Julie Linowes (formerly Julie Firth)
lives in New York and has been a
photographer and video installation
artist for over 35 years. Linowes
received a Bachelor of Arts from the
University of Pennsylvania in 1978 and
a Master of Fine Arts in 1988 from
the University of Southern California,
School of Cinema-Television. She has
exhibited widely both internationally
and in the United States and is in the
permanent collections of prominent
museums including the National
Museum Of Women In The Arts and
the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Linowes
is also in private and corporate
international collections and has been
in numerous solo and group exhibits
including a Sotheby’s exhibit and
auction and the Corcoran Gallery’s
“Both Sides Of Photography.” Linowes
has been published in academic
journals and she presents papers at
international conferences in her area
of specialization, the intersection
between psychoanalytic experience
and the creative process.
Julie Linowes: STAIN
January 25–March 13, 2010
American University Museum
4400 Massachusetts Ave NW
Washington, DC 20016
www.american.edu/museum
Cover: Genealogical Breach (detail), 2010, 8-channel video installation
with audio, 1 min., 29 sec. Courtesy of the artist.
Below: Moving Immobility, 2010, 8-channel video installation
with audio, 2 min., 11 sec. Courtesy of the artist.
Julie Linowes
STAIN
January 25 – March 13
Included Works
1. Making The Cut, 2010, 1 min., 46 sec.
2. Holding Cell, 2010, 2 min., 30 sec.
3. Genealogical Breach, 2010, 1 min., 29 sec.
4. The Unrendered Real, 2010, 1 min., 21 sec.
5. Moving Immobility, 2010, 2 min., 11 sec.
6. Drifting Intersection, 2010, 2 min., 01 sec.
7. Luminous Betrayal, 2010, 1 min., 50 sec.
8. Always & Never The Stranger Within, 2010,
3 min., 49 sec
Julie Linowes.indd 1
1/19/11 3:13:25 PM
Clockwise from top left: Drifting Intersection, 2010, 8-channel video installation with audio, 2 min., 01 sec.,
Courtesy of the artist. Holding Cell, 2010, 8-channel video installation with audio, 2 min., 30 sec., Courtesy of
the artist. Making The Cut, 2010, 8-channel video installation with audio, 1 min., 46 sec., Courtesy of the artist.
The Unrendered Real, 2010, 8-channel video installation with audio, 1 min., 21 sec., Courtesy of the artist.
JL: It’s a Jewish prayer shawl that men have traditionally worn when they
go into the synagogue to pray. It is a sacred kind of object.
JR: What does it signify?
JL: I am not any kind of expert on Jewish history or the intricacies of
Judaism. To me, the tallis does not represent religion or Judaism, but is
strongly associated with ritual, ceremony, family, and culture, and most
particularly with my father. Judaism was what I grew up with so these
are the objects and rituals I’m familiar with. I found this object that held a
deep personal significance, an emotional resonance for me, and that was
the jumping off point.
From the start, I conceived of STAIN as being comprised of both still and
moving image. I was continuing my investigation into the relationship
between conscious and unconscious experience. Very early on my
work developed a surrealist aesthetic and dream-like vocabulary which
has persisted to this day. I knew that I wanted the still images to be
extremely layered and I also knew I wanted to have video playing behind
a transparent still image though I had no idea how I was going to achieve
this.I started with the still image, with photography, and worked on this
component for almost 5 years. Work on the video came in the sixth. This
body of work took me 9 years to complete.
An Interview with Julie Linowes / By Jack Rasmussin
JR: Your installation, STAIN, is a very moving, very sad, and very beautiful
group of video experiences. I was wondering how it came to be. The
music, of course, is wonderful, so I’m wondering if you started with the
music or if you found the right music as you went along?
JL: I came across the music as I went along but as soon as I heard it, it was
all I could listen to while I worked. It struck the emotional temperature that
the work was exploring. The starting point for me with a new body of work
usually comes when I’m getting near to completing another body of work.
I feel this impulse to start casting about for a new direction, new ideas.
Often, I wander around looking at landscapes, various locations, looking
at objects. Typically, I find myself going to places that are saturated with a
kind of history, where there is a deeply layered sense of lives lived. I also
look for objects that possess that same quality, that are imbued with some
historical sense of significance. I prowl antique stores, flea markets, that
kind of thing. I gather things up with little understanding of what will be of
use and what will be discarded. All I know at the beginning is that they’ve
spoken to me in some way and so I’m willing to explore their significance
further.
The starting point for STAIN was when I came across a tallis that my father
had worn when I was young. I asked him if I could use it in my work and
he agreed. This was the object that started the journey that became STAIN.
JR: What is a tallis?
Julie Linowes.indd 2
returned to New Zealand after visiting the States, I walked into my organic
butcher shop and there was a full-body pig carcass hanging behind the
counter. It was like “Oh, my God!”. First of all, as an object it appealed to
me enormously because I love that push-pull between horror and beauty
and, boy, did that pig carcass possess both. This kind of polarity really gets
me going. I think that’s one of the reasons why I’m such a fan of Matthew
Barney, Francis Bacon. My response was that it had to go in, but I didn’t
know why. I spent several years working with both the tallis and the pig
carcass but I felt extremely uncomfortable about doing so. My discomfort
came from not really understanding why I felt compelled to work with
these objects. I knew that these were such loaded objects, and I knew
that if I couldn’t articulate, to myself first of all, why I was doing what I
was doing that not only was I headed for big trouble but I was also being
irresponsible. My discomfort was so intense that several times I nearly
abandoned the project altogether. But, I also trusted my intuitive process
and believed that sooner or later I would arrive at an understanding. And,
this happened. In fact, the meaning actually emerged from a dream. I
came to understand that I was exploring the sacred and the profane and
how unstable these concepts are; I was interrogating how we come to
assign those labels to certain objects and ideas.
JR: Have you always engaged in this process of layering still and moving
images?
JR: The piece is called STAIN, and I assume that’s related to the blood, and
also to your concern with human nature or Original Sin, a condition of
being alive.
JL: No, but I have always tried for this haunting quality, for darkness and
beauty. I have always been driven to create beautiful imagery, whether it
be black-and-white, color, or video. I know that my work is challenging on
a lot of different levels, and it has always required the viewer to go to an
emotional place that I think a lot of people would rather not go to. I use
beauty as an act of seduction, it’s what draws the viewer in and motivates
them to linger; it’s also the pay-off for being willing to go where the work
takes them.
JL: You’re right in saying that STAIN is related to blood but more
importantly, it’s an expression of my idea of the relationship between
conscious and unconscious experience where the only knowledge we
can ever hope to have of our unconscious is the residue that gets left
behind...perhaps in the form of dream memories or reveries or fantasies.
To my mind, there’s a stain, an evidentiary trace, that is deposited on the
membrane of the conscious and it is this that we can examine for clues to
ourselves.
JR: You require a lot of your viewers. They must take a significant amount
of time and enter a very dark place to experience STAIN.
Which brings me back to the second part of your question which has to
do with human nature and Original Sin or, as you so beautifully put it ,“the
condition of being alive.” I really do believe in that saying, “the personal
is political.” I think we all carry within us parts of ourselves that we reject,
harshly judge, are ashamed of...and I also think that we turn our back on
these parts and bury them out of sight, somewhere deep inside. Yet, just
because we don’t see them doesn’t mean that these parts aren’t still alive
and active. In fact, it is because these parts are unacknowledged that they
have a way of seeping out and wreaking havoc. One of the most troubling
manifestations of this dynamic is our need to vilify those people or cultures
that are different from us and to cast them into the role of the “Hated
Other.” We see this over and over again on the world stage. The enmity
that exists in various parts of the world, whether recent or ancient, has
always as one of its components, this viewpoint of the Hated Other. And,
really, from an entirely different viewpoint we can simply look at the other
party or culture as merely different. The hatred is a product of judgment.
And, this is where the tallis and the pig come into it. I know there may be
people who find the idea of the pig and the tallis coexisting within the
same image as deeply disturbing or offensive or blasphemous. And, yet,
this is exactly what the work is asking the viewer to explore and examine.
In another cultural context, these objects would not carry the same
emotional freight and what is reviled becomes revered. In the final image
of the installation, “Always & Never The Stranger Within”, the woman has
found a way to embrace the pig, she has learned how to have compassion
for that pig, to see it for the wound that it is, and, most importantly...
to forgive. Ultimately, STAIN is about compassion and forgiveness. It is a
protest against occupying any position that results in polarizing hatred...
either within ourselves or between ourselves and others.
JL: That’s true...both metaphorically and literally! And not only do they
have to spend the time and feel the feelings but they also have to figure
out how to negotiate the physical space. I put the viewer in a very active
position. When they first enter a room, the experience is overpowering.
There are four videos, one on each wall, each highly complex. And, there
is also audio. This experience of being overwhelmed is an intentional
strategy. The work is meant to blindside conscious understanding, to
force the viewer to metaphorically throw up their hands in surrender,
to propel them into some kind of unconscious encounter with the
work. Hopefully, if they’re willing to spend the time, they settle into the
experience and then begin to observe that there’s a kind of order...but the
disordered order that is characteristic of dreams.
On a certain level my main area of investigation, for over 35 years,
has been to devise a visual language that gets as close as possible to
expressing the interface between conscious and unconscious experience.
Not just the conscious as one thing and the unconscious as another, but
where they meet, what that interface is, and how we experience this. That
is such an ephemeral and ineffable thing; it is so fluid; so transparent and
permeable. To me a video installation, as opposed to having this object of
the transparency, got much closer to expressing that. It also allowed me
to have the still image transform which was an additional bonus. When it
was a transparency, it was a fixed thing and that was that.
JR: How and when did the pig carcass make an appearance?
JL: For the first few years it was all about the tallis. But one day, when I
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