Matilda Lin Berke is a New Yorker from Pasadena, California. She has written theory and criticism for publications including Purple Fashion Magazine, Mutt Art Review, the Brooklyn Rail, Impulse Magazine, Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art, Filmmaker Magazine, Spike Art Magazine, and The Whitney Review. She teaches at the Center for Fiction in Brooklyn and has also published fiction and poetry. Her second short film, “The Third Dimension is Time,” screened at Olney Gleason.
Thank you for joining us, Matilda. Can you tell us a little about yourself and the kind of writing and thinking you do?
Right now my work focuses on optical technologies: lenses, screens, cinematic organization, projection and emanation, the quality and dispersion of images. Throughout history, these developments have quite literally shaped our ways of seeing (c.f. John Berger), so they’re of paramount importance. A lot of this thinking overlaps with my other fascination with what I call the “surface/subterranea” model, which covers literal and figurative relations from superstructure/substructure, conscious/subconscious, container/content, and signifier/signified to Hito Steyerl-type theories of “expansion via compression” and the word-image power of memes i.e. image macros. I’m writing an extended theory called “Inside the Pearl”—the first two installments appear in the great print-only publication Mutt Art Review, with an (unofficial) third on Lucia Hierro in the Brooklyn Rail—that locates these ideas in optical readings of art history. The goal is to make sense of the evolution of our contemporary media landscape; it certainly didn’t come out of nowhere, and it’s certainly not all that unique (relatively speaking) in the context of previous sociocultural sea changes.
More broadly speaking, I love Werner Herzog and Vladimir Nabokov, both of whom explore the structural relationship between truth and fiction in art at large. Across disciplines, they’ve probably been my most significant philosophical and artistic influences. I’m really interested in the hybrid nature-culture relationship between biological, technological, and spiritual systems, like Vilém Flusser; I agree with him that humans are but one link in a significantly broader ecological chain and that philosophy is being transmitted through screens all the time. Also, the awareness of being filmed changes the way we react to things while simultaneously visualizing certain aspects of the subconscious—it models the plastic relation between perception and reality.
I’m actually making some new video work exploring all of the above. (Artist) Michael Joo and (art writer/historian) Isabel Filer were kind enough to lend their time; turns out they’re both superstars. They did such a good job that now there’s enough material for an entire show. And the piece(s) sort of evolved in conjunction with the aqua-biological themes of their individual practices, which added at least two levels that I’m aware of, and probably more that I’m not aware of… Without giving too much away, I’m very excited about it.
Your work moves across theory, fiction, film, and criticism. How do these different forms of writing inform one another, and do you find that working across them changes how you engage with visual art?
What I really enjoy about creating films/video work is that not everything has to make sense to me. I feel significantly more freedom; a lot of subconscious impulses emerge, which to some extent happens (in a conventional psychoanalytic fashion) in my use of language, but in less surprising ways. I’m constantly making decisions, but that process is a lot faster and more intuitive. I’ve developed a very precise/specific/austere editing style, but I’m still not in control of everything. (Films are also group projects, so they’re not just about my choices and feelings.) These are all good things! Writing poetry, which was actually my primary artistic focus when I was younger, is a little closer to this part of my practice—my poems typically come at once, as if I’m channeling them from somewhere else—but working with language does inherently feel more limiting. I think of all words as readymade objects. Images (even photographic images, about which I have many positive thoughts) are lossier, which also makes them more expansive. They constitute a less strict container.
Film also allows me to explore theoretical questions from different angles. In the same vein, the medium provides the viewer more ways (visual, aural, etc.) into certain concepts. Theory doesn’t “have” to be legible to the “average reader,” but it does if you actually want a decent number of people to be able to read and enjoy it, which I do. I believe that anything you truly understand can be explained in a relatively straightforward fashion. Wordplay and language experiments are fun and sometimes necessary, but there’s usually no reason to be a snob unless you want to show off how smart you are. No one is entirely immune to this. But I think that desire is better applied to the challenge of making complex ideas appeal to the general public without compromising said ideas. It’s barely possible; that’s what makes it a test of “intelligence,” if you care about measuring that kind of thing, which I don’t. Baudrillard and Flusser are both great examples.
Art criticism is even more so about successfully conveying specific information. (As a heavily style-oriented writer of “textual art”—in terms of my fiction and poetry—this was one of the first things I had to learn. It’s great if style propels a critical piece, but you have to meet your deadlines. And it has to serve the art.) The art critic should have a specific view while being kind of ego-less: establishing a lens that connects the reader to a particular reading of the work. It should be about the critic’s experience of the work without it being about the critic. Ideally, criticism transports a reader inside the art—intellectually, sensorially, or otherwise—while locating it in an external (technical, historical, economic, sociopolitical) framework.
The artist, on the other hand, has to be somewhat ego-ful to have the conviction to make (and market) work, though this can obviously go too far. Making visual art inspires me to be a better and more empathic critic; writing criticism makes me a more discerning and deliberate artist; writing in general makes me appreciate visual possibilities.
As someone who approaches art primarily through language and theory, how do you read a body of work or an artistic proposition? What do you find yourself paying attention to first?
I’m actually most interested in seeing the work itself, if it’s available. Failing that, I look for the images and themes that emerge in the artist’s language. This runs contrary to what most grant applications ask for, but I don’t necessarily need an incredibly coherent thesis statement, especially if the art is able to speak for itself. I do think it’s important for me to understand aspects of the art-making process or the artist’s context that might not be immediately visible in the final product. I’d also like to know about any fun facts or special interests, or any history of artistic/athletic/what-have-you practice at any level. (For example—I studied ballet, among other things; I don’t think I was a particularly impressive dancer, but I picked up a sense of choreography that informs my editing and directing.)
On that note, I’m always pleased to see artists verbally pick up on repeated motifs or fascinations in their work, especially if they’re not obvious—a sort of Duchampian self-awareness/unified aesthetic theory that extends across series or (even better) media is VERY exciting for me as a critic. But that’s really a personal preference.
The theme of Third Space Is a Verb invites artists to think about movement between identities, histories, and perspectives. As a juror coming from a writing and critical theory background, what kinds of propositions within this theme are you most curious to encounter in the submissions?
Movement is fundamentally relational, right? You’re always thinking of translation from one context to another, and the language we’re using alludes to a literal spatial concept. I don’t want to box the artists in with my ideas, frankly. But I’m very curious about art that’s mindful of relational aesthetics—which can be interpreted in a variety of ways—in terms of how visuals are dispersed in our specific contemporary context. We’re interacting with images all the time; they shape our ideas of ourselves, our identities, and even our histories (which are very much not static). I’m also interested in the fact that screens (broadly defined) are capable of capturing/displaying multiple perspectives simultaneously, so I’d be curious about interpretations of that premise.
What does community mean to you, and how has it shaped the environments and conversations your work has emerged from?
I wouldn’t be making art without my community: it’s an organic, social process. I’m constantly inspired by my friends, many of my best pieces of writing have begun in conversation with others, and all of my video work has come out of my environment. Both of my existing short films sort of happened by confluence/coincidence. The first one, “(Get) READY/UNREADY (With Me),” was originally based on an eponymous essay I’d written for Spike. The idea of making a film at all was suggested to me; I’d literally never even thought of it. I didn’t know how to use recording or editing software—I learned it all on the job. And I had like three days to get it done. Actually, my second film (“The Third Dimension is Time”) was kind of like that too, just with a slightly longer timeframe and more complicated everything, since it actually had dialogue and a plot. What I will say is that working under challenging conditions is great practice.
Assembling and leading a team is very important. My casts and crews are mostly other artists I admire. These have been practical decisions because my friends are automatically interested in what I’m doing, but I’m lucky enough to know a lot of talented people with unique perspectives, so I’ll probably keep doing that to some extent regardless of scale. I’ll just compensate them (more). Jokes aside, references to my immediate communities set these pieces in time and space while grounding them in emotions and situations that feel real, even though they’re being acted/performed. Ultimately all art is a record of human thought, but it’s more important that it’s a record of human connection. Mutato nomine de te fabula narratur.
I also work in Chinatown, which is one of the parts of New York where you can most clearly see interactions (or, sadly, the lack thereof) between people in the art world and people who live in the neighborhood. It’s easy to forget that we’re part of larger communities as well. I’m always thinking about what art means to people who aren’t in the strictly defined “art world.” I think the entire world is the art world, or vice versa. The most powerful works of art reflect larger truths: they blow individual experience up into a form that other people can inhabit or put on. You don’t have to be the same to see yourself in something, and that’s half the point of art.
My art isn’t intentionally “about identity,” but I can’t say that growing up in a very superficial, image-focused place (Pasadena/Los Angeles) where I didn’t really fit in doesn’t color my emotional fascinations with perception, surfaces, and communication: I mean, my first piece of video art was “about” body dysmorphia and my second was “about” empathizing with objects (paintings). Obviously those feelings come from somewhere. But then you look at the work of someone like Paul Sharits, and you see similar fascinations, and he was a white guy from Denver. So in a way that’s my community too. It’s just like sports—specifically, the Knicks. A topic for another time.
For emerging artists who are trying to articulate their practice in writing, whether for applications, statements, or proposals, is there any advice you would offer?
That’s actually a great question. In an ideal world artists wouldn’t necessarily have to be the ones to articulate their practices in writing—some of them are really good with language, but no one asks writers to apply for things by making visual art (at least not explicitly, hehe) which gets back to my fundamental points about language as a medium—but I know that’s not a particularly helpful statement. So I’d say my advice is: keep it simple, think about the context (personal and external) in which your work exists, and stay true to yourself. Things sometimes have a way of looking silly on paper, but remember that you’re making art because you have something to say, and then say it in words.
text & photo courtesy of Matilda Lin Berke
- Website: https://matildalinberke.neocities.org/
- Instagram: @matildalinberke
