Turning Over Rocks, And Other Task-Based Choreographies
An interview with Jill R Baker by Erin Langley and Tyler Stoll
This interview took place on the occasion of the online exhibition Performances for Hands and Desert Floor featuring work by Jill R Baker as part of Common Ground at antiaesthetic.com.
Erin: Can you talk a little about your interest in instructions or how they function in your work?
Jill: I think they function as structure, really. I will say, my interest in structure first started in grad school. I was in an intermedia program, so there was a lot of talk of Fluxus and Dada in this program; a history of Fluxus at the University of Iowa. So, I think of Yoko Ono and Yvonne Rainer’s task-based choreography. I usually begin with an action to perform and the work flows from that structure.
Tyler: Could you tell us about your relationship to Barry Lopez and his writing?
J: Sure, I first started reading Lopez with Arctic Dreams and I just love his writing. The work that fits under my title Performances for Hands and Desert Floor, which is also taken from Barry Lopez, was many different works created alongside four other artists. I brought his Desert Notes with me to the Goldwell Open Air Museum Residency in Rhyolite, Nevada. We were doing our own works and we were all reading some of these passages from [the book]. We were thinking, “Oh, we’re here, we’re collaborating together, we’re in conversation with each other, but the work we are making remains uniquely our own as individual artists.” And it kind of fit together in the same way that his chapters do in Desert Notes. They feel sort of incomplete. They’re notations. They’re thoughts and walks and meditations.
E: What is your relationship with the desert landscape? Does it extend beyond the Goldwell residency experience?
J: Well, I really wasn’t at the time, and am not in current works, interested in the desert as a subject, and I was aware of the tropes and how loaded “desert” is, and especially with environmental art in the ’60s and ’70s. We were working on the edge of a ghost town with piles of historic trash, colored glass shards, and ruins of small buildings, all surrounded by old mine shafts and wild burros. Layers of human impact are certainly incorporated into the ecology of that place. And artists have been leaving marks at Goldwell since the 1970s. I was thinking less about the history and ecology, or even landscape, of the Mojave Desert and more about how artists embody and inhabit the physical space around them.
T: Between the three iterations of “ Hands and Rocks,” there is an interesting shift in perspective, from a POV shot to that of an observer. Can you discuss this changing perspective?
J: Thank you for pointing that out. I hadn’t really thought about it. As I was shooting these, I did want to be with the camera and have my hands take up the frame. And the one where I’m scraping and pushing, I just had to come [in front of] the camera for that. [laughs]
E: The more I think about those video pieces in the Common Ground show, I think of them as—you mentioning it, Jill, made me think of it again—the relationship to the land art in the 1960s, like an antithesis to Robert Smithson in a way. Because it’s this very intimate—it’s kind of rough, but mostly it’s quite gentle—and not this big monumental digging in the dirt with backhoes that Smithson did. So that’s another way to think of those videos too. I think the image of the desert is what drives that connection. The setting of the desert or the landscape.
J: [laughing] I agree! But, yeah, I want to barf when I hear them talk about “moving the land” with their backhoes . . .
E: That ties into one of our other questions too, about your work engaging with concepts of erosion and human impact. How do you see your work fitting in with Common Ground’s mission of engaging with nuanced understandings of natural vs unnatural and art and ecology?
J: Right, yeah, I don’t think my concerns or questions or explorations are ecology-based, especially in the Hands and Rocks videos. Those are much more about embodiment and raw interactions with the natural world. And then We Come to Believe Our Hand is Made of Rock (2019) is also about embodiment and sensory perception. My work is concerned with ecology in a more phenomenological way; like glimpses of human interaction with natural processes, or performing ways humans inhabit and move through physical space. And they are small actions. I was much more interested in just sort of sitting in a small area and seeing what I could make in that space. I always feel very self-conscious, especially in this area of Oregon, with OSU and UO, because there are so many artists working with scientists. And it’s like with every log or rock that I turn over, I think of the habitat that I’m potentially destroying. [laughs]
E: There’s an interesting crossover between the removal of the rocks in the desert and your mark-making with rocks on paper and how they both engage with a printmaking process and the idea of “leaving a trace.” Do you see making prints and drawings as overlapping with principles of ecology? I think about the ecological idea of “leaving no trace” and printmaking and drawing being about leaving a trace.
J: Yeah, with a lot of that work, I’m thinking about drawing and how we’re always making marks, just the act of taking a walk, what marks are we leaving by doing that? In other works I’ve had paper with me, where I try to record marks of my actions or the actions of natural processes on paper. So, yes, I think about traces and prints very much. I also think we can practice “leave no trace” principles while also inhabiting and interacting with “natural” spaces. Much of my work happens in places where humans have “landscaped” or impacted the land, such as my backyard. My close-up framing often often only shows very little of the space and landscape.
T: We were wondering about this impossible action of re-aggregating a rock or the act of “re-sedimentation.” Since this is sort of a futile act, how do you approach these actions? Is it funny, mediative, or is it more of an emotionless action based in process?
J: Sure, yeah, I think there’s humor in thinking about impossible tasks. I think more than anything the actions and instructions I write, or perform, or use as prompts are human attempts to interact or understand the natural world, to explore and embody the natural world in a way that only artists can. The actions are impossible and futile but the act of attempting them creates a space and time and relationship in which they are possible. This ties into the ecology question because if I am engaging with an ecology of place or environment, it is a very human ecology, not in the sense of conservation or looking at human impact, but in terms of physically inhabiting and exploring space with a poetics of place in mind. References to surrealism and Fluxus, especially the work of women in those movements are also definitely present.
T: Tell us more about the sound in your video work.
J: The sound is recorded in the field, but it’s all recorded separately [from the actions]. And I do that for most of my videos that include sound. I love sound and soundscapes in film, and I think about soundscapes often. But you did point out that these performances are improvisations and then I’m doing all this post-production that takes all that rawness away. Is that kind of what you’re getting at?
T: Well, we were thinking about the context of Common Ground and the idea of natural versus unnatural, or expansive ideas surrounding that, and considering the play between improvisation and production in your work.
J: Right, yeah. I do like for [the sound] to be noticed in the work and I like to create a soundscape for my videos. I heighten or exaggerate the sound and it’s a little off. It doesn’t always match up with the action.
E: We were noticing the removal of yourself from some of your titles. Or a shift from positioning the rock as an autonomous being, and then positioning yourself as using the rock as a tool. Can you talk about your thought process behind those decisions?
J: There’s A Desert Rock Draws Circles on Paper (2017-2019) and another recent drawing that’s not in the show that is based on weather reports, where a rock pretends to be a cloud. The rock is painted blue and then the rain washes the blue away on a piece of paper. But, again, I think the titles emphasize ideas of embodiment, of thinking of my hands as rocks. This winter, I was thinking of the story of the Winter Hag who exists as a large rock in the summer months and as winter approaches she transforms into a human form leaving ice and frost on the ground as she walks. So I’ve been thinking a lot about my hands turning into rocks, especially in the winter when they’re so cold, and looking at my knuckles that look sort of stone-like. So, yeah, I do think about my hand as rocks, like in the experiment [We Come to Believe Our Hands are Made of Rock]. And I’ve been looking for more of those myths and stories of coming from or turning into rocks. To answer the question directly: I’m not thinking of the rock as a character but I’m thinking of it more as an extension or part of my hand.
T: I enjoy the moments where you’re clearly coming from a position of “this is not field work” . . . or the idea of fantasy field work, which is connected to the sound not quite matching up with the imagery. We both noticed it immediately. Like the sound of the birds in the grass-pulling piece is so beautiful but when we were listening we were like “wait, those aren’t there . . . “—
J: But they were there! [laughter]
T: Really?
J: The bee wasn’t there.
T & E: Oh! [laughter]
E: Well, yeah, when the sound is a little bit off it has more of an emotional or sensory impact than had you pushed it to one or the other extreme. The subtlety seems important.
T: There are moments when we feel almost inside the sound, sometimes it seems like you’re listening from afar..
J: Yeah, I like that difference.
T: Well, is there anything else that we forgot to ask you that you that is important or that you want to tell us about?
J: Well, I didn’t know when to use “rock” or “stone” in my titles, and “stone” sounds so much more poetic. And Barry Lopez uses “rock” and “stone” sort of interchangeably. So stone is human-manipulated and rock is just rock, earth—as is.
T: Yeah, when you mentioned it I imagined a stone being something that you throw.
E: Right. I picture a stone being smoother, somehow.
J: Yeah, more poetic!
[laughter]
Jill R Baker is a visual artist and educator based in Corvallis, Oregon whose work employs drawing, performance, and video to document interactions with landscape and the natural world. She is a current artist member of Eugene Contemporary Art.
Erin Langley and Tyler Stoll are both current MFA grad students in art at the University of Oregon, and artist members of Eugene Contemporary Art.
Common Ground is a platform for a host of conversations and events alongside an exhibition with works by Eugene Contemporary Art artist members and invited artists on the topic of art and ecology.
