Quietly Dangerous: A Conversation Between Aura Rosenberg and Veronica Gonzalez Peña

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August 25, 2023 • By Veronica Gonzalez Peña

My experience working together [with my mother] made me acutely sensitive to the possibilities, limitations, and permutations of expression from different positions. As a scholar, I’m interested in the idea of artwork as an encounter through which identity is artistically understood, defined, and challenged. This is particularly charged for the child subject whose identity is still coming into being. As for the question of collaboration, I believe the subject is always a collaborator to a greater or lesser extent, just as the artist is always, to some degree, the subject. The works that most interest me make space for the artist and the subject as well as the beholder.

Veronica Gonzalez Peña

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VERONICA GONZALEZ PEÑA: When I began seriously thinking about collaboration some 20-plus years ago, I turned to the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott’s theories of play and of the transitional space as a way to think more deeply about the elusiveness of creativity. He states that things must remain fully open, fully equal, in play: no one side can dominate because as soon as that happens the play stops, and it becomes a different kind of relationship. Can you share your thoughts on this, and how it is that you approach your collaborations with other artists? How it is that you keep things in this state of play, or flow? AURA ROSENBERG:Recently you brought an idea to me for the beginning of our film The Bull and the Girl, and after we spoke about it a bit, you let me know that you had been a bit wary of bringing it to me because I might think it was silly. You shared a Mike Kelley quote: “I have always appreciated complexity in artworks; the fact that works are high-minded or silly is less important than their complexity. That’s the true content of the work—its structure.” This was a great way for us to move into a discussion about what the complexity was that lay below what may have been initially perceived as silliness. Can you discuss this relationship between the high and low in your work, as well as the pushing through the initial resistance of a silly idea?For Winnicott, play always occurs in the magical place between things—never fully mine nor yours, nor even ours, for it lies in a place of nonownership. These concepts come from his theories of the transitional space, a space first inhabited by the breast (or bottle), and later by transitional objects (a blanket, a toy) that aid in the child’s maneuvering from the internal world to the external. The transitional space, represented by these transitional objects, is a tertiary space that is the space of creativity and of coming together. I think about this in regard to your work, and the generative space that I see as quite playful in your work (and things seem always to be at play). For example, in regard to your and John’s first trip to Berlin in 1991 and your worry before the fact at what this trip might bring up for you—your father had fled Germany during the war—you ended up taking Walter Benjamin’s memoir, Berlin Childhood Around 1900, and turning it into a new set of works, Berlin Childhood. As in Winnicott, the work you are generating is neither fully yours—your personal family history and their set of experiences—nor fully Benjamin’s as found in his memoir, but rather it’s a transitional space, both in that it is between you and Benjamin but also in that it is in constant play, or process. Can you talk a bit about this project—was it an investigation? Can you speak a bit more directly about your relationship to history? Here I’m also thinking about the Victory Column that you turned into a souvenir. Did you also bake it? I love the idea of your turning Benjamin’s metaphor into a literal manifestation.I want to talk about the series Who Am I? What Am I? Where Am I? and motherhood a bit. This is the work in which you asked artists to do face painting on either their own children or on your daughter, Carmen. Carmen has said that she enjoyed working with Dan Graham because he was so playful and had such an interest in children. But she has also said that, on the Mike Kelley photos, in which he made her up like a goth, she felt “like [her] identity had been completely erased.” When asked about that work recently, you responded that, in that moment, you had to decide if you were the mom or the photographer. And in that instance, photographer won out. I’m thinking about Constance Debré’s incredible 2022 book from Semiotext(e), Love Me Tender, which asks why we can’t look at motherhood as a relationship like any other, with conflicts and ruptures and mending and variation. Motherhood can feel like a straitjacket, both for the mother and the child, with idealized roles that seem both impossible to uphold and unchallengeable; if you do challenge them, you are easily seen as abject to the point of vilification, as Debré herself experienced when she came out as lesbian and her child was taken from her in family court. You yourself were roundly criticized for this series. Yet I imagine that if a male artist/father had said, “In that moment I was a photographer,” there might instead have been general agreement and a deep acknowledgment that, for the (male) artist, to be an artist always comes first.Do you think of your assertion, that in that moment you were artist first, as a political position in regard to yourself as a woman artist? Can you talk about the tension between motherhood and artist?You’ve said that your work is “good natured” and that it almost inadvertently often exposes underlying tensions. I believe it also challenges and subverts given modes and relations: motherhood for one, as we’ve just discussed. You’ve spoken about your desire in the late 1980s to make transgressive work, like some of the male artists you loved and admired at the time. Yet I feel your work is not transgressive in an affrontive, easily identifiable way; rather, it is quietly dangerous. It turns things upside down, the gaze as in Head Shots, in which a woman—you—is bearing witness to a man’s orgasm, and allowing the rest of us to do so through you. This relationship disrupts expectations, as does the series Dialectical Porn Rock, in which you decoupage porn images onto rocks, which you then term readymade figurative sculpture. Your work is historical, or is constantly thinking about and in relation to history—the rocks, for example, through which you investigate the long history of figurative stone statues. You take on the nude in marble statues more directly once you move to images of Renaissance sculpture, which you then decoupage onto marble. And this led to another series, out of which our film grew, Statues Also Fall in Love. You seem to be constantly challenging existing modes of looking and being looked at, and allowing the work to grow out of itself in ways that feel quite organic.Can you speak to the underlying seriousness below the good-natured exterior of your work and the tension between these impulses?To get back to the subject of motherhood, we both work with our daughters; our film on Ariadne and the Minotaur (which stems from your fascination with the Bull and Girl statues) stars my daughter Penelope Pardo as the Ariadne character. In a way, it was an honor when you told me you wanted her to be in the film because in asking Penelope you were not only acknowledging her talent but also referencing her acting in my own films, and there was also something like an extension of this investigation of motherhood through me. It’s as if you are continuing to play with this relationship through us, as much as making a film with us—the process of working with a mother and daughter in such close relation for an extended period of time feels significant to me, and I certainly feel much closer to you through this project. Your daughter Carmen and I sat together for a long time at Dan Graham’s memorial recently, and I found her very brilliant and charming. She holds a PhD in art history from Princeton, and we spoke a bit about her research interests and her teaching. She’s presently teaching a course at Princeton titled “Artists and Their Subjects,” which examines these relationships in the period between the French Revolution and the turn of the 19th century. I found this fascinating given that, as a child, she was a subject of so much of your work, in that somehow that early work she did with you has extended into her own research and investigations in her adult life, through the experience of the subject. It seems to have been foundational for her. Her interiority and sense of self must have certainly been shaped by it to an extent. Can you speak to this, the ways that you as mother and she as daughter have been deeply and variously affected by the relationship of artist/subject? Was Carmen a collaborator, as Lena Dunham has stated she was in your work with her own mother, Laurie Simmons? Can you say something about the idea of child as collaborator?Do you think your decision to become an artist was influenced by your trip to meet Rothko with your father when you were a child? I imagine Rothko was presented to you as a great man, perhaps even discussed as such before the fact. How would your father’s view of him have affected you, and do you think there might then have been something of a desire sparked in you to be like someone whom your father admired, in order to please your father? How deeply do you think your own relationship with a parent influenced the choices you later made in regard to life and career? Interestingly, the house I lived in for a long time on Long Island, and in which I shot Cordelia, was Theodoros Stamos’s and was built by him when he moved out of the house Tony Smith had previously built for him out there. Rothko, as you mention, is buried in East Marion, in a graveyard only a mile or so from the Stamos house. I wrote this graveyard into both Cordelia and our film, so somehow Stamos and Rothko lie at the far reaches not only of your childhood but also of our project, and this brings me back to this idea of the force field of history with which we opened this discussion. The two statues facing off, and the animation of a labyrinth with which you want to open our film, carry the idea that, whether we are aware of it or not, history, myth, and other types of stories, familial and otherwise, surround us, are always acting upon and influencing us, like a force field, as you say.