James Fuller: Funny you should mention that as I recently ran out of credit! There are other things about working alongside someone else so regularly–besides the labour and solutions we can offer each other–that I think about a lot.
I take a lot of solidarity from having someone close by working through their own ideas, their own works. If I’m trudging through some long unwinding process and Anna swiftly executes three pieces, at least someone’s moving forward. Also privacy is interesting, we work side by side, and discuss things and technical aspects, but you don’t always know what’s going on or being processed. Keeping things internalised until you are ready to share. There’s an image I’d been thinking about for a while that will take a physical presence in the show I’m working on right now and it’s not been spoken about at all but been quietly sitting with me for months and only when Anna helped recreating it by squeezing a lemon with some cowboy boot bbq tongs was it revealed. There are a lot of moments like that.
Anna Gonzalez Noguchi: We’ve actually been sharing a studio in Athens for almost five years, which has gone by crazy fast. After all this time we only just realised we needed to change our whole set up which meant keeping more divided, individual workspaces but still maintaining the communal workshop–and it’s already changing how we work. We have big similarities, but also work very differently and it’s important to be able to make a mess or give things air time so that they aren’t forgotten and have the potential to become something. The other day I had this tiny wood turned vase knocking about, an offcut of bent aluminium, and assorted English and Japanese letters left over from multiple projects, and it just suddenly made sense that these things needed to come together in a work. I make these quick intuitive pieces in between more complex and time consuming projects because those unexpected moments give relief in such intense moments of work.
James: She’s being very diplomatic about the number of times she’s helped dig me out the shit by the way. I like risk in the work and duration, long choreographies, but I always work until the last breath unfortunately. Now I guess we’re discovering new boundaries to make sure we can both continue to do what we need to do. Still, not much leaves the studio without some kind input or help from each other along the way.
I always had the sensation that Anna’s work was kind of additive to her being, and mine is subtractive somehow, that every work I make takes something from me and deposits it elsewhere. And in this way we access the personal from different directions.
James: It was a surprise to me too.
Anna: Our lives are intertwined in other ways but not our practices. My work’s starting position is already from a very personal place in Japan, in which I work and rework a large archive of possessions including used stationary, Japanese karaoke playlists or orchid collections, for example. People add their touch and express themselves materially their whole lives, consciously or unconsciously, like sewing a decorative trim to a medical hand towel. These tiny gestures to do with touch, intimacy, obsession maybe, they become a kind of currency in my sculptural language. This mostly plays out on the wall–one of the reasons we changed things around.
James reaches that same sort of emotional space through the duration and commitment to his work.
James: It’s idealistic to split everything down the middle. But at some point we have to embrace our differences and that means being in your own world a bit more. Now I’m upstairs with more flat surfaces, Anna is downstairs with more wall space. Good for my step count. We grew and we made a change.
That thing you mentioned about feeling comfortable enough to make mistakes, it’s kind of what I was getting to with the idea of things becoming personal. A feeling of being sufficiently emotionally and physically entangled that gives you licence to let go of things that aren’t totally worked, for speculation, or strangeness, for example. These things move you.
Anna: I love having a stable place, for me it’s so important. For real focus and for works to brew. I’m in Japan right now and the relationship has flipped, but I feel at ease knowing my unrealised works are stationed in the studio in all kinds of states of completion, and that more objects will connect here to there when I return. People often ask me about Athens, the scale and close proximity of everything is just right, there is always the possibility to just interact with different industries and processes but also build connections with people, whether that’s the anodizers or the stand we pick our eggs from–I’m making work about a very distant place but having this closeness is special.
James: I remember reading in an interview the Italian designers FormaFantasma, who were working out of Holland at the time, saying that distance from the Italian design world gave them a lot of necessary space to work, even if they were still very much connected to it. I always thought a lot about that with your work. There’s a lot of power in that separation between where you are and what your focus is on.
James: I can talk a thousand years about this, but essentially there are so many works I’ve made where I thought, “damn, how would I do this without being here, with this access, moving like liquid around the city.” I don’t want to idealise it too much, but our jobs are mostly always other peoples’ smallest jobs, usually a bit annoying, demanding, and other things that aren’t usually required. Often using people’s production systems in a way that isn’t always in their comfort zone. That takes personal relations, trust, good spirit, these things and I like that part of the work. It’s usually about five percent of the process, but can undo everything.
It lets you stay ambitious anyway, that kind of proximity, and materially, you soak it all in. I follow material strands and deviations naturally over time in my work and I can see how I’ve been influenced heavily by the raw materials readily available here. A lot of my materials these days enter via Industrial cosmetics, medical, or church supplies at some point in the choreography.
James: Well, in a way, very little because it’s five percent. Everything else happens in the studio, including all the development and control exercised prior to these external processes. It’s not some kind of playground, there’s real intention and precision in how and what we both do. I don’t build all these secondary industrial processes into my work just because they’re there and accessible. I often find them essential in helping to translate my intention into the surfaces and forms I make. At least right now, I don’t know if it will always be that way.
So none of that stuff influences the work really, it just colours and shapes the canvas from time to time. As an example, one of the things I’ve been working with for a while is the constantly churning US Patent office of newly filed or renewed patents. For years now–time moves so quickly here, it’s the sun or something–I’ve been grappling with how to deal with this daily data mass which contains so much speculation, ambition and surrealism. I’ve become totally involved in a language outside of my own. Then letting this bleed out into different physical works, including the ultra-thin plated copper works I grow back from colliding glass vessels. These works have a long process of turning existing surfaces inside and out, cutting and stitching, moving through liquid and solid states as the text I filter out from the database enters and contaminates their geometries, before working their way towards the acid tank. Eventually they’re essentially a conductive metal foil, strong enough to be independent but so light in nature, sometimes porous, barely there at all, and yet they carry a lot of weight in their delirious surfaces. This is the kind of sculpture I’m interested in making.
James: {laughs} Steady there, Robert, stealing is a big word. With the patents, for things to be protected they have to be really shown, and really known, and I’d say I’m part of that witnessing. I just redirect and mistranslate some of that data towards a much more abstract means.
But the idea of disintegrated authorship is critical, I work with a lot of objects floating around that have been absolved of responsibility by others. There’s an abstract painting that indirectly features in the show at South Parade that someone had made, and disposed of, and now those surfaces and colours contaminate the exhibition in different ways.
And don’t drag Anna into my legal peril, she’s maybe doing the opposite: taking responsibility for what’s already hers to own with a diligence and attention that should have implications for all of us.
Anna: I like this idea of multiple voices in a work, I always thought about my work in some ways as a cross generational collaboration whether I’m completing unfinished projects from my Grandfather or replaying a hand written karaoke playlist through sculpture.
Anna: No, I haven’t completed it yet, but there’s no rush. It’s something that's nice to work on in between other projects. It was always intended to be a durational series that plays out slowly over time.
James: Yeah, there’s a few different ways they will circulate in the show, through sticky and evocative text passages cut together and filtered from thousands of entries registered in the database over the last months, engraved in the foils that will be shown on the vulnerable space of the floor. And then there’s a drawing that features on a wax vase-like object of a recently patented horse-powered vehicle, where there’s a horse in the back producing the kinetic energy to move people around. A reverse horse cart, that will be kind of chasing its own tail around the bloated volume if you like. They’re a kind of looking glass, where descriptions and abstracts combine to become loaded with a different sense of sentiment, irony or humour maybe, that looks to speak about the kind of world we’re building, and what kind of world we want to live in.
It should be a very open place and have scents and small complexities that confuse and surprise in equal measure. Anyway, you can get back to me on that. The last month was so hairy and chaotic, I’m totally drained and blurry-eyed. Anna helped me over the line, of course, to bring it back to the beginning.
