VIP: Gregory Burke talks to Jacqueline Fraser about THE MAKING OF CIAO MANHATTAN 2013

For almost a decade, Jacqueline Fraser has drawn on and re-purposed images, sourced from a variety of cultural and sub-cultural milieus, as key elements of her installations and wall works. Over this time she has produced thousands of collages from magazine clippings she combines with other elements such as remnants of gold foil, plastic and wood grain veneer. In contrast to the provisional nature of those materials, she has at times copied and transferred her compositions to film transparency to create large and robust light boxes. She has also continued to work in installation, deploying the same elements used in the collages to create multimedia environments that often include theatrical lighting, rap music, designer furniture and projected Hollywood films, as well as large two-dimensional cutout figures that she will often overlay with three-dimensional elements such as wigs and dresses.

The human body is central to this work, a body taken from one context and refigured as a means for Fraser to address issues such as identity, fashion, entertainment, beauty, desire, adornment, opulence, celebrity, sexuality, obsession, excess, exhilaration, transcendence, violation, dejection, dread, death, and ultimately the compulsive stare of the viewer. In intertwining different references, Fraser riffs on art’s history while also alluding to connections between the contemporary art-world, the entertainment industry and consumerism.

Since 2011, she has focused on making works in series, the titles of which reference feature films. Some series appropriate art-house films from the 1950s and 1960s, such as Et Dieu… créa la femme, 1956, directed by Roger Vadim and starring Brigitte Bardot, and La Dolce Vita, 1960, directed by Federico Fellini, a film that played off religion against the rise of popular culture in post-war Rome. In contrast many of these series re-purpose recent Hollywood films of the blockbuster genre such as Legally Blonde, 2001, and The Devil Wears Prada, 2006. Collages from these often recur in her videos and installations, which also adopt the series title. I caught up with Fraser as she was preparing her latest installation THE MAKING OF THE CIAO MANHATTAN TAPES 2013.

Gregory Burke (GB) Jacqueline, while I have been keeping up with your work remotely, regrettably I have had few opportunities to see your exhibitions and installations since I left New Zealand in 2005. One installation I would have liked to have seen was from that year: “THE FABULIST”. It was included in the exhibition Superstars from Warhol to Madonna at Kunsthalle, Wien. The work seems particularly relevant to the new installation you are making for the Adam Art Gallery. Both installations incorporate large-scale collages, lighting, and a range of other elements to create an immersive environment, while the title of the group show in Vienna alluded in part to Warhol and his naming of the personalities he filmed in the 1960s as ‘Superstars’. The best known of these ‘Superstars’ was Edie Sedgwick, who is the focus of your new installation. How did you come to be included in the Superstars exhibition and was THE FABULIST made specifically for it?

Jacqueline Fraser (JF) I was living in New York in 2005 and reading the Phoebe Hoban biography BASQUIAT A Quick Killing in Art. It really describedmy constant search for a fabulous—that is, not ordinary—life. But the Fabulist usually fails by being too extreme, so both Warhol and Basquiat lived close to the brink at all times. The Basquiat biography focuses on late Warhol and is set in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where I often live in an apartment on East 2nd Street at Avenue B, which made it more vivid.Then my New York gallery said I'd been invited to do a big installation for Superstars from Warhol to Madonna in Vienna. The curator knew my work from New York shows and thoughtI qualified as a Superstar artist. I was thinking about Basquiat's relationship to the aging Warhol(the ultimate Fabulist) andimmediately titled the show "THE FABULIST " as a tribute to all Fabulists.

Then when I travelled to Vienna and started installing I noticed my work was next to a tiny gallery of horse paintings by Edie Sedgwick. Someone told me she was the original Warhol Superstar who died young from a drug overdose. I've met some faded Warhol Superstars still wearing their pyjamas at downtown parties, but she never got to that stage. Later I read lots of Warhol literature, saw the films many times and was on Edie alert. But the naive, innocent horse paintings really describe her best.

I have a horse theme in the new collages for THE MAKING OF THE CIAO MANHATTAN TAPES 2013. The major song on the installation’s soundtrack is rapper ASAAP Rocky singing WILD FOR THE NIGHT, which is the Fabulist's motto. Along with projections it repeats endlessly for two months in the Warhol looping tradition.

GB As the “Superstars” title suggests the exhibition alluded to Warhol’s interest in celebrity and his ongoing pervasive influence on the culture of celebrity. In the 1960s though, despite Warhol’s interest in Hollywood, glitz and money, his ‘Factory’ scene was viewed as underground and even radical, typified by his elevation of Drag Queens to superstars. By 2005, at the height of the art market surge, the art scene had become mainstreamed and thereby increasingly fused within the world of celebrity, which is a focus of the work of Francesco Vezzoli, an artist also included in the “Superstars” exhibition. By the mid 2000s you were spending extended periods in New York and around this time your work went through a shift. You continued making installations that conjured images and narratives out of the materiality of their elements, but you also began incorporating images drawn directly from screen, print and online culture. To what extent do you think the context of New York and the art world/art market of the time influenced this shift?

JF Living in New York really exposed me to a huge amount of art. It also gave me confidence to make my work more extreme. I've exhibited at Art Basel in Switzerland eight times and have hung out in the VIP lounge. I've sold work to very sophisticated European collectors as well those in NYC.I noticed artists were blatantly using new technology to scan, upload, and project whatever's available. Wow! A twelve year old can do anything technically if I give them instructions. So undergroundbecomes mainstream and I could be part of that. Live web cam feeds of my installations to a huge audience all over the world become possible.

I saw Vezzoli's movies at the New Museum in New York when I was there and thinking back they were re-enactments like my THE MAKING OF series. But I also saw a lot of Hirschhorn installations in fairs, museums and galleries. They were closer to my recent installation THE MAKING OF AMERICAN GANGSTER 2012 with very tough images about violence.

I re-started my career in 2000 when I lived in Paris by myself and did work no one was likely to see. A pivotal moment at that time for the development of my work was seeing a private collectors’ exhibition at La Maison Rouge in 2000, with the most graphic, extreme work, all owned by French collectors. Fantastic! Experiences like these informed my decision to leavemy long-term galleries and focus on Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in Sydney and international travel to The Armory, Art Basel art fairs etc. I started making work for strangers, which was really liberating and very successful.

GB What connected you to the graphic images you saw in France and the confrontational installations of Hirschhorn and what drove you to push your new work toward the extreme?

JF When I studied art I included English and Spanish literature in my degree and I had previously studied French for five years. This study was an important influence on my work as I've always been interested in ideas and narrative in a visual way. I've also immersed myself in film and music videos and I work in my studio with cable TV turned on showing a continuous stream of images and late night rap music with a PG rating. Very tough!

There was a certain caution in the art I was seeing when I first started working full time as an artist, which made me avoid anything controversial. So seeing artists like Thomas Hirschhorn completely unfettered by censorship was really exciting. Paul McCarthy, the Chapman Brothers, Steve McQueen to name a few more, artists who are making audiences angry like some of the movies and music videos I referred to do. All of these experiences influenced my incorporation of more graphic imagery into my work, which has made it much better in terms of my purpose.

GB You mentioned your interest in narrative, but another aspect that seems equally important in terms of content is the form of the work. I am reminded of Hirschhorn’s striving for form as a statement of resistance. It is this approach to form that links his installations to his collages. Like Hirschhorn, you use existing images not just as compositional elements in the traditional sense of modernist collage, but as information that has an ideological underpinning. The clash of elements in your collages often seems to subvert the veneer of the original image and thereby its often unquestioned message. With these collages and also your installations to what extent are you seeking to unmask a truth of your source material?

JF Truth is an impossible result but I admit I am interested in "neo-realism" or "hyperrealism". Realism is conventionally seen as truth. I start with a concrete image, movie or even idea and then I usually juxtapose another image. European travel guides, Italian Vogue, British porn magazines, topiary garden books, all torn or cut and mixed up. Putting a French formal garden next to a half dressed girl from a sex ad subverts either image, so neither is true to its original purpose.

Often I paint a small black wound and let it drip. That immediately adds a fracture. The viewer is uneasy and an emotional element is added.When I invert a person or fountain or landscape, a mystical strangeness suddenly develops which I can't predict. But I still work in a formal way using composition, mirror image, and time lapses as regular elements for projections etc., so my work is strangely traditional. I'm surprised how many collages enlarged as light boxes, or huge projections four-stories high on a downtown building façade, look like Leonardo da Vinci paintings - large portrait figures and an inverted landscape, or interior-making chiaroscuro perspective in the background.

So it's all true but an emotional element overlays the original image. Plus the title is an important element. 50 per cent of the work is the title.

GB The wounding in your work, particularly in images of torsos, also reminds me of Sandro Botticelli’s St. Sebastian from 1474. Yet some of your rectangular compositional shapes evoke 20th- century modernism. In this regard they prefigure the juxtapositions of Aida Ruilova in her exhibition I’m So Wild About Your Strawberry Mouth, that has just opened in Los Angeles, where she overlays opaque black rectangles and circles over film posters related to Emmanuelle, the French pornographic film from 1974. Your works are powerfully evocative, not just in terms of the images you use, which frequently have iconic attributes, but also in the way you undercut the original context of the images. Your use of language amplifies this effect. Not just with the titles, but also, and more overtly, with works that incorporate text as a graphic element. Your use of text elements in THE FABULIST installation is an example, as is the collage A B-Grade Edie Sedgwick is not a good look, POODLE, from 2006. The texts you use appear to be scavenged from available contexts, most obviously with the film title references, but also with the insults that are positioned as first person quotes. To what extent do you script your texts?

JF I got the insult titles from the VIP lounge at Art Basel in Switzerland and openings round Chelsea, New York. I was really shocked by how these ultra rich, arty people talk to each other. But the words became annoying. Every time I saw my work in a collection after a few years I wanted to edit the title, so I lost interest. But printing them on acetate on a fabric background under glass gave the text an extra punch. Sometimes a sign-writer printed them on the Plexiglas of the frame and the words floated.

THE MAKING OF LAST TANGO IN PARIS 2011 and all the hundreds of titles I've done in that series are from working in front of cable TV. Movies in the “the making of " genre of documentaries are usually about 20 minutes long. They include interviews with the actors, producer, director etc., and tiny previews. They also include the muck-ups, which I love. So I'm focusing on the not-finished film as a re-make. Then I'm finished with the title. I've made 1000 collages with the same title in the series THE MAKING OF AMERICAN GANGSTER 2012. But sometimes I make a single collage, for example THE MAKING OF LEGALLY BLONDE 2011 consists of only one.

GB So with your “The Making Of” series the reference is firstly to a fictional ‘making of’ documentary and to the personalities and process involved, so that an actual film such as American Gangster is alluded to only through that frame. After selecting a film subject, do you follow up by viewing the film itself?

JF Yes “The Making Of” films I suggest in the titles are fictional. Most of the films I've seen but a lot I've only heard about. I Google them for a brief background check.

I've seen a lot of Warhol films repeatedly but only the ones at my video store. So the Ciao Manhattan Tapes I only know from reading Andy Warhol biographies. They’re described in Edie's biographies as well so I know the social aspect. That gives me more freedom to focus on the re-make idea that the fictional "The Making Of" series is promoting. That's why I include the year in the title to lock it into the present, such as THE MAKING OF THE CIAO MANHATTAN TAPES 2013.