INTERVIEW : GLORIA NOTO : WORK MAGAZINE

Work Magazine and Gloria Noto are national treasures. As art, fashion, design and music become increasingly co-opted by the world of corporate marketing, we need tastemakers and champions of the underground ever more with each passing season. Gloria — like the best of the best who have come before her — follows her instinct when curating exhilarating content for Work; she knows it when she sees it because she feels it. Work Magazine can now be found in rooms at Ace Hotel & Swim Club — leaving your room with one in the morning and reading it by the pool with a Bloody Mary and French Toast breakfast is highly recommended.

We wanted to ask Gloria about her background, her work and her daydreams. She obliged.

You grew up in Detroit. Being from the archetypical blue-collar American city must have something to do with the magazine’s proletarian name.

That is a very interesting angle. It very well could have been a part of the many ingredients that make up the basis of the title and concept of The Work Magazine. Growing up in Detroit gave me a fierce work ethic and follow through with the things I set out to accomplish. To be from Detroit means to be a fighter and a hard worker. It’s tough out there, so you have to be tough with it.  

What does the magazine as a blank canvas mean to you as people, artists, citizens?

Each time I launch an Issue, the very next day, I am faced with another blank canvas and all the hopes and dreams I would like to set to accomplish with the following issue. Having the magazine be such a great platform for myself to express and connect my feelings and interests to the world is such a great feeling for me…to connect…that’s all we really want to do itsn’t it? And then there is the greater purpose of The Work Magazine, to be a blank canvas for those involved. To help them push the limits to submit something of the issues concept, but submit something that forces them to think outside the box, or get out side of their comfort zone. And now take that one step higher, and reach the reader…having them hold that once blank canvas in their hands and shown something they haven’t seen in other magazines, or in general, and to teach them something new, to give them something new to store in a crinkle of their brain. Like before mentioned, to connect. That’s what a blank canvas means to me.

Does it feel like work?

A lot of people say that if you love what you do, it will never feel like work…I disagree! Yes it feels like work, because it is work. It takes a lot of time, a lot of back and forth and searching, a lot of bumps, etc. And when you are a very small family that mainly does this as a labor of love, it takes even more work. But with that said, the work is so gratifying, and such a learning experience with every individual I meet, or bump that I encounter, that it makes the work enjoyable at even it’s harder points. I am lucky to have a strong team that keeps things together for me when I feel like I am at my last, and a team that is constantly bringing new and interesting point of views to the table.  Without them, there would be a really sad magazine. So yes, it feels like work, but who says a work feeling can’t be a good feeling!?

What has inspired you in the last 24 hours or so?

My girlfriend Ally and the little pow-wow conversations we have while taking a very long walk around the SilverLake Reservoir. We get on topics of work often and have such a great banter on back and forth ideas on what we want to accomplish and how we can do these things. And then there was the neighborhood I was walking in while having this conversation, Silverlake is such an inspiring little town full of beautiful homes, nature,  artistic people, and amazing food… Every time I walk in my neighborhood I feel a dueling sense of peace and excitement. I can feel the creative energy all around me and that makes me feel creative in return.

If you were packing your bags and leaving LA today, where would you be moving to?

Are we talking realistically here? Because I would have to take into account where I could continue to work, if that was the case. But since I have a feeling that you don’t mean a realistic answer, I would say Berlin. I haven’t been yet, but I think it would work out.  

Why did The Work need to be?

The Work Magazine needed to be because I needed an outlet to be. I am a makeup artist as well, and am constantly surrounded by these amazing individuals whom I thought deserved recognition, rather than the same bull shit that I would see over and over again in magazines, used only because the client would be paying them for product placement rather than because the item or the concept had soul. I felt that a lot of soul was missing from publications and that I also wanted to leave a mark on the transitioning magazine world. I wanted to show the world what I thought was interesting and to hopefully have them share the same view, and in doing so, share these amazing artists with the world.

Do you have a favorite magazine on airplanes?

I don’t have a specific one, but I did grab the most recent issues of BUST, LOVE, GentleWoman, and Dosier, and a new favorite Kinfolk on my last flight to NYC. They helped me through the whole flight.  

If a fictional character was curating an issue of The Work, who would it be?

Someone with a severe case of schizophrenia, ADD, and great taste. Maybe Andy Warhol. 

INTERVIEW : MIKE MILLS

Mike Mills is an artist, filmmaker, photographer, musician, handsome gentleman and multi-disciplinary imagination vessel. His recent film Beginners arrives on the heels of decades of nimble, idiosyncratic and hella special work like his other films Thumbsucker and Paperboys (among others) and his music videos for Yoko Ono and Air, as well as album covers for Sonic Youth, Beastie Boys and Ol’ Dirty Bastard. If you saw him in that seminal documentary of outsider art, Beautiful Losers, you probably remember what an eloquent voice he has on behalf of his craft, and on behalf of being human. That voice, carried over into his film, print and other work, is what moves us so deeply.

Mike has created a pair of limited edition printed posters for Commune — the group of people who helped design Ace Hotel & Swim Club, and old friends of Ace; you can see some behind-the-scene shots of Mike working on the posters on their blog here. The prints are centered on civil disobedience, and we had a chance to ask the man in question about what counts as disobedience and why color is a power tool.

You are civilly disobedient in much of your work — both via civil disobedience and by being civil while being disobedient. Is art a friendly way to disobey? Does being friendly make change more possible in the world?

Who was it that said if you’re going to break some laws you should dress nicely as to not be detected. I think that’s a powerful metaphor. I think the art world is actually too open for disobedience to be very impactful, that’s partly why I prefer to work in the design context or the entertainment world — while there is less room for subversion, I feel that what you can get away with in that context just has more traction in terms of making the world a bit more open. And lastly, yes, I love courtesy, friendliness, empathy and manners and I think all those qualities can be lethally subversive.

You’ve designed books, scarves, advertisements, music videos, fabrics and probably a bunch of stuff no one but you has ever seen. How do all the mediums you’ve used inform one another? When you’re designing or imagining, do you have a specific medium in mind? How does this change when you’re working on a commission or for a specific brand or project?

I very often just have ‘interests’ or maybe they’re obsessions and things on my heart and mind that are churning, churning, churning, and they come out in whatever opportunity is in front of me (a shirt, part of a script, a record cover, etc.). And yes, something I do in an art show can totally help me figure out a problem I’m having with a script, or something I learn doing a record cover can teach me about how I want to film something. I think I took my Bauhaus book I got in high school way too seriously and I thought this was how it was going to be in the future, everyone was gonna have multidiscplinary artistic lives, and that most of those ‘discplines’ were little lies made up by cultural institutions and schools anyways.

Color and you seem to have a great relationship. You have a way with gold foil. And Beginners has some beautiful full-screen color blocks. Is it California-born blood that brings out all this color? What does it mean to you? Can bright colors be sad? Can gold be depressing?

To be honest, I don’t totally know where all that came from. My father was, in addition to an art historian, a flag designer and did really amazing work that was always around the house. My mother loved minimalist art and color-field paintings, and I do carry that with me. I often feel a simple field of color says so much, is gorgeously open-ended and inviting, and, like music, works on a much more interesting and powerful subconscious level. And let’s face it, color is cheap — you get a lot of bang for your buck with a field of color and I really admire and respect that simple power.

What’s it like to make a movie about relationships when you’re in a relationship with someone who makes movies about relationships? Do you find yourselves in there sometimes, or is it a kind of therapeutic fiction (knowing that fiction is a great form of truth-telling)?

Oh, that’s private of course!

Photo of Mr. Mills by Autumn de Wilde

AFTERFEST INTERVIEW : KATHLEEN MCINNIS, CURATOR

We’re back with year two of Afterfest — the official Palm Springs Film Festival’s Shortfest afterparty with DJs, late night food, R-rated bingo and trivia, plus nice deals on rooms with food, beverage and Feel Good Spa credits. To kick things off, we had a chance to sit down with the festival’s film curator, Kathleen McInnis and get caught up on this year’s selection.

Last year’s ShortFest saw several entries from filmmakers who didn’t take the traditional path through film school. Are the novices still trending or leveling off? What does it all mean?

We always have a large number of films from emerging filmmakers, whether they take the film school route or not, because the short film format is so perfect to use in perfecting your visual storytelling voice. I think that is one of the more dynamic aspects of ShortFest — these collective emerging cinematic voices are fresh, visually stimulating, emotionally demanding in a way we haven’t experienced before.

Is it only a matter of time before social media finds a way to bring short film medium back to “the masses” à la Fatty Arbuckle?

Ah, the dream — to have audiences at large and worldwide re-embrace the short form not only as art but absolutely as valid entertainment. The short form theatrical venue so well established in the teens and early ‘20’s took nearly 70 years to crumble, but once gone is hard to get back. Theater owners realized more income from an extra feature screening crammed into the space left by taking out short form (not to mention adding in advertising to the space formerly occupied by cartoons and short films) and so were loath to give that up. Certainly, we’ve seen social networking sites and for-profit film sites on the internet trying to occupy that market share, but for me I still believe that we can create a valid and exciting cinema experience by adding back in the short form to the front of the featured film. I hope arthouse theaters far and wide embrace the idea as a way to bring another level of cinema experience to their audience — an experience that can’t be recreated on a laptop or in a dorm room.

Nollywood is the third largest producer of movies now. Where’s the next “_ollywood” going to be?

Wow, that’s like trying to forecast the weather — everyone has opinions and charts and numbers, but at the end of the day it’s still a bit of luck and happenstance. Some would say New Zealand is already it (Zollywood?), with the mega-productions of The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings series, etc. But historically, once a location is “shot out” film production simply moves on and finds a new geographic look somewhere else. Nigeria’s huge output of film and video, I think, is really a response to a dearth of product throughout a large landscape. India’s vast production of Bollywood films stays strong because of the dedicated audiences found not just in India now but throughout the world. And Hollywood’s domination of film screens worldwide is still a result of the demand for  visual popcorn by those with money and time but not a lot of sophisticated taste (i.e. kids). When looking at the emerging voices coming from the East (SE Asia, Singapore, China-including Hong Kong, Indonesia, etc) I see new stories told with sophisticated storytelling and well trained craft. It feels quite fresh, so perhaps that’s where we’ll ultimately find the next “_ollywood”.

Does your personal mental highlight reel have a soundtrack?

I never thought of it until you asked but then I started to listen and sure enough, it does! Music from Blade Runner, The Mission, Lawrence of Arabia, The Big Chill, Babel, Santitos, Amadeus, Wicker Park, Garden State, Footloose (original), Dirty Dancing, Happy Feet, Clay Pigeons and One False Move dominate my play list. And, to be honest, I kind of expect a full orchestra to bust out at any given moment throughout my day!

SNOW IN THE DESERT INTERVIEW: EVE FOWLER

Eve Fowler is arguably one of the country’s greatest living conceptual artists — trained in photography at Yale and in journalism from Temple University, she documents queer lives, interrogates “non-creative” visual forms and bridges the word with the body. She’s joining us this weekend for artists workshops at Snow in the Desert, an art space for women at Ace Hotel & Swim club. We asked her about her work, and what we can look forward to on Saturday afternoon…

What is your relationship, or your work’s relationship, to ideas of “beauty”?

I don’t really think too much about beauty in an art context. When I look at art or when I make art I tend to think more about what the artist was thinking or, regarding my own work, I’m trying to get information out into the world that matters to me in some way. I have a lot of art up in my apartment right now because I run an art organization, Artist Curated Projects, and I really love most of it but I don’t think about any of it in terms of beauty. When I was in grad school the worst thing you could tell someone was that their work was beautiful…

Talk a bit about the series of works you created at your residency at One Colorado — related to one of our favorite books in the world, Gertrude Stein’s “Tender Buttons.”

The public art project I made this year using text by Gertrude Stein is something I’m really excited about. I have been working with that text for a couple years making collages. Last year driving to my studio downtown I would see neon posters, made by Colby Posters, on telephone poles and fences. This is a very common form of advertising here and these posters have been used by a lot of artists. While I was using Stein’s text to make cardboard, wood and paper signs and collages I started to think these posters might be a great way for the general population to experience this text that I really love and enjoy. I see some of the text in “tender buttons” as really queer & coded but I think it’s so open-ended that it could mean so many things depending on who the viewer is. Aside from being posted in public, the posters have been used for classes, occupy LA and other protests. I recently made larger versions of them, paintings, for a show in Austin, Texas — along with a sound piece I made in collaboration with Tara Jane O’Neil. The sound piece combines ambient sounds collected while I put the posters up and “this is it with it as it is” spoken continuously for three minutes.

What will you be working on this weekend at Snow in the Desert?

I think this weekend I will have my library that I collected from the One Institute Gay and Lesbian Archive. They sell books for 50 cents there and over time I collected about 65 books. The books are wrapped in collages — I think we will unwrap them together and talk about that project a little. My library has some very obscure books in it but I think the books and the authors are important because they were out when it was hard to be out — making it easier for everyone now.

INTERVIEW: DMITRY KOMIS : CHELSEA PLACE CURATOR

The Chelsea Hotel is an icon of New York’s endangered free spirit — replete with freaks, geeks, ground shakers, noise makers, and artists who just don’t give a shit about capitalist progress. Though the latter has gnashed its teeth and the Chelsea’s caboose has stuttered to a halt, the spirits in the air will never vacate the premises.

Writer and independent curator Dmitry Komis curates The Quality of Presence at the Chelsea Hotel today through Sunday in a recently vacated suite — a group exhibition that employs Walter Benjamin’s seminal text The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction as a point of departure, and extends Benjamin’s argument of a diminishing “aura” of an artwork to the architectural space that encompasses it.

We walked through the exhibition with some Ace x Impossible film and had a chance to ask Dmitry about the show and some our friends who are in it.

Sherrill Tippins wrote about how the architect of the Chelsea was influenced by the French utopian philosopher Charles Fourier — that it was envisioned as a hub of creativity from the start. Is American utopia down for the count at the Chelsea or making a comeback?

To be honest I do not feel very optimistic about it, informed in part by my own experiences at the Chelsea.  

Living there, I was most interested in the people who felt they could not live anywhere else, because they felt so much a part of it, the architecture and the mood. The people who have been there 20-30 years. So you cannot tell them that artists have left the Chelsea or whatever people want to say now, they’re still there and continue to make work. There are not many buildings in New York you can still say that about. I also feel that for an artist community to flourish anywhere, affordable housing is a prerequisite. If the Chelsea continues to raise rents and fight its rent controlled status in court that would be a complete disaster.

Is Colette here to represent for the Fourierist spirit in 2012?

Colette is Colette. She is true to her vision. Her work is certainly informed by a self-sustainable ideology, but I’m not sure she would say she was influenced by Fourier. For The Quality of Presence, she resurrected one of her original bedroom panels, complete with a 1975 lightbox, and customized it for the Chelsea space. It looks like it’s always been there. I begged her to do it, she was not keen on bringing that back, but I felt it had to be seen within this context. I really respect Colette’s work and think she deserves a lot more serious attention. I won’t mention the current “controversy” surrounding her work, but it does seem to be very relevant at the moment culturally, thinking about artists and musicians and their all encompassing environments.

If Zaldy could dress any of the artists-in-residence in Chelsea history however he wanted, who do you think it would be? 

Viva. But she already had a great personal style.

Will Desi Santiago represent the 90s club kid aesthetic?

Desi’s piece literally borrows from the 90s club kid aesthetic, as he is using materials from Mathu & Zaldy’s costumes in the 90s, which were stored in the same closet where his installation will be. Desi found them in the closet after Zaldy & I moved out of the apartment. Desi certainly loves a spectacle, and is inspired by that culture, but his work takes on so many other cues and meanings that become something completely different when removed from the club context. The work is celebratory, yet dark and introverted. 

Has Scott Hug taken any more Polaroids? 

Scott is including his graph collage pieces. I love this body of work and I think it can go on forever.

Mapplethorpe and Miguel Villalobos in one room — that’s a powerful litany of black and white.

Miguel has photographed many many shoots in the bathroom in room 302, so it is fitting that he is contributing images that were shot there. His photos will be contrasted by Jen DeNike’s bathtub projection. Every artist is responding to the architecture and utility of each room in the suite. 

The Mapplethorpe in the show is pretty powerful; the longer I stare at the photograph the more I start seeing other things the image.

DESERT GOLD INTERVIEW : ALEX PASTERNAK OF LEMONADE

Alex Pasternak grew up in Half Moon Bay, California playing punk and hardcore and jazz bass. He studied ethnomusicology and anti-boasts a repertoire of rare magic from all four corners of the planet including Turkish Cifteteli, North African Rai, samba-reggae and Folklorico, and he mixes it all with two-step, grime, kuduro and cumbia digital. He lives in Brooklyn, plays drums with Lemonade, has reigned over the decks in the lobby at Ace Hotel New York, and will be gracing us poolside tomorrow at Desert Gold, with a 5-piece Balkan brass band. Dude makes it happen.

Read on for more background on his degree from the School of Hard Knocks and advanced certification in Variegated Horizons & Shifting Sands. And we’ll see you tomorrow — see the schedule and get a room.

What are some roadside attractions that have…attracted you?

I really loved having a picnic at Shoshone Falls a few years ago on tour with Delorean. If you’re ever passing through Idaho, it’s a great relaxing stop.

Also, Tammy’s Truro Tavern in the middle of fucking nowhere Iowa is amazing Americana.

If you could be any highway or US route which would you be?

Highway 1. Eeeeaaaaasy. Called the PCH (Pacific Coast Highway in So-cal) though Hwy 1 is me. I was raised on it, literally, between San Francisco and Santa Cruz at a little cove named Martins Beach and have driven that road all my life. From Mendo down through Big Sur to Santa Barbara, I love it.

Who is your ideal road trip mate, living or dead?

My best buddy Chris White. We’ve been taking road trips and surf trips together down the California coast since junior high. Headed to Mex with him this May to find some waves in Oaxaca and visit my sister in Mexico City.

Favorite song or band to listen to on a road trip? Do you have any songs you search the dials for? Be honest.

My classic California road trip album is Neil Young’s “On the Beach.” Makes the sunset especially bright when cruisin down Hwy 1 and somehow ties my dad’s generation and mine together.

Best unexpectedly amazing thing you’ve seen on a road trip.

One time I lost the keys to our rental Mercedes Sprinter in Vancouver and freaked out, not knowing what to do. The ONLY spare was in SF and there was no way to make one in time to make a show in Minneapolis. I somehow convinced my little sister Anna to pick up the key for me in the Mission District and drive to the airport with hopes of sneaking it onto a plane to Vancouver. Years ago I worked for SkyWest Airlines and still know a few folks there. I called the gate and found someone I knew though to my dismay she said she was too busy to run outside of security to grab the key…. Desperate, I told my sister to ask someone near the ticket counter for an extreme favor. Not sure how but she got the key (and electronic clicker) through security with some baggage dude and onto a plane to vancouver with the flight attendant. I took a taxi to the airport, grabbed the key, cabbed back and we were on our way. Phew.