in, in form and content regardless of like whatever, you know, variation it may take at its core, just as a categorical decoration of this thing. It is a, a painting of a figure, like cool, man, like this feels deeply conservative. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I want to switch a little bit and to talk about something you and I chatted about before, and it is, I guess, the high-faluting way of saying it is the place of an artist in the city, right? And we talked about New York City, you and I, which we can extrapolate that to talking about cultural capitals in general and how impossible it has become to produce our, in these cultural centers because of how expensive it's gotten. Yeah. I want to start with, what was your experience in New York City? Like, because I know you, you know, you, you and this group with, there's snow and then Colin. What was that scene like for you? What was your experience of New York City in late 90s, early 2000s? We seem like, I think we're all, we are basically the same age. And I think we are close in our experience of New York City. I moved to New York in '92 and but the late 90s is really when I started experiencing New York City as a cultural center because I lived, you know, yeah, I lived in Brooklyn, but I might have as well been living on Mars. So what was that like and what happened in the intervening years to now? I mean, just, I have my nephew who I love to death and is in his 20s and he works as a chef at a really great restaurant in the West Village, you know, and lives out in Brooklyn and talking to him and comparing notes to his experience, you know, being a young creative who is, you know, doing something ambitious and living out in Brooklyn and commuting into the city for his, his job because that's the creative core of what he cares about, right? It maps over like the Venn diagram of his experience in my experience, you know, it's pretty close to a perfect circle, right? Except when it comes to, well, how does this in capital letters work? Like, like, I could, when I was his age and the similar said, a similar situation I was able to do an art handling job or tattoo or whatever, like a fairly low impact kind of occupation for enough money that will allow me to have a studio space and like, you know, also a social life and go out and see shows and now his experience is just work all the fucking time and then go back to an apartment where he's hot housed with a number of other people as age who are doing the exact same fucking thing and all they can do is work and it's just like, yeah, you're living in New York, but you're not living in New York because you're working in New York. There's, there's, it's now a binary. You're working in New York and that's what you do and that's how you experience New York, but you're not living. And then there's another strata of people who are enormously fucking wealthy in their living in New York. And fuck those people. True, true, so, but here's the thing. And we talked about, we talked about this recent essay by the artist Josh Klein about how impossible it have become to live in New York. And again, it sounds like you and I were both in the minority where we were like sure, but that is so obvious. Like why had this article hit? Yeah. And, and I know you will look, you will, you will very frustrated with it. Yeah. And again, it's, it's, I'm not, I'm not frustrated with Josh Klein or his art. I don't know him. I don't know his art tremendously well, but what I know I like, you know, the essay, his conclusion and his overall thesis. I'm not disagreeing with what I found profoundly fucking dismaying about that essay was its response, like the reception to it. The fact that so many, from my perspective, what he was writing was just purely self-evident. There was somebody standing up to their neck in water, declaring water is wet. And the reception to that across the board for the art world is like, holy shit, this is revelatory. Yeah. Where the, the sense of dismay that, you know, something that is so transparently obvious and self-evident should be treated as if this is deeply insightful. No, it's not. This is what the shit looks like. This is as close to like, I don't know, journalistic exactitude as you could find in an essay, like these are the conditions on the ground. You know, and it is, it's just a measure of the disjunct between the audience that consumes art. And I mean that quite literally, you know, the people in the session to transact that, you know, and the people who produce it. And that gap is just yawning wider and wider and wider. But again, like it's his, his overall thesis is like, fuck it. Like, I'm all for de-centering New York from the conversation. I live in upstate New York. I'm on the page with that. I'm all for, hey, let's look at, you know, different modes of, you know, creating and communicating and distributing work and all that stuff. And he even sort of points to subcultures as a positive, productive model to look to fuck. I'm all on that, like pretty much going point by point by point down the majority of his essay. I am not arguing with that or do I object to any of it. It is again, it is purely the fucking reception to it and seeing treat that as like a ray of light from heaven was just like holy shit. Where are you fuckers looking? Yeah, it seems that it was used as a kind of again, moralizing moment and everyone like wrung their hands and then everyone's going to move on without doing anything about it. And to me, the thing was like, yeah, okay, so let's create new cultural centers. Oh, it's, I mean, this is, this sounds very sour grapes and that's not my intention, but I just did this. I haven't done it a solo show in New York City in a really long time, you know, and that's by my choice. But I just did a project out in Brooklyn, which was, you know, I have a friend who's got a house that is just overwooks the BQE and he's got a backyard with a garden shed and it's weird sort of fucking, you know, that he's turned into a gallery. This is an example of how to respond to diminishing opportunities like find the cracks, find the spaces that haven't been co-opted and occupied and use that to promote the culture that you want to see, right? So that is what I did in Brooklyn. I did this show at a friends house is still up and that's sort of like getting people to go out and see that. You know, this is the thing where you're like, did if you, if you are disgusted or exhausted or frustrated with how things are going to status quo and you don't support a alternate to that status quo, I don't know what to do. Like, and that's, that's a, and then again, it sounds very sour grapes and it's very specific to my experience. But like, yeah, I'd love for people to see that but I'd love for people to see every random weird fucking thing because I guarantee there's a lot of people who are mobilizing their little small garden shed in response to opportunities being shut down. Yeah. I agree. I agree. Yeah. But I also think when you to get over these AZs that there are only a few cultural centers and we have to be there. To me, today is increasingly starting to sound like you got to be close to the market. Not to the art market, not to the art, but to the art market. Like, you have to be close to the client. Because everybody consumes shit through social media or the internet, you know, they're not going to go see the show. You know, I mean, this is my experience with art. Like, I'm not sure how that translates with fashion. But like, the, they're digesting a show by seeing it online. Yeah. And then there are consultants telling them that this is a good mood to make and here check the auction results that you can look at on, you know, by Googling it. Yeah, like all the stuff that doesn't at no point in this is there a demand for somebody to actually go physically interact with an object and experience it. Yeah. And my understanding of these things is as a physical interaction. Like I go and I look at stuff and I love it and it's just very terrifying when that suddenly is no longer valued. Yeah. Well, we talked about your connection between you know, far fine art and music and subcultures and you're and now I want to bring in fashion to it. Because again, I felt when I fell in love with fashion, I was falling in love with those designers who were very connected to rock music. It's various incarnations from, you know, noise to industrial to punk and so on and so on. And I know you've had, you know, the big thing you did with fashion was with Eddie Slimman when he was creative director at Celine, but you also did something while he was at Do or right. I think you designed one of the stores. So can we, can you, I mean, feel free to, you know, be as free willing as you like, just like what's your take on the relation between fashion, art and music and just like the history of your work with fashion, what you think about it. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's, I mean, in broad strokes, it's, it's my, you know, I don't think art always exists in a gallery. You know, it's, it's can be fashion, it can be music. The, the, the thing that I'm looking for and that I respond to is what I was trying to describe earlier that there's this kind of ambiguous thing that allows me to ask me to be a participant in the creation of the meaning of this thing. In fashion does that just as well as art is just as well as music like that doesn't mean all fashion doesn't mean all art doesn't mean all music. It is, it is a specific and and kind of verified condition. And when you find it, it's fucking amazing. You know, that, that's my relationship to it and very, and it very generic broad strokes that that, you know, there are instances of, you know, designers and fashion who create that and have created and and I respond to that very, very much. So my, my personal experience is I, you know, you'd mentioned Heady, I met him. I think when I did the Whitney Biennial, it would have been 2004 and there was a period where, you know, it was a fairly steady communication with him and yeah, he, he was the creative director for Dioro at that point and the, the stores under his directorship all had a changing room that all did he had asked different artists like Google, Brown and Own and a number of other people to sort of design those spaces. So they were opening one in Osaka and that was right. If I'm remembering correctly, that was right when I was opening a solo show at the Whitney Museum. So that would have been 2005. That was happening at the same time. So there was a little period where it was a brief kind of forery of like we were interacting a number of, a number of different points and did a couple different interviews, did a bunch of photography and, you know, we're fairly steady communication. And then, you know, we reconnected a few years ago when, while he was with Sleen for first one collection and then this larger project with a bunch of sculptures were installed all over the place. So, but he's one of these people who consistently, when I look at what he produces, you know, not just in terms of his designs, but, you know, his, his, the way he stages things, the way he, he photographs and documents things. There is, he's somebody who is, I feel, exquisitely sensitive to that sort of that thing that I was talking about, that sort of ambiguous core, that space that asks you to find yourself within that. It is not dictating the terms to you as an audience, but is asking you to be involved with it in a certain way. Yeah, which I think is miraculous. I want to talk about those sculptures you did for Sleen stores because, was that the artwork that ended up being called Throne, first and last and always? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I saw that at Dan Collins at the Sky High Farm, by and show, which is close to where I, where I live upstate. And that was my coming back to Banks, Violet, Moment, where I was like, oh my god, I totally forgot, you know, this totally is gaming. I mean, it was by far, no offense to the artist. This was by far the most incredible thing there. And I, and I, I love you using, which is one of the recurring mentees, right? And that is, you're nice. Your art connects your art to music is you use a lot of that. Sound equipment, kind of like what, you know, for concerts, all these like boxes for musical equipment, all the extension cords, this kind of like a roady thing. That's very present. These stage elements that are very present in your work. But I wanted to because we really haven't talked in, I know some artists like absolutely hate describing their work, but I hope you will indulge me and talk about that work. Yeah, so those were originally, it was going to be 15, but it ended up being 14 because one of the locations that ended up not working out. But in essence, they're 14 chandeliers and they're chandeliers that are constructed out of, they're really sort of like schematic or skeleton versions of chandeliers. They're these circles, these big sort of steel diameters. And then there's these descending lit elements, which are in the original versions I had made have been for us in tubes. And then for the Celine series, they were these special LEDs because they had to sort of travel all over the globe. And there's different requirements and zoning restrictions and stuff like that. And it's better for long term archival reasons to, you know, switch from four essence, which are being phased out and use these LEDs. So they're 14 of these objects are sort of skeletal chandeliers. And if you almost imagine sort of doing like a stick figure drawing of chandelier and then make a flip book of that chandelier falling from the ceiling, hitting the ground and then collapsing. So it starts stable, it collapses vertically and then it collapses fully horizontally. So there were three basic forms of the chandelier in each of those three basic forms collapsed vertically and then horizontally. So what you saw at at the dance show, I think it was three or four of those. Yeah. And then different versions of there were different stages of these things kind of falling from the ceiling and collapsing. Those were really like I'd made, I'd refer to this a moment ago, I'd made similar kind of objects in the past. So I was kind of referring to those things from my own history. I was also referring to these series of sculptures that Martin Kippermurger, the artist Martin Kippermurger, had made that were these street lamps for drunks. The really amazing thing, amazing things that are like those. Yeah, these woozy kind of, sort of psychogiographic kind of remapping your environment as a drunk with these street lamps. So I was making this sort of Narcanned, you know, heroin overdose version of these chandeliers. If the chandelier is kind of like a stand-in or a surrogate for the human body and that that human body kind of collapsing in space, in slow motion, kind of almost like a moiburid sequence. Yeah, so that's kind of the rough idea for it. Yeah. I think they're all absolutely gorgeous. And also, you know, the name first and last and always. It was a very deliberate. Yeah. Okay, you talk about the name. Yeah, so the first one, like the first title I had made a couple of these previously, as I mentioned, that were called Throne, which is a great to word. It sounds like, you know, it's the way it's spelled as Throne, like a seat for a king, right? Or if you just say that loud, Throne, it means something violently sort of, you know, you've closed something, right? And then first last and always, Sisters of Mercy reference. So that that's such a beautiful phrase that makes it it sounds loving and sincere, but also is deeply selfish. Which is a one which is this is a mercy. Yeah, I mean, that is If Andrew Eldritch had one thing on his headstone, that should be it. Like, it's beautiful, it's a pocket, it's great. It's also deeply, deeply self-centered. - Yeah, yeah. - Like, it's perfect. But also is a great sort of stand-in for like my relationship to, I'm a recovering drug addict. You know, like that was my relationship to Harlan for fucking years. So there's a kind of nod to that. And then there's a kind of numbering sequence in a way of like organizing these for shipping. And it was really like, you know, usually my approach to titling things is not like, it's meant to be a license plate, you know. And it reflects what I'm listening to at the moment. It has some kind of connection in a direct sense to what I'm thinking about, how I'm making an object. So there is a really kind of, it seems, overly elaborate when you drill down to it, it is purely dedicated. - Yeah. - Yeah. - Yeah. So those were really, really beautiful. And I'm glad I saw them and it kind of made me reconnects. And, you know, evoked again, the impact seeing your art has, on me at least personally. And I'm glad to see you coming back. I mean, it's a silly thing to say coming back because, - No, no, no. - Yes. - It's for free. - But I know you've had a recent art forum cover, which I think, I always think like for somebody who comes from this like subculture, golf, you know, industrial metal backgrounds of like, ending up on the cover of the major magazine. I'm always like, whoa, what's happening? It seems so unusual. - It was very fucking weird. That one's always very, but I've always, like that's been my way of relating to like, anytime someone's like, oh yeah, this thing is happening. And it's a positive. I'm always like, why? (laughing) Like, I've never got my head around the idea that, that like, oh yeah, yeah, but like, you know, people respond to this thing outside of these, this sort of carefully siloed kind of little audience. And even though it's my intention not for it to only communicate to this tiny little audience, obviously I'd like to engage a much broader, you know, world, I'm still kind of secretly shocked when that happens. - Yeah. - Like, oh, this should be only five weirdos, you know. - Yeah. - Yeah, so it's exactly how I feel about my writing. I'm like, every time like, oh, this is, it's interesting. That's the other people to respond. - Yeah, and I know I seem like an asshole because somebody will compliment me on something and my first impulse is always like, why are you, why do you like this? - Yeah. - And it seems deeply ungrateful, but it's me just responding to a kind of shock. (laughing) - But makes that a sense because as, you know, when you do grow up, I mean, the reason they're called subcultures, right, is that they're small. And the subset of people who are engaged in counterculture is actually quite small. - Sure. - Yes, and especially, I feel like the deeper you go, the more is a taric it becomes to the mainstream until it becomes simply off-putting or all they see is a confrontation and they don't see the examination part of countercultures, basically of subcultures. - And that's always the very tricky line to tell, which is that you're referring to something or you're relating to something that bias-very nature is meant to be kind of hermetic, you know, some degree. But you're intending it for a broad audience. So you've got to translate this thing, it's arcane and esoteric in this one context and shifted somehow. So other people can find themselves within that. And that's the interesting, the interesting. But I'm always shocked like that it does work, you know. - Yeah. - I guess there is also a danger of it being co-opted or misinterpreted and I think that's what pains truly creative people and I think with probably, I do think it's worse, you know, with fashion because it is inevitably, you know, it is inevitably a commercial proposition meant for consumption, but when these ideas become just consumption, right? I think this is when people are like kind of like, "Oh, no, this doesn't sit well with me." - Yeah. - 'Cause it actually was trying to say something with the work. - And it is really interesting to see it. Like, "Oh, is there a way to make this thing that is somehow, you know, not immunized to its eventual recuperation and commodity form, but they can almost function as kind of like, you know, a poison pill that someone has put in it." And then when it's formed and transported into a new in different contexts, it then can, you know, open up and spread its particular poison. Yeah. - Yeah. See, in my darker moments, I feel like that's absolutely impossible today because neoliberalism is the water we swim in as far as culture goes, not just the economy. And to me, the sort of the end point, yeah, I don't want to say that it's end point and there's nothing after it, but it was a very disperting moment when, you know, that Banksy artwork that self-destructed after an auction that was sold for a million, that was then resolved for 25. It's like, what do you do after this? - Yeah, yeah. (laughing) Yeah, it is, like everything will be go up that, you know, and yet we have to do something, like we have no choice. - Yeah, or, you know, like the KLF foundation burning a million pounds and like, maybe on the Farrell Islands and making a video of this. So like, it's not just that one instance, it's the fact that there's a set of antecedents of other people trying to resist, you know, being absorbed into, you know, the marketplace, in similar manner, and that like every decade there's an iteration of that and it is equally as unsuccessful 10 years ago, as it was 20 years ago, it's like, like, okay, cool, where is the successful productive model of resistance? You know, I think that's the question. - Yeah. - Whatever. - Yeah. I guess the final answer is it's inside us. - Yeah. - It remains inside us. And that is the final point, right? And I mean, I always think if I can turn on that one kid who will say, oh, I read this and A, like I don't feel insane. - Yeah. - Any more, like I don't feel like I'm a crazy person and everyone around me because like I feel like an alien. And there's that confirmation and there's that explanation of what I was feeling, but I can't quite maybe put it into words. 'Cause I've had those moments, and I still have those moments sometimes and they're incredible. You know, I've had those moments like, I don't know, like reading Al-Berkamoo and you're like, boom, your brain explodes. You know, yeah, this is exactly how I fell. I think that's what we gotta do, right? Like that's the thing that remains. - Yeah, I mean, I'm enormously fortunate. I get to do a Zoom call later today with a younger artist who's sort of working on a larger project and wanted my feedback. And I'm like, fuck, beyond fucking gratified. - Yeah. - I'm in a position where somebody would want that, would ask me to do that, and then I get to do that. - Like, yeah. - That is what an enormous gift, whether they give a shit about what I say or not. Like, is less point, and it's more of the like, at the end of the day, I'm always, again, I'm always shocked when these things translate to a broader audience, and that's great, and that's wonderful. But in the end of the day, if it's only five people, that's also okay. - Yeah. - Like that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, deep inside of it. - That's great. - So, yeah. Well, I think it's fitting to end our episode with Samuel Beckett. I can go on, I'll go on, that feels like the cultural moment we find ourselves in. - Yeah. - Yeah. - I mean, that was a perfect fucking submission. - Yeah. Thank you, Banks, and I invite the audience to check out your work. It's really fantastic, and come with an open mind, come with the sense of inquiry, because it is disturbing some of it, and it should be disturbing. It is meant to be disturbing. Thank you, Banks. And we'll put up some visuals on our Instagram, which obviously you work should be experienced in person, but hey, it's a start. Thanks for coming on, man. I appreciate it. Thank you very much. I enjoyed it. Bye. You've been listening to the Stahls Lai Guys podcast hosted by Eugene Rapkin, produced by Patrick Liduk, intro and ultra music by Wesley Iceult of Cold Cave. We are Reader Supported Publication. Support us on Substack at www.substack.com/stylesideguys. Your subscription is an important step in keeping independent fashion journalism alive. We also invite you to take a look at the Stahls Lai Guys Academy, our educational resource, at www.stahls Lai Guys.com/academy. There we offer courses that will enrich your knowledge and further your interest in fashion history, theory and practice. Last but not least, don't forget to like and review the podcast wherever you stream as it helps us enlarge our audience. As always, we thank you for your support in keeping fashion journalism independent. (upbeat music)