An interview between collaborators  |  December 2004

Carolyn Lambert and Fereshteh Toosi

commissioned for an upcoming publication from the Berwick Research Institute, Roxbury, Massachusetts

C: What was your favorite moment/action/happening of The Tea Party and why?

F: I truly don’t have a favorite amongst our many activities. I think all the parts
worked best as a whole, but if I had to choose, I guess I really liked going to the
protests with the ACLU and the National Lawyer’s Guild. I enjoyed using our
project to contribute to an organized activity, something that we could fit into
positively without being the main act. I also got a lot out of the energy of being
there, because I felt excited about our contribution to the event. I don’t get this
feeling when I show up to a protest and hold a pre-fab sign, even though I might
feel very strongly about the cause. It was a similar to how I felt when Pink Bloque
came to Pittsburgh and we learned dance moves together, and the workshop I
did with Bread & Puppet. I’m really interested in creative resistance that is fun to
do and fun for people to watch.

You didn’t get to come with me for this one but my other favorite activity was
going to Johnny Carrera’s studio (Quercus Press in Waltham, MA). He greeted
me at the door in full costume and in your absence it was like he became a
surrogate or honorary Tea Party member. I liked the ambiguity in the meaning of
my visit with him, in that it was very much art meeting everyday life.

C: When I think back about how you and I begin a project, it’s difficult to characterize or
analyze how it happens, but I’ll try. It seems that we both use a combination of intuition
(or in other words, a kind of a gut reaction to a circumstance or place- or even language)
and then we explore that initial impulse with a more reasoned or intellectual inquiry into
that idea. There seems to be a combination of those approaches: each of us responding
and challenging an intuitive proposal with pragmatic questions of intent and purpose and
expected outcome. Is that how you would characterize it? How would you compare this
beginning stage of our collaborative works with the beginning stages in your work?

F: Although I never thought about it this way, it is a pretty accurate description,
and similar to a process I use often in my solo work.
There is a delicate balance that is difficult to achieve, it lies between innovation
and something that is purely about achieving a certain set of goals. Sometimes
you have to let go with the intuitive process before cutting it off with the pragmatic
questions. I think that if you cut it off prematurely, it’s easy to edit out the wacky,
weird stuff that comes out of playing with ideas and daring to do something
illogical.

But I would also add that the myth of art production is that it is all intuitive and
saturated in personal motivations, disregarding pragmatism or logic or questions
of intent. Of course this is the romantic notion of the artists’ muse, and a lot of art
that follows this myth is pretty banal.

C: I don’t think we’ve ever discussed why we are twins. Can you talk a little bit about
why you choose to be a twin?

F: The use of identical costumes is not necessarily about becoming twins, but in
creating a sense of uniformity. This also has to do with a desire for the piece to
create a quality of legitimacy that is not available when people are dressed
differently. By legitimacy, I mean a sense of organization and authority that
comes when you dress in a way that is pre-meditated.

When two otherwise different people dress identically, it has obviously been preplanned,
or it has been required of them by some authority. This aura of authority
is meant to transfer to the personalities wearing the identical clothing; it is
supposed to drown out any sense of individuality and to unify them to be part of
some kind of team effort. But when the outfits are weird or funny, like they were
with both Searching for the Fourth River and The Tea Party, hopefully it enables
the spectator to question the authority that requires such comical uniformity.
Also, the fact that there are only two people works to our advantage because it
further confuses the idea of group identity that is associated with uniforms. It
leads people to question the very basis of the uniform: Was it just a coincidence?
Are there really only two of these characters, or did they get separated from a
larger group?

C: When we talk about the Tea Party project, some people seem confused by the direct
political statements that we make because they are combined with silliness, humor and
play. Why do you think this is? And why do you think it’s important that we have both?
Or do you? Do you think this may change in the future?

F: I play with political issues because I don’t really know how to talk about
politics any other way. The structure of it, the total enormity and our lack of power
as individuals within institutions: these things are totally ridiculous to me. If I can’t
laugh about it, I feel paralyzed and hopeless. Of course I take it very seriously
too. There are many people doing serious work around social change. I’m a
willing participant and audience for traditional activism and documentary, or
traditional means of disseminating information. But my contribution is dedicated
to finding strategies to talk to people about issues that, in our culture, we try so
desperately to drown out. So many people nowadays claim to get their news only
from Jon Stewart. The daily barrage of silliness that spews from mainstream
news is only detected when people don’t agree with the representation of a
certain issue, and this does not happen nearly enough. Whereas Jon Stewart is
not hiding his use of fiction and humor. In our projects we are adding to this mix,
but on a more grassroots level. So yes, I do think it’s important to have both, in
that it is a strategy to maintain accessibility to otherwise difficult subject matter
and to expose the fiction inherent in any version of history and politics. Also, the
confusion is extremely positive in my mind, because it provides a deconstructing
force that I hope to encourage for any mediated experience.

C: With The Tea Party, I pulled back at the last minute, on one of our more potentially
charged political actions. You were willing to risk arrest. Do you regret that The Tea
Party didn’t do that action as originally planned it (putting orange flags directly outside
of T stops)?

F: I don’t actively regret not doing this action the way we originally planned it, but
I’m curious about what would have happened. With work in the public it is easy to
second-guess ourselves, to try and predict how people and authorities will
respond. But that is absolutely a requirement too; we have to prepare and take
responsibility for whatever happens as a result. It is wiser to err on the side of
caution, but there is value to risk-taking. Interventions into the public sphere are
inherently riskier than work in the gallery, so we are already challenging
ourselves on the most basic level, and I’m glad for that. You know what to expect
from people when they enter a gallery, and you have a general idea of the kind of
people who go to galleries. Anything can be transgressive outside the safety of
arts institutions, especially now with the fascistic tendencies of the current U.S.
government administration. In a recent lecture, Steve Kurtz talked about Critical
Art Ensemble’s history of confrontations with authority. He presented several
projects that are precursors to the highly visible federal case CAE is a part of
now. One of the first examples, which CAE also writes about in their book
Electronic Civil Disobedience, involved an adult playing with toy cars in public. It
seems absurd, but most every time, police or security would show up and ask
them to leave. We need moments like this to stay aware of the nature of our
culture. Artists can raise this awareness, if they are willing to take risks in their
work. Throughout the talk, Steve highlighted the lack of freedoms that we have in
our society, but ultimately he emphasized that it’s never worth it to go to jail for
art. I agree, but there are gestures that reveal these lack of freedoms, and for
that, I am willing to take my chances.

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F: I just read something Meg (Meg Rotzel, Director of the Berwick Research
Institute) wrote that called our endeavors a series of mini-projects. And I recall
when you were talking about it at some point, you really emphasized the process
aspect of the project.

I wonder what you think about issues of scale as related to this project: Is it
possible for our work to create an impact on us, or on the audience, through a
series of short-term actions? How do you feel about the way that the project
developed in a series of smaller elements?

C: I do think it is possible for our work, or work of this kind, to create an impact on us
and the audience, and I think The Tea Party did. Some of the evidence of this is that it
captured the attention of a number of news media. Having our picture on the front page
of the Christian Science Monitor is evidence that one of our short-term actions both
captured the public eye and in doing so, made an impact. Additionally, a friend of mine
(who was not in Boston) was particularly excited about the buttons that we made out of
parking tickets and distributed freely. These were intended to spark conversation about
creative conversions for parking lots and even though my friend is pretty removed from
the parking problems of Boston, this part of the piece struck her as particularly
imaginative and inspiring.

The public tea party-picnic on the Esplanade that ended the project was a nice way to
reconnect with an audience that had been aware of our presence and aware of our
activities and intentions, even if they weren’t witness to them. I think that is one thing I
miss about a project based on smaller parts. I miss an audience. Without a consistent
audience we are the only witnesses to the entire performance.

F: I have been reading a lot of writing by Mike Kelley, who began to write
critically about his own work to represent it more accurately than he felt art critics
could. I really believe in this idea of self-representation, but I’m also really
interested in interventions into mass media as well. What are your thoughts
about having control over how the work is defined, in the way that Kelley
represents himself, and in giving up this control to be represented by others?

C: I’m really glad we are representing ourselves in this format: writing this interview
rather than being interviewed (and in addition to Courtney’s piece). I feel that perhaps
both are necessary. For me it’s important that the work, and in our case the
documentation, speak for itself. In documentation, we are, of course, representing
ourselves. We edit some things and emphasize others. I think it’s important for the work
to communicate with someone without the intermediary of the artist. But I agree with
Kelley, too often artists defer to a critic or writer as if we are not able to speak about our
own work.

F: With both of our projects we have had different experiences with media. We
have been covered as a news story and as an arts feature. We have also created
our own bits of media, in a way, with the pamphlets and tea bags that we hand
out, and our website. How have your thoughts about the media as a means of
“distributing” a performance art piece been informed by the experiences that
we’ve had?

C: I am most interested in opportunities to be the feature story, and tell a story through a
TV spot as we did with the Fourth River. In fact, I would also be interested in doing a
project that was solely about media infiltration. But I also feel that the small features in a
number of newspapers created a web of information about us, and the project was
significantly larger in context because of them. I think this was particularly important in a
city like Boston and I would definitely seek it out in other places.

F: After our first project, Searching for the Fourth River, we wrote about the idea
of audience-participant, and the ways in which conflating spectatorship,
authorship, and participation can affect the way the content and meaning of a
piece is generated. Do you think The Tea Party created effective audienceparticipant
relationships? How would you update or expand upon the idea of
audience-participant now, after the experience of The Tea Party?

C: I feel like the main difference between Searching for the Fourth River and The Tea
Party was our relationship to audience and participants. The Tea Party was much more
about promoting an ideology (less oil dependency, defiance of “homeland security”-type
measures, limiting gentrification), than offering situations for co-creation as the Fourth
River did. With the The Tea Party, we were lobbying, protesting, and situating our
costumed selves in provocative locations.
As for the future, expanding or updating this idea: I would like to continue to work in this
format of co-creation with the audience member. That is a big emphasis in my new
project with the houseboat. But I also feel like I now have an understanding that the
audience/participant relationship can never be non-hierarchical: the artist or initiator will
always be more powerful in the creative process than the audience-participant. And I feel
OK with that. I still think that work with an emphasis on gathering multiple
perspectives/stories is some of the most interesting work.

F: I’ve been thinking a lot about documentation methods for public interventions
and performances. I wonder what lessons you’ve learned about this from The
Tea Party? Do you feel that it was made only for the people of Boston in the
summer of 2004, or do you think it has a life for other audiences after this time?

C: I feel like The Tea Party should have a life beyond summer of 2004, for me to feel
satisfied with the project. I do feel like the web is a great tool for communication and
documentation. I love that we had a website as an on-going component of our Boston
experience, but it was hard to work on both ours and update the Berwick’s at the same
time. I would definitely use a website again. I think the web-based documentation is
something that will get easier as we go along. And we will find strategies that work:
something really simple yet clear and accessible. I love N55’s website for this reason.
Earlier, when I was speaking about not having a constant audience for a piece that is
divided up into parts, I wondered how Lone Twin (British performance duo) deals with
that. Their practice often doesn’t involve an audience for its entirety and they don’t have
a documentary web site. But they do have staged performances in which they do a kind
of re-enactment of their walks. They embellish it with stories and use choreographed
movements to involve the art audience into performances that originally have only
incidental audiences and audience-participants.

F: When I gave a presentation about our work recently, it was difficult for me to
articulate the kind hype that had built up around the DNC’s visit to Boston, even
though it was only a couple of weeks after the election in November. When I’m
doing the work, it seems so important for it to be relevant to current events, in
particular the way we addressed the issue of the baggage searches on the T.
This project was so particular to this moment in time; do you have any thoughts
about how this kind of timeliness affects artwork? In particular I am curious what
you think about the relationship between specificity of subject matter and
accessibility to more diverse audiences (outside the time and place the piece
was made)?

C: I think you bring up a really important point with this question. I feel like all artwork
has meaning specific to the context in which it was made, but sometimes the meaning
changes. I was just reading this book by Ivan Illich called, H2O and the Waters of
Forgetfulness. He talks about how late 19th century artists like Degas and Ingres began
painting women in bathtubs. Before that women had not been painted in bathtubs. The
domestication of sexuality and women’s bodies was a significant shift which reflected on
the Victorian views of femininity, women’s’ sexuality, and the iconography of water.
You know, when I look at the work of the Situationist International, that movement was
so specific to what was happening in 1968 in France and in the world: student riots in
Paris, the killing of Martin Luther King Jr., and Bobby Kennedy. The work of the
Situationists has been tremendously influential on contemporary art, to people as diverse
as Julie Mehretu and Jenny Holzer. But it wasn’t until I began to look at their work in the
context of the time period that I understood it fully.

I think our work, specific to the DNC and the local hype and paranoia during those two
preceding months, also touched on some subjects that are translatable to a wider spectrum
of time/space: freedom of speech, surveillance, oil dependency, gentrification.

F: There were aspects of the project that we worked on alone, and things we
worked on together. Could you tell me how you felt about this distribution,
especially as it relates to your period of working now (in which you are doing an
ostensibly solo project). Do you think there is room to have an individual and
collaborative practice at the same time? How will you structure your practice in
the future?

C: I really liked having solo or sub-projects as part of our residency. I wish that the
inflatable horse (my project) were more integrated into some action or performance as we
had initially talked about. The website, as I said earlier, was integrated more and
beneficial to the work as a whole. The Reagan video (one of your sub-projects) was
helpful in that it was in the beginning and we got out into the public. I feel like it was a
good exercise: a warm up. Perhaps for you, since you took the lead on that one, it had
even more significance as part of your body of work. Overall, I think sub-projects are a
beneficial way of working. I would like to develop it to the level where independent
projects could be working toward the same collaborative effort and feed and influence
each other.

You know, I would like to ask you to answer the first question that you asked me.

F: Which was that?

C: The question about making work that is comprised of a number of smaller scale
projects.

F: I tend to do a lot of smaller scale projects. I think that I would probably want to
continue with this kind of working process, it really keeps me interested and
motivated. But I have been spending a lot of time now considering the value of
the documentation and presentation mode, and I am becoming interested in the
idea of creating stories after the fact, to embellish the “real” things that happened.
Would it be interesting to discover a new platform for The Tea Party to transfer
their energies? For example, Reverend Billy began with the Church of Stop
Shopping. He now uses this character to preach about everything from
Halliburton to Starbucks. Our Tea Party characters were like this: their interest in
one issue naturally overlapped with other connected issues. I am interested in
creating a project that can be very specific, but that is transferable with some
tweaking as well. And yes, I am very interested in Lone Twin’s strategy for
creating new lives for the same project. I think this is what we will have to do, if
we are to build something substantial for ourselves to learn from without getting
burned by trying to start from scratch every time. It could be anything really: the
Fourth River investigators could tackle other urban legends, The Tea Party could
begin its 2008 campaign now.