Jacolby Satterwhite
This conversation took place in September 2019 as Jacolby was preparing his immersive multimedia installation and performance series You’re At Home at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, NY.
The interview originally appeared in edited form as the cover feature in BOMB Magazine, Issue 150, Winter 2019-2020. Click here to read the piece on BOMB. The full transcript is presented here.
Installation view of Birds in Paradise, 2019, two-channel video.
Courtesy of Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York. © Jacolby Satterwhite.
Sean Capone: I wanted to start by talking about your relationship with your mother’s work, with her sketchbook inventions. It’s a well known backstory, that she was a mentally ill woman who created this incredible trove of creative material that you continue to work with. Could we touch on it again, perhaps framed around the methods of the mediums you work in: video, performance, and animation. Why those mediums in particular?
Jacolby Satterwhite: I originally started in performance after working 10-12 years in a painting education in boarding school through graduate school. I’ve said this in a lot of discussions, it was the only language I felt like I had agency with, it was just about having autonomy with something. I was dealing with a personal narrative with my mother’s drawings, and the only way I felt I could resolve my collaboration with those drawings was through performance. I went to Skowhegan School for Painting & Sculpture, doing mostly performance with the drawings, which was derived from a Dada/Fluxus strategy where I wanted to use spontaneous language and the instructions in the drawings as prompts for actions. I mined those actions as potentialities for use as ‘labor utilities’, almost like a Martha Rosler Semiotics In The Kitchen but with a schizophrenic woman’s drawings. Like, how could I potentially use all these on the greenscreen or with the point-and-shoot camera I was using at the time. When I was at Skowhegan, I was doing direct video performance, I wasn’t drawing anymore -- I wanted something to meditate on. I started to teach myself After Effects there, and then I taught myself [the 3D animation software] Maya.
SC: What year was this?
JS: 2009, 2010. Then, all the rotoscoping I was learning in After Effects made me realize I could trace the lines of my mom’s drawings and render them into these massive crystallized landscape tableaus that reflected the language of what I was trying to achieve in my paintings. And I could perform in those spaces as well.
SC: By tracing her handwriting as a kind of virtual signage, you seem to conflate the idea of the invention with the actual form of it. It’s interesting you started from a conceptual art framework as opposed to ‘functional’. A lot of artists might choose to recreate the sketches as literal sculptures or installations.
JS: I think that my language, it is derived from world-building; when I was young I read The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings, and I used to buy these massive strategy guides for videogames and role-playing games, with maps and legends and languages that you had to learn. With Dungeons & Dragons, Final Fantasy, there’s always some dense codex that you immerse yourself in once you take on that folklore. So, I was definitely into immersive languages, and I felt like I wouldn’t want to make sculptures because that’s not the first solution. Working digitally, with architecture and terrain, I can deal with the variables of space in an ephemeral way, moving things around and taking chances for ten years in order to have mastery over real space and finally produce complicated sculpture and painting shows. But for me, I needed an economical way to deal with those variables, for all those languages I wanted to put together beyond my mother’s. My mother is definitely a click-bait part of the process; personally when I work there isn’t a hierarchy. Whether it’s the models I solicit to perform on the greenscreen, the Google images that I download for moodboarding, or the landscape shots, it’s a complicated palette on 40GB of hard drive space that I’m trying to consolidate into some weird metastasized... utopia.
SC: Thinking back to those fantasy games as a source of inspiration, and the relationship between the gesture and drawing as a kind of ‘invocation’. You’ve taken these drawings and handwritings and transposed them into 3D virtual space, so now they’re actual objects in the environment. It’s a kind of conjuring, like a magician surrounded by glyphs. There was that recurring image in Reifying Desire of you in a recumbent pose surrounded by the glowing geometric shapes... using dance as a kind of spellcasting. Is that too esoteric? <laughs>
JS: No! Well, I consider the formalism around my dance strategies as a method of casting a spell by creating visual harmony ... I have a strong grasp on my visual language and what I want to achieve with it, that’s what keeps the viewer locked into the mystery. I’m so committed to the composition, to the performance ritual. In Birds of Paradise, there is a coliseum, an ancient 360º virtual reality space. I wanted to use the VR medium to build and animate a coliseum, and also do West African shrouding rituals on the other screen, and integrate different forms of regeneration, circularity and spectatorship in one composition. It’s like abstract painting, but with a visual rhythm of circularity: crop circles, coliseums, and shrouding performances that turn my body into a Maypole. I try to stay consistent within a motif, and build a narrative out of it. Dana Schutz is actually a big inspiration for my work, I like her process with narrative building. Her, and Derrick Adams, my mentor when I was 19 who guided me into the space that I’m in. I love him.
SC: The consistent thing in your work is how you extrude forms and a physical world to inhabit out of an inner space of imagination and desire. To me, that’s part of the whole project of being queer in the world, to some degree.
JS: Well, to survive as a queer person in the world, it’s about extruding a fantasy and committing to it, like a kind of cosplay, assimilating into structures where you don’t necessarily belong. I create safe spaces for myself to stay sane, it’s a self-care regimen. I guess...I don’t know how to respond to that.
SC: Maybe that’s my own projection.
JS: No, I used to be committed to the idea that I was world-building as an escapism, creating a space for my language to thrive and you have to assimilate to it. By principle, that is what I’m doing. But the older I’m getting, it doesn’t feel as divisive, it feels more generous, like a form of poetry-making. Like maybe how... Barnett Newman wakes up in the morning and creates a zip as a way to meditate on the poetry of the vertical line, as a reflection of skyscrapers in the city, you know?
SC: Well, with Blessed Avenue, it looks like you’ve dramatically expanded the scope of your cast and the variety of actors you work with. You said before that you hated when people compared the spaces in the video to a nightclub, but I do think of it as a kind of virtual ‘pleasuredome’.
JS: But it isn’t really about pleasure. Yes, they’re naked, and have BDSM gear and harnesses on, but that’s more about the literal slave/master binary. But it’s all blurred and you couldn’t even find the master in the video... but you saw some kind of labor gesticulation that looked like work, but you couldn’t see what was being produced. In one scene, you see figures flying over disaster zones, hellscapes afflicted by climate change or war. These characters are complicit in the system but being kept aloof to what’s actually happening. It’s a narrative game I wanted to play.
SC: The characters do look like they’re working -- there’s more of some kind of labor on display than hedonism, for sure. They look like implements in a soft machine or bio-techno contraption.
JS: It looks like hentai in a way. I think that I wanted the ambiguity between pleasure, play and work to be there. It’s like... if Instagram was a ballet, this is what it would be.
SC: What’s your relationship with the performers and actors in the studio? You never show explicit sex, it doesn’t feel pornographic even though it seems like you’re approaching the line...
JS: I’m approaching the aesthetic of BDSM because I know I wanted it to be a factory. A tongue-in-cheek, sartorial decision, mostly about nudity, not sexual. It’s a blur between ‘play’ and ‘work’ that I wanted to contrast with the chaos of the landscape in the film. They’re kind of like zombies. The most sexual video I ever made was Reifying Desire #6, but there’s really nothing sexual about this video, except they’re naked.
SC: But there are certain visual codes you have here: the bondage gear, the way they strike alluring poses and discipline each other, working each others’ bodies...
JS: But that’s because they’re working! That’s the double entendre I’m dealing with conceptually. It’s more about a slave/master binary that’s blurred. They’re hot and naked, but they’re not performing eroticism.
SC: Hmm! That’s a fine line to straddle.
JS: The next time I make a fuckin’ body of work, it’s gonna be the most banal, flower-candy, corny-happy -- well first of all, I don’t even have sex anymore anyway so ... I definitely don’t have anything to reflect on, on that. <laughs> I pushed a certain kind of sexuality and queerness to the work because digital media is such a cold and callous kind of thing. So keep it raw, to keep things fleshy, and keep things primal and carnal, and composite into a medium that’s not, is a kind of tension I like to reinforce.
SC: I used to think that queer people would really embrace and identify with digital space, virtual worlds and digital characters. I don’t know if that’s really happened, unless I just wasn’t paying close enough attention to the right corners of the internet. But also maybe it’s because of the increased visibility of queer people in the real world, through popular culture. It seems like the codes are being rewritten in mainstream culture, helped by shows like Drag Race and Pose.
JS: That’s natural, every decade something mainstreams really hard. But it’s all agenda-based, we’re all just puppets. That’s kind of what this video is about. Crowds being pushed around. I’m sorry, I’m so cynical now. I don’t find my queerness or anything about it as a tool for poignant artmaking. I don’t find that conversation interesting anymore. I think just by ‘being’ we’re contributing to it, I’m not interested in ‘quoting it’ in that conversation. I’m just saying... we’re in a crazy political climate now so of course this conversation is gonna be a lot more rich.
SC: It’s a generational procession. The way this younger generation has embraced the issues of gender malleability and identity, and it’s become divisive to some degree.
JS: It’s become more sophisticated. I mean, when I first saw Pose, it was sublime because I never saw anything that looked like me or the narratives that I’ve personally experienced given form on such a massive platform, and done well. I’ve cried a couple times watching that show, it was like a Lacanian moment for a 33-year old. It gave me a sense of purpose and form, I think I needed that. I feel that white dudes watching Queer As Folk in the 2000s probably felt a similar way, and I didn’t know I was missing that. So yeah I’m excited as fuck about it. But because we’re moving in such a positive direction, with how many people are getting to share their voices, and the culture is becoming more nuanced and demanding more intelligent things, I think right now we’re in more of a didactic phase where everything is very lesson-oriented, in order to get the masses ready. But I cannot wait until 2025 when we can go back to being rude again.
SC: It’s a bit of a minefield right now.
JS: It’s a minefield. I think it will become corny to be so didactic. It’s such a conservative cancel-culture, it’s very vindictive, anything you say can get you cancelled. It’s a micro-managing period of time, but the pendulum always swings the other way. That’s why I sounded so cynical when you first asked me; I’m so ready for 2025, for the next wave of nuance to develop. When art can happen again. I feel like ... well, you know, culture is also money. Capitalism influences how culture moves. So money is afraid to invest in things that are problematic. Rich people are afraid of being cancelled, so art is being compromised.
Detail of Room for Doubt, 2019, five-channel video, insulation foam, expanding glue, resin, plywood, and other materials; 93 × 96 × 96 inches. Courtesy of the artist; The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia; and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York.
SC: I’m glad we got to talk about that, because speaking with you, an artist who’s crafted an identity around ballroom and vogueing ... you know I was going to have to ask you about Pose. For me, even though that scene wasn’t my culture growing up, watching the show with my mother gave me a chance to bond with her about aspects of my gay history and identity that we just never talked about.
JS: It’s weird, but a lot of people I know said that show made them think about their mothers.
SC: It’s a show about motherhood, isn’t it? I just realized this, but is there a connection there, in how your work is about the relationship with your mother, and vogueing, or...?
JS: Well... I mean, I have vogueing languages in the work but it’s a lot of improvisational modern-dance performance that I’m inspired by. Like the techniques of Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, Wiliam Forsythe, people who use improvisational drawing movements to carve out space, it was as a compositional device that inspired me.
SC: <referring to screen> This scene that we’re watching, it almost seems like you’re drawing a parallel between dancing and... martial arts? Like, it’s formal but also a mode of self-defense?
JS: Noooo! <despairing voice> Yeah, but. No.
SC: Okay, that was my own bad reading. <laughs> Let’s move on! We’re looking now at Chapter 4 of Birds of Paradise.
JS: This part, people have said “oh, that was really hard for me to take in, I don’t know about that one”, because these white, white-garbed figures are hanging me, flogging me, a sort of erasure, and shrouding me afterwards. The song is about second chances and resurrection, containing a circular, regenerative air about coming back and being given another time to exist. The Yoruba masquerade culture is what inspired a lot of the motifs that I re-perform as a ritual in these films. In this video it was a more tribal version of the shrouding ritual, but it’s about renewal, it’s not about a hate crime. But because of the history ... it’s kind of a Rorschach test for the viewer depending on what part of the world they’re in.
SC: About how the viewer would interpret this flogging and hanging of your body.
JS: Yeah. It was intentional to have that blurring, but it’s just to be ironic because the song is about finding love for the second time. That could mean anything: healing, renewal. You’re seeing them deconstruct this figure and then make him strong and silver in the end. I get wrapped up, then unwrapped and she bathes me and I’m reborn. The film, in general, is all about healing.
SC: The live-action component of your work is really distinctive. The way you integrate live-action figures within these digital environments. Your self, and the bodies of the other performers you shoot, are the activators of all these CGI spaces and contraptions. As opposed to just using all computer-generated characters like other artists working in this medium might do.
JS: Yeah... I find it weird when I get ghettoized as a V.R. (virtual reality) artist. It’s happening less now. If Joseph Beuys and Bruce Nauman and artists who are using their bodies as a modernist object, and the language around their body and their history and name, you know... all those artists would have articulated it with whatever the most prominent medium in consumer culture was happening at the time. Right now we’re in the land of Netflix and Pixar.
“I find it weird when I get ghettoized as a virtual reality artist. If Joseph Beuys and Bruce Nauman and all those artists who are using their bodies as a modernist object, and the language around their body and their history … they would have articulated it with whatever the most prominent medium in consumer culture was happening at the time. Right now we’re in the land of Netflix and Pixar.”
SC: This is the connection to the history of conceptual art, to body art which is where video art started, in a way.
JS: If the world ended, art is all I have, because that’s what I’ve committed my life to, studying art history, paying respect to the medium. Performance, painting, sculpture, moving image... it’s all just part of the prism that I pay equal respect to. They all push my knowledge about other mediums forward at the same time.
SC: Well, regarding the live-action aspect. I wanted to ask you again, what is the relationship you have with the actors in your videos, in terms of sensitivities and boundaries, versus working with CGI characters, who would do anything you make them do, without reservation.
JS: As I’m getting older, I’m not as audacious, but I used to not give a fuck. How do I put this? The performers trust me, it’s organic, but I had to build up to that. Actually I’m glad you asked that question! When I was in graduate school, that was the hardest thing for me to do. That’s why I used my own body, over and over... I wouldn’t want to be responsible for anyone else’s failure by working under my name, that felt like the most selfish thing to do. So I wanted to fail using myself, I didn’t trust my own gestures and concepts. I was still marinating and massaging things. When I felt like I had a more mature voice around the language I decided to expand, and I felt more confident to work with people. That confidence came off and I just became more of a fun person. People usually give more to me than I’m asking for... it’s funny, people that overdo it, I’m like “I don’t wanna see all that, girl! No!” <laughs>
SC: You were using your own body, first thing. There’s an aspect, a certain relationship between being gay and narcissism, how we portray ourselves, loving bodies that look like our own, self-desire and self-love, etc. I don’t know if that’s what it was about for you.
JS: I was deeply insecure coming from painting to moving image. I didn’t really feel valid because I committed 10 years to figuring out Windsor & Newton binding pigments and being very motherfucking formal about it, whatever. For me to switch over so radically, I didn’t trust myself. I took only a few gender-study, conceptual-sculpture classes at college, but I was into image making in a very different way. If I was going to explore this medium, I wanted to be the agent of control; and plus, I know my body more than I know other people and I will push my body further than I’m willing to make someone push themselves. I’m getting beat up, flogged, dragged, hanged, durational dancing for hours...mastering my body and working 8 hours a day on film with my body. Mastering my visual language, I can’t have others on set every day for that.
SC: It took me forever to get to the point where I felt comfortable depicting myself in my work again, even though that’s what I was doing in school, when I was much younger and more into myself. It’s alluring but dangerous to deal with yourself that way, instead of from behind the camera or in some avatar disguise.
JS: I finally feel okay. Some of this stuff is pulled from years ago that I finally felt comfortable enough to use. But I would confess... I will say maybe there is some narcissism, sure. Everyone’s a narcissist in the Instagram era. But if you decide to be a contemporary artist after Modernism and Postmodernism, like, the dawn of Modernism was about the individual. Whether it was the Abstract Expressionist days, when the individual’s relationship with the canvas and evidence of their body was the main concept, right? You know, finding your voice with your rhythm on that canvas. So, Bruce Nauman using his body as a measurement device, or the way he spelled his name in neon, “Brrruuuce!” ... he’s making works about the presence of his body, like taking the negative space from a chair, or making you have to swivel your own body to read the text. The individual is modernism. So in order for me as a millenial, to make work properly, I have to start with myself and metastasize myself out, I’m the nucleus. Now that I’m entering the second decade of my career I do feel like I’m moving away from myself more than ever.
SC: For me, I think the artist has control exactly over their own body, their own space and what they do in the studio. Everything else is up for grabs. But now we are in another moment, in contemporary art, where artists are being asked to challenge those notions of individual ego, where more conversations are happening now about community engagement, social practice, audience outreach and so on.
JS: I mean, I smell the shift, I don’t know where I fit in it. I don’t know. I personally don’t make work in certain ways. I’m inherently political just by existing, just by being honest in public... politically I live under many different categories of discourse you could dive into, but for me? I’m just writing poetry.
SC: The interesting thing about this conversation is there’s no clear didactic reading that you’re allowing for your work. Or at least, you’ve resisted some of the surface-level readings that I’ve tried to make.
JS: I can’t even... I mean, I have fun with it being flat sometimes, I like to teeter between bad taste and good taste and high and low, because what would life be without fucking making an interesting gumbo? There is a more ambiguous poetry happening underneath the surface readings. As all artists’ body of work grows, there’s more context and understanding of the layers of what they’re trying to do.
“I’m inherently political just by existing, just by being honest in public... politically I live under many different categories of discourse you could dive into, but for me? I’m just writing poetry.”
SC: Can I shift gears and ask you some more boring, production-related questions? How tightly do you storyboard and script out the films? Would you be able to work with junior animators or art-direct assistants in your process?
JS: No. I can’t. There a very improvisational story that involves shifting the mediums around, it’s very spatial. Like digital installation, I’m just moving blocks and polygons and language and narrative around, it’s like choreographing. There’s so many spontaneous decisions, and retractions of those decisions, that I could never work with someone. My eccentric labelling is way too intense, it’s a very personal way of animating, it wouldn’t really work if I storyboarded them. Well, let’s not say that. I make these first... <points to large-scale print on wall>
SC: Oh, you start with the still images, the print compositions? I would have thought these came after, as a result of the video being put together.
JS: Yeah. These C-prints, I make like twelve of them. Then I write about them and figure out how to make them segway into each other. I make these massive painting tableaus first, I feel it has to stand on its own as one big image. This is a very ambitious way of storyboarding versus pen and ink in a little square. It’s like if I went to the Met Museum and curated a selection of paintings, and then sat with my journal and found a way to get those paintings to intersect narratively. How would I go from a Rubens to a Titian? You know how in the Renaissance they would all paint the same allegory? What if I curated seven of those allegories and found a way to build narrative transitions between them as an animator, as a storyteller? It’s kind of a ‘window within a window within a window’ framework, where I’m playing ‘exquisite corpse’ with many different languages: the drawings from my mother, or the performances from the greenscreen, or the art history references, or how I build compositions to map into each other. Maybe I’m a little schizophrenic.
SC: On the one hand, you’re saying it’s very improvisatory, and not knowing what it’s going to be until it ‘is’, but on the other...
JS: But not by being loopy! It takes months. It’s 12-hour days for months, anxiety attacks, walking back and forth, trying to remember files, being hung over... it’s not a fun process! It’s very thought out, and really slow, and it’s just a feeling I get when I know it has to move. It takes so much to get to that feeling, to get that door open ... and to the next door, to the next door.
SC: This year you had a well-received foray into pop culture, working with Solange Knowles. Your work already operates in the visual language of the music video, to start with.
JS: It was really meta. When I was a kid, what really got me wanting to go to boarding school and become an artist professionally, was when I saw a Nick Knight music video for Bjork’s Pagan Poetry. I loved her before anyway, when I was like 14, I thought “I want to make shit like that!” And then I went to boarding school and painted, instead. It was bad to think about music videos as something to aspire to in 2001.
SC: I would think it would be the opposite, making music videos would seem cooler to a younger person.
JS: No, I went to a fancy art school that was brainwashing us to be elevated. I was a ‘serious painter’ at a formalist school that had a very academic approach to things, very tight up the ass. The whole model was for me to be a ‘Frick painter’ and then transitioned into being a ‘Mary Boone painter’ or whatever the fuck. <laughter> I’m not shitting on it, that’s what gave me discipline. Bt that’s why I feel I can’t relate to other new media artists in that way, because my discipline comes from a whole different language.
SC: Video art came from a kind of formalism too, early on it was all about the banality of ‘TV as an object’ and minimalist sculpture.
JS: I was part of that study too, my work has that aesthetic sometimes.
SC: I feel like now, with moving image, it becomes less about the formal qualities of the medium, and the idea of ‘entertainment’ becomes more of a necessary and accepted kind of artistic material. You can work fluidly as a music video director one day and then... well, what’s your future dream project? If you could do anything.
JS: I want to work in every kind of thing I can! That’s why I like writing too. When you think about Julian Schnabel, he was the predecessor for working that way. If I had the means, I would want to make the best painting show ever. I want to make a feature film, a movie. I would love to adapt a story, because I’m such a collaborator and I need a language to springboard off of: my mother’s drawings, bringing people in to give me gestures, or bring a vocalist in. I thrive off collaboration, inspiration, off of muses.
Room for Demoiselle Two, 2019, C-print, 45 × 60 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York. © Jacolby Satterwhite.
SC: And your literary inspirations, would you look to stories as source material to adapt?
JS: All my friends are great writers. My friend Andrew Durbin, he’s one of the greatest writers to me. We always try to work with each other, we always joke about it, one day we will work together. Actually! His piece You Are My Ducati (2013) is what springboarded me into this aesthetic for Birds of Paradise. I interpreted that poem through a series of C-prints I made that were all based on it. Those images never actually made it to the video. But, it starts with that, everything is painting to me.
SC: So, if it’s not too personal... it is known that you’re a survivor of childhood cancer. Would you care to touch upon the medical challenges you continue to face, that you mentioned before we started?
JS: I mean, I don’t know. I’m not performing anymore because my arm now, I have an artificial right shoulder and I need a procedure where my right arm needs to be replaced with a different rod. I can’t use my body athletically, with dance, anymore... and so I have to think differently. That kind of crisis shows up a lot in the work, like the Room for Doubt piece, I’ve been meditating on my medical history a lot because it’s compromising the medium I’ve been invested in. I had cancer when I was little, which has been in remission for 20 years, but the shoulder was supposed to fall off, supposed to have problems. It makes me want to deal with more visceral mediums, more primal mediums. I have a very lucid mind that plays out video, the way I make moving images is a cerebral thing... but I’m more interested in the way my body can make marks in the real world now that it’s in such a contingent place. A place where I may lose my arm. That kind of stress shifts away ... by making things. I care less about ‘digital’ now.
SC: We have to think about the integrity of the body, the body’s relationship to the artmaking process. Conceptualism treats art-making like it’s a purely intellectual process and the body is just a means of execution. That’s such a privileged idea. These things need to actually move through the body and out into the world, from the mind.
JS: Well, I’m a very complex and traumatized person, I guess! <laughs> I’m definitely going to do things in reaction to my lived experience. You know, I play with shapes and Rorschach tests and lines and compositions, I do it very organically and instinctively and I let it tell me what it’s saying afterwards. It’s like that show on HBO, the comedian who creates narrations around all these shapes he has on stage? [referencing Julio Torres, ‘My Favorite Shapes’]. His psychology comes from how he interprets the shapes and moves them around and tells stories about the shapes, it’s animism. It’s like playing with toys, but that’s what I’m doing. The toys come back to me and tell me what the fuck I’m thinking.
SC: And there’s also a medical aspect to the shroud ritual we see in Birds of Paradise?
JS: I mean, after finishing the film, there were layers I discovered and unpacked through the rituals that I performed over and over. And because renewal, shrouding, and rebirth, and regeneration, and resurrection are such constant themes, I feel like it may have to do with the fact that I escaped death so many times through cancer. Being ‘shrouded’ in the medical system with chemotherapy and surgery, then ‘unshrouded’ outside, leaving my gurney and taking to the streets, as a healed person in remission, you know... with a bionic arm. I feel like that’s the underlying code to Birds of Paradise, to what’s happening in it. I wish I would have said that in other interviews. But I’m figuring it out as I go.