Interview With Filmmaker Cassandra Troyan

          Coup de Foudre, Part I of The Ascent of the Behemoth Trilogy.

Cassandra Troyan, my erstwhile roommate, collaborator, and friend, is a filmmaker, performance artist, and poet who has just released a chapbook with her brother, Cody Troyan, called Big Bill and the Lonely Nation. At the Wexner Center earlier this year Ron Green, an Associate Professor of Film Studies at OSU, dedicated his lecture on the emergence of the film loop to Cassandra, as well as to other OSU alumni Stacie Sells, Randy Hunter, Karl Baumann, Matthew Swift, and Nicolette Swift for pursuing the realization of experimental film and video at a university that doesn't even bother to offer a program for film production. But don't fret, Cassie has since transcended such dire circumstances and now finds herself a MFA candidate at the University of Chicago.

I interviewed her almost a year ago about the three-part film she made with Stacie Sells entitled The Ascent of the Behemoth Trilogy. That interview, partially updated to reflect time + reality, is after "the jump."

Conversation with Art Critic Lori Waxman

Read Waxman's reviews from the Columbus show at ROY here.

Art criticism is in a weird place. Lori Waxman's 60 WRD/MIN performance this past March at the ROY G BIV gallery made that clear by blurring the lines between art and criticism and mixing a bit of the past with the present.

Waxman is a professional critic and art historian who is an instructor at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a freelance contributor to the Chicago Tribune, Bad At Sports and Artforum. With 60 WRD/MIN, a traveling performance underwritten by the Warhol Foundation, she visits isolated art locales like  Austin, Texas; Knoxville, Tennessee; and our own Columbus, Ohio to write short reviews on an appointment basis for that untouchable caste in the art world -provincial artists. 

So what's weird about that? Well, to start with, the reviews Waxman wrote in Columbus were published by a magazine that no longer has a dedicated art critic or arts editor on staff.* This is part of a nationwide trend among print publications to cut and/or water down arts coverage. Since art criticism has been amputated from our current media experience, part of the allure of being reviewed now lives in its near impossibility. Actually getting to have a serious review written about your work feels almost like a anachronistic novelty, like using a wind-up clock or going to a haberdashery to pick out a spic-and-span trilby. While 60 WRD/MIN clearly serves to invigorate local art scenes it also underscores that out-of-time je ne sais quoi of seeing actual art criticism in contemporary American media. The environment which makes 60 WRD/MIN necessary and intriguing also makes it a bit depressing, like "No, Lori, please don't leave - we need you here!" 

But it's also weird for the contradictory impulses that have always been constitutive of art criticism, as Waxman points out on the 60 WRD/MIN site:

"The short review is at once a challenge, an insult, a record, and a piece of advertising. Its purpose is debatable and arguably quite different for the various parties involved: the writer gets a tear sheet, a couple of bucks, and some editorial gratification; the reader, in the best case scenario, gets a succinct, opinionated description of a body of work they probably did not see in person; and the artist gets published recognition and an entry for their bibliography."

In our absolutely mammoth conversation after "The Jump" I ask Waxman about all of that and more - touching on long form versus short form writing, general readership versus professional readership, quality of artwork in regional areas versus metropolitan areas, her PhD dissertation for NYU on radical walking, the theatricality of 60 WRD/MIN, its critical reception and the particularly odd behavior exhibited by a few of our more uncouth Columbusites. 

*Arts Editor Melissa Starker left the Alive in December. Recent Artscape articles covering going-ons at the Wexner Center were written by freelancer Tracy Zollinger Turner, who is not listed as being a member of the Alive's staff on their site. And, perhaps tellingly, no one is listed as being the new Arts Editor.

Dorothy Gambrell Interview

Dorothy Gambrell is the creator of the long running and overly educated webcomic titled "Cat and Girl" that successfully straddles the line between knock-knock joke and philosophical dialogue. Gambrell also produces humorous/sad infographics at Very Small Array, keeps an ongoing document of how she spends other people's money at Donation Derby, and made another strip (now dead) called "The New Adventures of Death." One of her bands, The Basement Apartments, has a song about Jacques Cousteau. The other is called Jenny and the Holzers. What follows below is a Gmail Chat/interview from February 23rd, 2010.

(A version of this interview is at LADYDRAWERS, the Anne Elizabeth Moore-helmed blog of everything not-a-dude in comics.)

Jay Ryan and Paul Hornschemeier at Wholly Craft. 11/13/09

Jay Ryan's "Animals and objects in and out of water."      Paul Hornschemeier's "All and Sundry."

Chicagoans Jay Ryan and (former Columbusite) Paul Hornschemeier recently stopped by Wholly Craft to sign, sell and talk about their work. Ryan silkscreens posters for bands like The Decemberists, The Melvins and Fugazi. Hornschemeier makes comics, writes short stories and also does freelance illustration for major media outlets. Some of his more recent comics he shared take on an illustrated prose form instead of comics.

                    I get this because I am taking Philo 101. From Hornschemeier's "three paradoxes."

Here is a MP3 of Hornschemeier reading from his book.
Here are two (1, 2) MP3s of Ryan presenting his work.

After "The Jump" is a transcript of an interview (MP3) with Ryan that touches of digital aesthetics, hand painted signs, business models of posters, design vs. art, etc. Also below is a copy of their tour itinerary.

Recent Interviews

Ryan Agnew, Jamie Boyle, Herb Vincent Peterson, and Aimee Sones on their project space "13 E.Tulane."

Lindsey Gibson on the feminist activist group Women and Allies Rising in Resistance, or WARR.

Former OSU student on the 2002 Chittenden riots after the Michigan Game.

Lisa Dent, contemporary curator at CMA, on the Dale Chihuly show.

Tim Cummiskey, a jazz guitarist, in the worst interview I've ever conducted.

The Lantern story about Tim Cummiskey.