Monika Weiss is an American artist, born in Warsaw and based in New York City. We've had the opportunity to work with Monika on several projects over the years, including two of her publications--Vessels, an exhibition catalogue published by Chelsea Art Museum, New York in 2004 and Five Rivers, a survey of her work published by Lehman College Art Gallery, City University of New York in 2006, also in conjunction with a monographic survey exhibition--as well as her website. Monika is a wonderful client to work with, but even more so, she's a fascinating individual and artist. As we love her work so much, we thought it only appropriate that she be our first interviewee.

To give you some background, Monika Weiss' work combines ancient media (drawing) with technological media (video projection) to explore the relationships between history, memory and presence. Through drawing, sculpture, video, performance and sound, Weiss creates work that merges symbolic form reminiscent of medieval paintings with the formal simplicity of Minimalism. The use of her own body directly in her art as both the maker and the inhabitant of the artistic object is characteristic of her work in which she explores concepts of absence and presence, the seer and the seen, the world and the human being.

Weiss' works have been most recently on view in The Prisoner's Dilemma at Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation CIFO, Miami (2009), as well as exhibited at Concentart, Berlin (2009), Frauenmuseum, Bonn (2008), Wyspa Institute of Art, Gdansk (2007), Kunsthaus Dresden (2007) and North Dakota Museum of Art, Grand Forks (2006), among others. In 2005-2006, the artist's first major and comprehensive survey exhibition was on view at the Lehman College Art Gallery (City University of New York) and reviewed in The New York Times. Weiss' works are represented in multiple public collections including Museum Albertina, Vienna, Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, New York and Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, Miami.

www.monika-weiss.com

You began your education studying piano and musical composition in Warsaw, where you were born. At what point did you start to become interested in performance art?

Meredith, first let me thank you and your company for a very rewarding collaboration over the years and for thinking of me as your first interviewee. You are a wonderful designer, and it is always inspiring to work with you and your colleagues.

It's interesting to me that you combined music and performance in your first question. Performativity is musical. It's about what happens in every moment, about the change... But I wouldn't call myself a performance artist. Life presence is often less important in my work than the fragile and fleeing recollection of presence. Virtual traces are embedded in the projected video and in the layers of sound composition. Physical traces are the drawn marks left on the surface of paper.

Does your musical background influence your art in any way?

Music is about ephemerality and transition. It's also about drawing the lines, melodic lines, that create a web of relationships together, forming a new harmony. It's like water that you cannot keep in your hands. Yet you know it exists, your body and mind react to it. Playing piano for hours everyday has left a mark beyond my childhood, leading perhaps towards my interest in repetition. Another influence of musical background is my way of working, sort of polyphonic, in terms of mediums or genres that coexist in installations, independent yet in dialogue with each other, creating those harmonies or dissonances. Polyphonic also in terms of my interest in working with parallel visual and conceptual narratives.

Let's briefly talk about inspiration.

It's hard for me to pin down inspiration. Often, it happens backwards, the connections come after the initial concept is born. At first I am usually working with an idea. Then suddenly a text or a poem comes my way, that feels very close to that idea. Over the years, I have developed a kind of a visual vocabulary, a set of idioms and concepts that lead me further and further down the road. The inspiration comes within the trajectory of the work itself.

Some of your performances have lasted for long stretches of time, such as Ennoia (2002) in which you were immersed for six hours, curled up like an embryo in a water-filled octagonal basin, reminiscent of a medieval baptismal font. What does the duration of time feel like during these multi-hour performances, and what is your relationship with the outside world?

In Ennoia I treated my body as a vehicle of expression. I was tired and cold, but what I counted for was the video image, which was first recorded life by a camera that I suspended above the basin. This is important to me, to always be in charge of the video and photography, not only in the editing process which I do myself, but even and especially during a performative act. I often work with sensors and attachments so that I can shoot photography and video via remote systems. The image in Ennoia shows delicate changes, for instance the movement of my arm, the shortness of breath. The work is not about myself though. It's about any being. My sense of the self and of my body was no longer subjected to the everyday needs or goals such as basic comfort. The sonic experience came as a surprise--my hearing got extremely sharp, to the point that I felt hurt by any noise or sound arriving from the outside world. Later, I was told by a Zen master that some forms of meditation create a similar physical condition.

Some recurring motifs in your works are octagonal spaces, curling up into an embryo-like position, closed eyes, immersions and the outlining of one's body. Can you talk about a few of these motifs in relation to a few specific installations?

Our presence in the world is both unique and anonymous. In my work, the Self (any-body) is humble and quiet, perhaps even muted. It exists lying down, curled up or moving slowly and only within its own reach, as if attached to earth by invisible forces. This can have many open-ended connotations. I am interested in both poetic and political expression. Perhaps it is an expression of resistance towards the military, the powerful, the marching, and the loud...

In Drawing Lethe, a large-scale public project at the World Financial Center Winter Garden in NYC, passersby were invited to join me in complete silence inside a space of a landscape-like canvas covering the entire floor of the building. We would lie down and draw with charcoal, leaving abstract marks around our silhouettes. This simple gesture resulted in a gradually changing and darkening drawing where lines and marks felt like a living organism or like waters of a river (Lethe is the mythological river of Oblivion). I installed sound composition in the pits around the palm trees. When people entered the installation they could hear soft layers of noises and voices that I recorded on the site of WFC, several months prior to the installation. It was September 2006, and the project took place just a few steps away from Ground Zero.

A similar installation happened the same year inside a 12th century castle in Portugal, bordering with Spain. While working on Anamnesis (Swiatllo Dnia), I discovered that I was more interested in the quiet preparations for the act of drawing than the drawing itself. I filmed hours and days of sewing the sheets of white canvas, sometimes blowing in the wind like waves of the ocean, as we worked with a group of local women. I recorded their voices, asking them to list all things they ever did with the earth (most were farmers at some point in their life), and I also asked them to say specific words like "silence" or "light of the day," all in Portuguese. Hence, for audiences that don't speak the language, in the video the melodic lines of the voices feel like abstract sounds. This piece will be on view on September 13, part of Perform Williamsburg 2009 organized by Urban Art Projects.

Phlegethon-Milczenie and Keimai 3 on the other hand, are examples of installations that are more enclosed and solitary, and they both are involved more explicitly with historical events. In both projects, I have gradually collected different groups of original documents, mostly from 1930s Germany, which I then composed together as a kind of sculptural collage. I self-shot on video and self-photographed the encounter between my body and the documents. I drew with my eyes closed around my body, leaving marks on the surfaces of the Archive. There are other motifs and forms that come back in my work. In my large-scale drawings there are semi-abstract figures, who appear to be awaiting, as if suspended in space and time. An architectural form of a medieval baptismal font, which you mentioned previously, recurs in a series of installations, White Chalice (Ennoia). The octagonal sculpture is filled with water, and projected into the water is a video image showing a curled-up figure moving along the walls of the vessel, as if permanently trapped inside, a virtual memory of my own filmed immersion.

You have said that your "work is about observing from the inside towards the outside, while being inside of an artistic object, surrendered to it." In your artistic career to date, what would you say has been the most challenging experience for you? And which has been the most rewarding?

Being an artist is a little like being a poet or a shaman. The economic and social uncertainty comes with this basic paradox: as an artist, one is needed and admired while at the same time, superfluous and unwanted. This creates a context for the eternal struggle for survival. It's not only about facing continuous economic uncertainty, regardless of the advancement of one's career. There is also a deeper kind of responsibility, which is not towards yourself but towards your work. So you need to tend to the ideas that you give birth to, like a self-employed gardener. You remain alone in that act. The greatest rewards come from exactly the same source as the greatest pains...

One of your more recent works, Keimai 3 (2008), was inspired by the life of Helene Mayer, a German-Jewish fencer who was invited by Hitler to take part in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. In this performative video and photographic installation, you create a parallel between drawing and fencing. Tell us a little about this project and what themes you reflect upon.

Helen Mayer was a young German woman and a successful Olympic fencer who, while still in high school, loved to write long papers about Goethe's and Schiller's poetry. After 1933, it was discovered that her father was Jewish. In 1935 the Nuremberg law took her citizenship away. She became a citizen of no country. This paradoxical case of "double body"--German and Jewish--speaks among others of the fragile state of our democracy which, according to Giorgio Agamben, poses still exactly the same threats as it did during the upheaval of the Nazi regime. Quite recently, in an enlightened country in Europe, certain people have suddenly and legally become non-humans. Through this mirror of history, I want to look into current times. As you know, for instance in France today, you can be stopped at the Paris airport for no reason at all, and you will be kept captive for up to 4 days, with no legal rights. Perhaps you have brown eyes or you smiled in a wrong way... We tend to be very secure in our sense of freedom and we assume these things will never happen to us. So did frau Helene... Going back to Keimai 3, (in Greek "I lie down") drawing here is a gesture towards history. The ancient sport of fencing is also one of the oldest forms of fight. Cutting the body with a saber corresponds with cutting and wounding the fragile surface of paper with a chunk of charcoal. The figure in Keimai 3 holds a saber and at times a Chinese sword. Her body is anonymous, gesturing with the ancient sword while as if merging with the documents, her skin is as fragile as the surface of the papers.... The third element in the video installation is a musical composition, collaged from about 20 tracks. I recorded a vocalist whom I asked to sing fragments of medieval anonymous compositions. I then merged and altered these tracks to create a sense of a chorus-like waving of voices.

You've worked with children quite a bit in several of your video performances, like Drawing Meadow (2005) and Drawing the City (Day One, Day Two) (2004), where groups of children have joined you in drawing and painting onto large-scale canvas. What words of advice would you give to any of them who aspire to become artists?

Children are like water or like fire. Uncontainable, unpredictable, fluid, free, perhaps violently so... They bring with them contingency, which I am very interested in, while I work with otherwise carefully designed installations. I set up a controlled environment--even a charcoal drawing involves such a controlled structure, where the rectangular shape of the paper becomes inhabited by marks and by accidental traces. In the installations, it is the canvas covering the ground or the sculptural object and the designed duration. But then the work invites contingency through the material used and the interactivity itself, like with children inhabiting my drawing. Ephemerality resulting from contingency allows for a dialogue between the composition of the work and the outside forces.

I think for an aspiring artist of any age, the main thing is to listen to one's intuition, even as a child, and to find avenues that feel extremely close and moving. It may be books, music, etc. When something, like a painting or a poem moves you deeply, that usually is a sign or a hint for a young mind, it tells you where to go... Being an artist is not about external circumstances as much as it is about how much you can grow inside. So, my advice would be to build your own ideas, collect feelings and hopes, narrow down your passions, and then, build your portfolio...

I see that you became an Artist in Residence at the Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle (CSW) in Warsaw and that you received a 2009 Fellowship in Interdisciplinary Work from New York Foundation for the Arts. That's wonderful. Can you tell us about any new projects you are currently working on?

I am delighted to have been this year a recipient of the two awards you mentioned. The artist residency at CSW will have a continuation in a solo exhibition scheduled for spring 2010. For this exhibition, I am developing a series of new works, including an object-based installation, a group of video projections, photographs and drawings as well as a sound piece, all titled Sustenazo (in Greek "lamenting together"). The fragmented and poetically altered historical narrative inspires this series of works, as based on actual events. At the moment my initial documentary impulse is gradually morphing into a new poetic composition...

One final question... from The Proust Questionnaire: Who are your favorite heroines in world history?

So hard to choose... Hildegard von Bingen comes to mind, the 11th-century composer who was also an amazing writer and mystic. Most recently, like many people around the world, I often think of Neda Agah-Soltan.