To Leave Is To Return: An Interview between Marko Gluhaich, arts writer and senior editor of Frieze Magazine, and artist Brittany Nelson
Marko Gluhaich: When did you first encounter Solaris? Did the book or film come first? Was its connection to your practice immediately apparent? You once referred to each new body of work as “adding one more line to a poem that is slowly being written over the years.” I wonder what resonated with your past work in that initial encounter.
Brittany Nelson: I first encountered the Steven Soderbergh remake of Solaris when I was 18 years old, but I don’t think I grasped what I was watching, only that the style of filmmaking felt meditative in comparison to other films of that decade. Later on came the book and the original Tarkovsky film, but I couldn’t tell you in what order. The mental bounce between what Lem’s intentions were in the novel and the subsequent focus of the two films is really what has captured my interest. Lem stated the purpose of the novel was to demonstrate how any attempt to communicate with an alien entity would be a futile endeavor and he famously hated the two film adaptations that focused on the central relationship of the story famously saying he didn’t title his novel “love in space.” Yet this idea of being haunted by a past relationship is the very aspect that has resonated so deeply with myself, and I believe the public as well.
Solaris occupied my mind so substantially for so many years, but I needed to wait for the right time to directly address it. In other words, more lines of the poem needed to be written first before it would make sense.
MG: In your essay “An Argument Towards Abstraction. As Outlined By Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris” from 2018, you use the wonderful word “gargle” (incidentally not used in Lem’s novel) to describe the utterances made by the sentient ocean on the planet Solaris. You also describe the horror when the ocean responds in a language the characters recognize (translated via avatars of loved ones long passed), writing: “You cannot separate your experience from the image, the literalness of her form is both a comfort and an insanity. With specificity comes personal confrontation, and you’ve concluded this is far too specific.” Could you speak more about the significance of the “gargle”?
BN: I was originally commissioned to write an essay about abstraction in photography, a field which I am both annoyed by but participate in. The outline and tone of this essay came from two ideas to perhaps reflect these feelings. I gave myself two ridiculous prompts to structure the piece: What if all of the art theory was contained only in the titles, and what if the body of the text was written in very short, plain language, declarative statements mimicking the narrative voice of Rod Serling in the original Twilight Zone series? The titles are both honest and misleading; they ready you for a theoretical text by using the language one expects (and they do properly describe the connection to Barthes I’m trying to illicit), but what follows is somewhat of a farce. In Solaris, Lem certainly never describes the sentient ocean as gargling at anyone, but this became a great word to describe the lack of communication between it and the protagonists of the novel, as well as a stand-in for abstraction in art and photography in general. It conjures the frustration of the researchers (imagine being gargled at), a drunken incoherence, miserably indecipherable, and somewhat silly. However, the alternate side is when the ocean does start to speak more coherently, and in the case of the main character Kelvin, makes a recreation of his deceased wife out of his memories to haunt him aboard the ship. This recreation I would consider the portrait photograph. One might think they prefer something so easily legible but, in this instance, they certainly do not, so let us turn back to abstraction. This entire text is not meant to take itself too seriously, but I really do mean what I say.
MG: Gargling makes me think of how Stefanie Hessler approached your work via Jane Bennett’s “vibrant matter”: “the forces and flows of materialities that are lively, signaling, and affective; a liveliness that is swerving, buzzing, and turbulent, in which everything affects everything else, without an a priori goal, and without being either, or, but always both and all at once.” How do you contend with this kind of material entanglement in your work as it concerns the themes of longing, isolation, and searching, that are woven throughout your past projects?
BN: The feeling of loneliness is pervasive in me. I am sure this can be attributed to growing up in a very secluded and gay unfriendly place in Montana with a repeated scenario of unrequited love, but I think this feeling also persists through the realization that one’s mind is a closed entity, no one else can ever enter it and no one can ever be fully understood. But this not a problem I aim to solve through this work, I’m not interested in pointing to a culprit or finding a resolution as much as I am in ruminating on and existing within it. I try to approach this idea from many directions in my work, to see if an accumulation of source material can start to capture what I cannot articulate. It is also important to me that any combination of works can all live in a room together or be remixed. I consider it all one body of work, albeit from different methods and materials, and I like that they seep into one another. For this exhibition, in particular, I was interested to see if I could set the stage with just three images. Each of these images is produced with different methods that I would characterize as: taken, created and appropriated. The image I have taken from the Allen Telescope Array which serves as a split consciousness of the observer and the observed. The image of the spaceship window is appropriated from Tarkovsky’s Solaris and places you as the main character inside the ship looking out, and the Mordançage work is created through a technique I devised with the chemistry using only paper and light.
MG: In the work in this exhibition, there’s a tension at play between the longing to connect and the phantoms that come when that connection is ostensibly made in Solaris. The phantoms are made manifest by the “Mordançage” work, itself a sort-of ghost, the technique with which it’s made being both an antiquated relic of photomaking past and a seemingly extra-human manipulation of the photo’s surface. It’s not the first time that ghosts and haunting has been suggested by your work, but it’s the first time the yearning to connect has led to an actual meeting in the work, and yet, the audience is met with more phantoms. What does the desire to make contact, to prove that we aren’t alone in the universe, mean to you and your practice? In this project, do you feel you’re representing a failure to connect or something more?
BN: What has drawn me so much to SETI research (the scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence) and working with the SETI Institute is because it is one of the largest and longest running scientific endeavors to yield zero results. I think that SETI by itself is a magnificent
artwork. I am perhaps not as interested in us making contact as I am in the sheer endeavor and subsequent persistence involved in continuing the search, and what propels the desire to answer the question if we really are alone. I do feel I am representing a failure to connect in this project, or a continued failure I should say. But I also hope it might contain the romanticism of repeatedly trying to; in outer space and to each other.
MG: You’ve been working on the “Mordançage” series for 15 years now. What did you learn through reengaging this process for the context of this show?
BN: I’ve learned that the beauty of the level of abstraction present in these works, is that I can play with re-textualizing them over the years. When I first started making this series it was a reaction to photography itself and its fetishization as a vehicle for nostalgic. It was a way of creating a new image by destroying the very thing that makes it able to capture the image, the light sensitive silver in the paper. Later I embraced the exo-planet like landscape quality in the works to set the scene for other exhibitions that dealt with science fiction. Now, with this particular image, I’m interested in its personification as both the phantom that is haunting you on the spaceship, and as the watery entity refusing to communicate outside of your window.
Publication
An Argument Towards Abstraction.
As Outlined By Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris
by Brittany Nelson
