To say that Jesse Aron Green’s practice maps the psychodynamics of our social landscape is an understatement. Green’s Force Tracking project at the Williams College Museum of Art was named for military GPS technology, but it references the environmental psychology of the Panopticon prison. His Ärztliche Zimmergymnastik reveals the psychoanalytic underbelly of our most beloved contemporary pastime, the gym. The Allies, which Green just mounted at Warsaw’s Center for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, is drawn from the 1917 Battle of Cambrai and British psychoanalyst Wilfred Ruprecht Bion’s theories on group dynamics.
Just after his opening in Warsaw, Green spoke to Artwrit about fascism, formalism and the scoring of public spaces.
AF: Congratulations! How was the opening?
JAG: It was really great. I’m very happy with the show.
How did the piece land in Poland?
I was invited to do a residency here for about ten weeks last year. I actually shot the work here and the curator invited me back to show it.
There are so many motifs at work in The Allies, I’m hoping you can walk me through some of them. Is the piece about war, this battle in particular, or are you mostly interested in the battle of Cambrai because of Bion’s work on group dynamics that came out of his experiences there?
Yeah, it’s really because of him that I focused on that particular battle. So much of my work is about taking things that don’t necessarily seem to fit together and throwing them against each other in the hope that something bigger begins to appear. I’m certainly interested in violence and representations of violence and war, and interested in psychoanalysis, but really, maybe, this piece came out of my thinking about relational aesthetics: How do I, as a singular maker, deal with the contemporary history of theory and art-making over the last fifteen years and use it to think through something a little more historically grounded.
Another work of yours, Ärztliche Zimmergymnastik, uses Daniel Gottlob Moritz Schreber’s theories about exercise as a psychological curative to consider mental illness and social control. Your work seems very concerned with late nineteenth and early twentieth century notions about the systemization of the human mind and the psychodynamics of social spaces. Do you feel like our most potent cultural notions are rooted in the turn of the twentieth century?
That’s a great question. There are so many ways to begin to answer that and none of them are direct. More often than not, when I’m faced with some kind of contemporary dilemma, it seems to me there are potential answers from the past, and in The Allies and Ärztliche Zimmergymnastik I looked to this specific period. It just happens that these two figures were working at the turn of the twentieth century and I thought they might have something within their writings that would be useful to us now. Although, certainly, when I began making Ärztliche Zimmergymnastik, I did funnily think to myself that perhaps it was one in a series of works that dealt with each of the wars, the major historical events of the twentieth century. And even though it takes as its subject a document that was authored in the 1850s, it’s in a way more of a Second World War piece for me because of the clear ties to fascism.
Yeah, as a Jew I was really interested in the relationships you drew between the role of physicality and social control in that work, and I also saw it in terms of WWII questions.
That work especially is so over-determined for me, both personally and artistically. I think at that point I was thinking about things that I care about and a lot of it was in some ways directed towards the Second World War and questions of, if not exactly my Jewishness, certainly questions of difference in all ways and violence and alterity. I was reading a lot of psychoanalytic theory like Elaine Scarry’s book about pain that were directing me to ideologies of the body.
So, lets go back to The Allies…
What I was most interested in seeing was that during that battle something happened to a group of people in real time and I wanted to make a work where something actually happened and where audience members could experience that happening and undergo something like an empathy of viewing based on a phenomenological relation to the space of the installation. It’s somehow generating the potential for the creation of a document. It’s not a documentary; I’m not watching a group of people in the real world undergo something. I’m setting up a kind of fictive situation, but at the same time, they’re not acting, they’re not performing. In fact, they’re not performers, they’re just being asked to do something that they then attempt to do. And with that in mind, Bion and his theories and his history and this specific battle and his background seemed like a perfectly over-determined way of getting at those things.
It seems like another motif in your work, outside of the psychology of group dynamics, is the notation of movement.
Absolutely. This works on multiple levels for me. On the one hand there’s the crashing together of very different material, but the other is bringing a historically specific aesthetic strategy to the work. In Ärztliche Zimmergymnastik, it was very much about the meeting of 60s high conceptual minimalism, the grid, with much older ideas about looking at bodies in the sculptural sense. The Allies is dealing with scores and scoring, also related to conceptualism. The work takes a specific art historical motif and relates it to an art-making endeavor. But somehow separate in my mind is the extension of the ideas of scores and scoring which on one hand frees me as an artist from having to make decisions, but is also more interesting than anything I might attempt to invent. I’m not interested in the authorial take on what beautiful movement is. I’m much more interested in watching a group of individuals, professional and amateurs, move around…
…Watching their group dynamics…
…Exactly.
You’ve said your work is layered and I’m beginning to understand your layering of theories about the systemization of the human mind, the systemization of the use of social spaces and the superimposition of aesthetic systems.
I hope that it’s layered and that at various moments different layers are revealed. Making work is always a proposition for the viewer, but it’s a proposition for the artist, too, and I’m thrilled to finally see the work in scale and not just on a tiny screen, because it’s only now that I really have a sense of whether it works or not. That’s one of the reasons to get work shown, so you can see it for yourself.
Jesse Aron Green: The Allies
2 June—16 July 2011
CCA Ujazdowski, Warsaw
