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Neoteric Art: Give us some history on yourself. Meg Duguid: I came to Chicago in 1995 to study at the School of the Art Institute, where I focused on ceramics and papermaking. Within a year of graduating with my BFA, I started throwing public fights (Fight 2000 series), and that’s what really started my personal investigation of performative practice (although it took me a year or two to conclude that I was a performance artist). Those works led me to start exploring laughter, smiling, and eventually comedy, and later opened my practice up into a larger exploration of relationships. After the Fights 2000 series I did a series of works called The Great Guffaw, where I staged group laughing events at various locations throughout the city. My favorite one was on the CTA blue line, where I had about 15-20 people in a rush hour train car; when the doors would open, we would all laugh, and when they shut, we would stop. The effect became eerie to some rush hour travelers, annoying to others, and still others loved it—this was done a few years before flashmob started. In 2002 I had the opportunity to create my first work at the MCA for the summer solstice event, where I threw Dance with Me…, a silent dance party which took place on the front plaza of the MCA; a DJ spun a transmission to 50 wireless headsets that participants danced to. I also attempted to dig a hole to China in Dogmatic’s dirt room, and I later toilet-papered the Suburban and left town. I left Chicago in 2003 to get my MFA at Bard College. Bard is a low residency program, so I spent three months there every summer for three years, which freed up nine months to develop new work. I spent my first break interning at the Headlands Center for the Arts just outside of San Francisco, and then the next year I moved to New York City. In 2009 I came back to Chicago. In the grand tradition of the Chicago Alternative Space, I opened Clutch Gallery, a 25-square-inch white cube located in the heart of my purse, which I have been curating since December 2009. My practice transformed a lot while I was in San Francisco and New York. I fell in love with early comedy, I started to direct individuals in performances, and I began to sketch. During that time and up to now, my investigation of public performance has created a practice that is as much invested in the recording of the performative as it is in the initial act itself. Over the last few years I have been attempting to rip apart my studio practice and build it back into one that is studio driven, utilizing contemporary practice and its intersection with the performative NA: A lot of your work seems like it is or could be cathartic for the participants. Is there an underlying psychological or therapeutic motive? MD: This is not my intention. I am interested in the crafting of a moment and the setting up of relationships. When I enlist groups of people, I may be interested in relationships of strangers to each other while participating in an activity, or I might be interested in a specific act itself and how it functions. In grad school I shot a series of portraits of fellow students smiling for as long as they could. The result was a series of videos that ran from 2 to 30 minutes that captured all the stages of smile from painful to forced to genuine. At the outset of much of my work, I have a picture of what I want the piece to act like, contemplating how performers can be moved around, what method of recording makes sense, where the work is going to happen, and if the architecture of the space plays a major role within the way the work can be created. Last year, I created Everyone Is a Bathing Beauty, where I shot a silent film over the course of a week using the patrons of the Museum of Contemporary Art. In this work I was interested in how bodies can work together to create a shot as well as how a prop can become a character. The piece was loosely based on George Bernard Shaw's classic play Pygmalion, with a Busby Berkeley twist. Visitors to the museum performed in either a large-scale Busby Berkeley dance scene or short, scripted scenes in which they played the role of Henry Higgins, Eliza Doolittle, or a supporting character. The scenes were edited into a finished film with a loose narrative. The silent movie features numerous Higginses, Doolittles, and supporting characters of varying age, gender, race, and physical appearance. NA: Describe the relationship between performative work and more traditional studio art, like painting and drawing. MD: I have found that the term performance art no longer encompasses what it is I do. I am actively seeking to articulate the relationships I am making between the performative and photography, video, sculpture, and drawing. Drawing has proved to be a really effective tool for me in a few ways. First, for creating objects that stand in for the real deal. A mustache can suddenly just be a drawing of one held up in front of one’s face, and that’s enough for the viewer to say “Hey, look. A mustache.” In Everyone Is a Bathing Beauty, I was able to use a simple drawing of a bathing suit on a Tyveck jumpsuit as a reference for old Hollywood glamour. Of course, when drawing is used like this, it also references cartoon and fantasy just a bit. Second, drawing is a really nice tool to use in conjunction with photographs of an action. In 2003, I started a series of street performances based in early filmic comedy. These performances derived from the simple question of what happens when you take a comedic moment out of its media context and re-present it in real life. While performing these acts in public, I have found that video cameras become too intrusive and upset the performance, usually contextualizing it as reality television, rather than being a calculated moment. As a result I switched my format to still photography, which allowed my documenters to remain as unobtrusive as tourists or other passersby. When I got the photos back, I began to ask myself, how do I make this more than just documentation? It’s this question that led me to start erasing the performers out of the images and drawing them back in. The result is a photograph of an actual place and time with a comic book performer doing the action. It plays with the idea of what is real and what isn’t, as well as starts to refer to the idea of comic in all its meanings. In the autumn of 2007, I staged a 15-person slapstick performance in Battery Park in New York City. The performance consisted of an all-female cast, 5 photographers, and the backdrop of a the Statue of Liberty. I am currently in the process of creating a comic book from it. This piece has taken up various portions of the last three years and hasn’t seen the light of day yet. Some day it will be finished. Last year I started Smashing Pumpkins, a work all about how to film a falling pumpkin, make an action painting, and reference time-slice photography. Making use of 30 pumpkins, a ladder, a video camera, a digital sound recorder, a canvas, and a performer, I placed a ladder in the center of a circular perimeter (the splat zone). Around the splat zone, 30 marks were made, each one corresponding to a pumpkin drop, and a video camera was moved to each mark so each splat was shot from a different angle. The pumpkins were dropped one at a time, splatting onto the canvas. Smashing Pumpkins was edited using the visual effect known as "bullet time," which was popularized by the movie The Matrix. This technique is achieved as an expansion of a photography technique known as time-slice photography. As Smashing Pumpkins is an intersection of multiple acts rather than one, the time slice taking place mid-drop was generated by the 30 pumpkins in the performance, creating an imperfect animation effect that represents the performance as a whole. Additionally the canvas covering the splat zone was preserved as a painting and will eventually be stretched. NA: During the creation of a piece, has anything ever happened that has changed the work from what was expected? MD: This describes almost every piece I have ever made. Because each work is heavily dependent on the conditions of the space it’s in, who is in the audience, and sometimes the weather; there are things I just can’t predict will happen. My practice relies on the ability to structure a work around how I think it should function and then adjust to the reality of what it is. NA: What are some of the challenges you face when creating your work? MD: Outside of the general issues that artists can face—the need for a day job, lack of funding, the want for more exposure, etc). I look at the challenges I face when making a piece as a part of the process. From the physical challenges of going up and down a ladder 30 times in high-heels, or smiling for as long as I can, to encountering gale-force winds on performance day, or people just not coming out to participate. NA: How do you see your work evolving in the future? MD: It the future my work will become like the threads of a blog, where each piece generates the next iteration. Right now I am getting a handle on generating one iteration away from the performative moment, with a comic book, a video, or a drawing, etc. I am also hoping to start going back into older works and finding their next step in the threads of my art practice. NA: When was the last time you laughed so hard you couldn't breathe or you cried? MD: A few weeks ago. My husband and I had a two-person dance party to Sheena Easton. Needless to say I ended up on the floor in hysterics. If you want to see me laughing hysterically when I was in my early 20’s over the word monkey, you can click here. www.megduguid.com

Neoteric Art: Tell us about yourself. Paul Sierra: I was born in Havana, Cuba in a typical middle class family. My father was an attorney but his true love was art. At home there was always classical music, books and conversation about every possible subject. It wasn't perfect but it was a good environment to raise independent thinking children. When Castro came to power, we wanted to believe that it was going to be for the better. It was not. "...if you want to test a man's character,give him power"—Abraham Lincoln. Eventually the family immigrated to the US; it wasn't easy to adjust to a new society, to a new way of doing things. Fortunately for me I had painting. Art provides a means for leaving my past behind, not getting lost in the limbo between the old and the new life. Nostalgia is not a positive feeling. NA: One can be reminded of Henri Rousseau in your paintings. Is he an influence, or is this coincidence? Are there any artists you admire? PS: I admire and "borrow" from many artists, at one point one of them was H. Rousseau. But he was a bit too naive for me, his technique a bit too sloppy. Other heroes are Goya, Degas, Kijat, de Kooning, the list goes on and on. NA: Your work evokes a feeling of memory or a dreamlike state, yet are very vivid in detail. Do you work largely from memory? Also, there seems to be a strong undercurrent of violence in some of your work such as the "Crashes" series and pieces such as "Icarus #10". This almost seems the antithesis of much of your work. Do you find that this causes tension or balance in your work process? PS: I work with a few different themes: Greek Mythology, fire, car crashes, imagined landscapes, Lincoln Park, birds, swimmers. I paint all these different things because I don't want to paint the same idea again and again. Painting would become a job—I can't think of a bigger disaster. I don't use memories consciously, they may be there, I can't tell. I like to paint a world that is quiet, silent, even after a terrible car accident. My universe is oblivious of our hope and desires. At best it's indifferent. NA: How has working in Chicago been beneficial to your career and have there been any changes in the art world, locally or otherwise that may have an effect on your art practice in the future? PS: I love Chicago, of course not in winter. In the summer, Lincoln Park is my favorite place, the best in the world. I never cared much for the hard commercial New York Art world, too much shark feeding frenzy. Chicago makes it possible for me to paint whatever I want and still make a living. Perfect by me. I have seen some radical changes in the art industry since the 1980s. Many dealers wanted to believe that large expensive Art Fairs were the answer to their problems. Maybe it was for a while. Today around Art Basel in Miami there are about 15 different "satellite" art fairs. So now they face their major problem again. Fewer people are visiting art galleries and the art fairs are too many and too expensive. The must important change is the internet. It's a difficult marketing tool to use; it takes lots of time and certain amount of money. But it has given the artists opportunities and the power they never had before. www.paulsierra.com

"White" was originally published January 16, 2009 on vschneider.wordpress.com Two days ago at a press conference in Millennium Park, Mayor Daley warned residents about this week's dangerously cold temperatures while at the same time announcing a new campaign to attract tourists from around the world to Chicago in the winter. In his cavalier way, Mayor Daley mocked the media for sounding the alarm every time it snowed: "We've had snow, I mean, we've always had ice." (Imagine with the inimitable Chicago accent.) Yes, we've always had it, I tolerate it (badly), but if he thinks a gaggle of Australians are going to leave their summer behind to experience mounds of snow, sheets of ice falling from buildings, temperatures below zero, and, when it all starts to melt, slush and muck so deep you could lose a baby in it, well, I think he is in for a bit of a disappointment. I'm already sick of winter and it has only just begun. I'm tired of the cold, fed up with the snow, and sick of well-meaning people telling me "how pretty it is". Aesthetically speaking, I'm sick of the color white. On sunless days white has a hegemonic dominance over the landscape. Looking at the cottony blur in the morning makes me feel as if I'm in a continual process of coming out of anaesthesia, clarity always a bit beyond my reach. Besides, isn't it unsettling, almost unnatural, when the bottom of the landscape matches the top? Just ask any sailor. White might symbolize innocence and purity for some but in India women wear white saris when their husbands die. White doesn't fare much better in Moby Dick. In the chapter The Whiteness of the Whale Melville writes, "...it is, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that ere is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows - a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink?" For Melville, white is absence ("dumb blankness") and it is precisely this which makes it so full of meaning: it is the ultimate fear, the fear of nothingness; it is the great, white leviathan that drags the crew into the vortex of non-being. In his short essay Black or White, American abstract expressionist Robert Motherwell doesn't go into the symbolic powers of white (though he does mention Melville), but he's pretty blunt about the chemical properties of the respective pigments black and white. Black, he writes, being made of soot, is "light and fluffy" whereas whites are either "cold" and "slimy" (zinc oxide) or "extremely poisonous on contact of the body" (lead). 'Nuf said. White is also a real stickler for the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein: at least half his comments in Remarks on Colour focus on white as a problematic concept. The crux of the conundrum is that white is the only color that doesn't have an opaque and transparent version. Think about it: grass is opaque green, old Coke bottles are transparent green. An apple is opaque red, a red piece of stained glass is transparent. One can even imagine transparent black, though when a sheet of white paper is put behind it, it appears dark grey (which poses yet another problem according to Wittgenstein, for white dilutes other colors but cannot itself be diluted). All this brings Wittgenstein to postulate: if milk is opaque white then doesn't it follow that water is transparent white? Chicagoans know all too well what happens when our white, opaque stuff begins to turn into (white) transparent stuff: first it gets speckled with exhaust, then the large, grey mounds melt, which produces a flow (not very transparent) of water, dirt, spit, and grease, all of which ends up in a water treatment facility somewhere. Which brings me, oddly, to the beautiful painting by Gerhard Richter called Ice 1, one of three in a series at the Art Institute of Chicago. Richter takes on the colors of our cold, drab winter and turns them into three amazing paintings of ice; ice out of which seeps infinite and at times almost imperceptible variations of color and texture. Imagine one of our whitish-grey mounds of plowed snow lit up from the inside and embedded within it tiny particles of color: at first glance it looks like ice, upon closer inspection the whole thing is pulsating with color. Now that might (just might) bring the tourists here in January. Remarks on Colour, Ludwig Wittgenstein, University of California Press The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell, University of California Press The Daily Practice of Painting, Gerhard Richter, The MIT Press Gerhard Richter's notes are so honest, deep, and poetic that I have an inkling to do a "best of" post with some of his quotes and paintings. Read this book!