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Today we're meeting with Brooklyn-based artist Nina
Katchadourian.
But as you can tell, this is not Brooklyn.
We've met her here in Lawrence, Kansas where
she's working on a new project.
Nina's works address a wide range of ideas,
but throughout her career, she has consistently
engaged with the every day.
Her series Seat Assignment makes use
of overlooked materials in her spare time
during her plane flights around the world.
The photos range from surprisingly moving landscapes
to bathroom selfies that could pass for 15th century
Flemish portraiture.
And for the past 20 years, Nina has
been working on a series called Sorted Books.
Working with collections small and large,
she immerses herself in libraries
to select, stack, and photograph groupings of books
so that the titles on their spines can be read in sequence.
What results are concise, clever visual poems that
are often revealing about the owner of the books.
Right now Nina has the amazing opportunity
of accessing the personal library of American writer
William S. Burroughs and we're standing outside of the home
where he spent the last years of his life.
So let's go talk to Nina and see what
she's finding out about Burrows through his books.
Hi, I'm Nina Katchadourian and this is your art assignment.
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We are sitting in William S. Burroughs' house
where he lived for the last 16 years of his life
in Lawrence, Kansas.
And given the wild life that this guy led,
it's really interesting to me that this house
is a very sweet red and white cottage with a beautiful garden
all around it.
It's the most peaceful place you can imagine.
The reason I'm here is because I was
very lucky to be granted permission
to work with William Burroughs' books
to make a sorted books project.
I read William Burroughs in college
a little bit as part of a Comp Lit class like lots
of college students do.
And I'm not in any way a kind of William Burroughs scholar
or William Burroughs geek.
I have been a little bit self-conscious
about that coming here and had to make some decisions
a while ago about whether I wanted to go into a huge geek
out research effort in advance of coming here.
And decided that since one of the things about the Sorted
Books project is that you get to know
a person through their books, that there might actually
be something interesting about encountering him
as a person who I get to know primarily through his books
and not to kind of overeducate myself in advance of coming.
And that has been a really interesting part
of the last two days.
It's made me think a lot about were I to drop dead tomorrow,
what would people make of my book collection.
You know, I have kind of an odd library, I think.
And maybe there aren't books that I'd be so happy for people
to know that I owned.
I think we all have some guilty pleasure books in our life.
In other words, books that we really love and we have around,
but maybe they don't sort of show the public side of us
that we'd like people to always see.
So your assignment is to work in somebody's library who you know
or that you would like to know better
and to make a portrait of them by making
three clusters of books.
Each cluster can have as many different books in it
as you want.
But you have to think a lot about the physical qualities
of the books and make sure that your book stack reads clearly.
You might want to line up the titles flush left.
And in the end, it should be a portrait of that person.
So as you know Sarah, I am obsessed
with portraits that are not about physical resemblance.
Yeah, like Felix Gonzalez-Torres'
heartbreaking and beautiful portrait
of his partner Ross who died of AIDS where
he made this pile of candy that corresponded
to Ross' ideal body weight.
Yeah, and then people are encouraged
to take candy from the museum or gallery,
and then it's constantly replenished.
It's really beautiful.
Oh, it's just gutting.
And there's also that portrait of William Carlos Williams,
that's just a big, all the fives.
Oh right, Charles Demuth's abstract portrait.
I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold from 1928
that relates to Williams' poem "The Great Figure."
Yeah, it occurs to me there are a lot of literary connections
for this assignment, right?
Right, there's William Burroughs' cut-up technique
itself.
Yeah, There's also, like, Gertrude Stein's word portraits
when she had these ways of describing people that
were very non-narrative, used fragments,
made kind of descriptive essays of people.
Right, yeah, true.
But there's something we're not getting at here
and that's this sense of assemblage or montage
that's going on with this work.
I'm thinking of artists like Christian Marclay who
collages film and digital media in similar ways to Nina.
His 1995 piece Telephones pulled together
clips of one-sided phone conversations
from movies in a totally brilliant way.
So he was doing mashups before there were mashups basically.
Right.
But what we're homing in on here is the sorting part
of the sorting books activity that is all about archiving.
Archiving is pretty big these days in art.
Is it now?
SARAH URIST GREEN (VOICEOVER): OK.
So an archive is a collection of documents providing information
about something, right?
Like in this case, we have William S. Burroughs' books
which give us some information about him
as a writer and a person.
Everyone's favorite comedian Michel Foucault pointed out
that studying archives is learning about the past
through its material remains.
The archaeologist of knowledge, he says,
tries to reconstruct the archive to show
how we relate to the past and construct meaning around it.
Contemporary artists working this way
are described by art historian Hal Foster
as having an archival impulse.
He sees more and more artists taking information
as a kind of ready made material inventorying it and reordering
it.
Like Thomas Hirschhorn.
Or remember Deb Sokolow?
Whether we're Tumbling cat pictures from the 1960s,
scrapbooking, or sorting books, Foster calls this impulse
an attempt "to probe a misplaced past,
to collate its different signs, to ascertain what
might remain for the present."
Nina's project takes the past and gives it a present.
It's not a portrait but it is a reminder
that archives, while meaningful, are also
incomplete, accidental, and at times, absurd.
I think that the answer to why do it is really a book
cluster itself that I made many years ago.
And I say, what is art?
And the answer is close observation.
And I really believe that.
I think that what every artist does in some way
is to hone in on something in the world
that they have a strong attraction to or reaction to
and to translate that somehow in a way that
allows them to start a conversation with an audience
member, with a viewer.
Could be one viewer, could be 10,000.
It hardly matters.
But I think that's what art is.
It's a communicational act that kind of
lobs out the first question that can
become a kind of conversation.
So that's why I do this.
I do this because I think it's worth looking
more closely at many things.
But in this instance, at books and at our own relationship
to them, and at someone else's relationship to them.
The very first phase is always a kind
of getting to know you phase where
I look at every single book that's there.
I make long, elaborate lists of titles
that are interesting to me that might be useful.
It's almost a way for me of memorizing the collection.
And it's been really important to do that
by physically writing things down.
I have a clipboard, I have lists.
Then there's a second phase where
I take titles that continuously kind of jump out at me
and transcribe them onto index cards.
And then I spend a lot of time moving index cards around
and seeing what works with what.
And the very last stage is actually
moving the books themselves.
The system has evolved partially because it
means you don't have to put a ton of books
back at the end and display somebody's
library in very drastic ways.
One really important part of the Sorted Books project
has always been that I'm thinking
about the books as physical things,
as sculptural objects, as things that
have weight, and size, and mass, and heft,
and wear and tear, and font sizes, and colors.
So I'm always trying to think of this as sculpture also.
And it's not just about the information,
not just about the writing.
This wouldn't be a project, for example,
that I would ever want to do by just listing
the titles of the books.
It's really important that it be stuff that's been moved around.
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Handgun Reloading Manual next to Was Mozart Poisoned?
And then The Domestic Cat.
Which, those are three pretty great titles.
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