Zine Of The ‘Week’ #5 – LAURA

-How long have you been publishing and how did you start?

We have been publishing Laura since April 1st, 2010. We are obsessed with mass and personal media, fandom and magazines as objects and we were living in Red Hook (in Brooklyn) and there was a lot going on and we were compelled to begin publishing a zine that features all of the people that we love.

-How do you fund it and how do you distribute it?

We fund it through advertising and distribute it to for free. We leave copies at our favorite places, mainly in New York, LA, Vancouver and Montreal (Jared is Canadian).

-Is it a labour of love? What else are you working on?

We don’t know if it is a labor of love or not.
Johanna is a visual artist, so she is working on a new body of work as well as preparing her work for a solo exhibition in Finland. Jared is a freelance writer. We also play in a band together.

-Who are your collaborators?

Our collaborators are ourselves. Jared Leon & Johanna Heldebro. We have done everything together since we were 17 and we are now 27.



An excerpt from the pages of LAURA
Issue 1, 2010,
SARAH CHARLESWORTH
Sarah Charlesworth has been working as an artist in New York for over 30 years.
Her work has dealt extensively with ideas relating to the language of photography.



Johanna: I saw in Words Without Pictures you talked about spending 9 years figuring out what
art should be.

Sarah: That’s a hard question!

Johanna: I was just curious about that process.

Sarah: As an artist, growing up, I was interested in art-in all kinds of art, paintings, sculpture, photography and film. And the idea of art that I grew up with, that I think very much is a Western modernist idea, is the idea of an avant-garde tradition where each generation of artist explores a new frontier of ideas.

I was growing up and was studying art, first in high school and then in college, and getting more interested in ideas about art. It was very much a kind of modernist mentality where each generation of artist would re-imagine what art could be. So in the 50s there was Abstract Expressionism and the whole idea of the abstract pouring out of the self into painting and that that could be meaningful without any kind of figuration or any reference to known canons of art. And then in the 60s both Minimalism and Pop were very important and kind of recreated other ideas about what art could be. So the generation that directly affected me, which was also heir to both Minimalism and Pop, was Conceptual Art, and I had had Doug Huebler as a teacher, who was one of the first East Coast Conceptual artists, and then Joseph Kosuth was a mentor and a partner for many years. And so I had been a painter when I was in high school and in college as well and had studied art history and I had started doing photography as well when I was in college. When I came to New York for my last two years of college, there was a very, very vibrant art scene going on. Rauschenberg was around and Warhol was around and Carl Andre and Don Judd and you could go to their shows. And artists met frequently at night and talked in the bars about each of the shows, so for me the challenge as a young artist was to really figure out what was important for my generation to do. And so when I talk to the students, as I think I mentioned to you, I talk to the students about the fact that they really should look for a way in which their artwork is not only just an expression of their selves but can really make a contribution to the culture at large, to ideas of what we understand about art or about our world. And so the challenge for me was to try to really figure out what I thought was important to say to my culture at that time. What did I feel like? What art was worth making? And it wasn’t the way I conceived of art to go back and say, “Well I’m really a painter at heart so I’ll just go back and make some landscape paintings or some Expressionist paintings.” That was something that was known and to me art was a wonderful tool and social context for really exploring that which is unknown and ununderstood. Art, unlike science, didn’t have a prescribed method; there was no methodology. But I think one of the jobs of young artists is really to see what needs to be said, what needs to be understood in their culture and address that through their work.



So I spent a lot of time reading art theory and working with art groups like Art and Language. It’s funny, those words Modernism and Postmodernism, they sort of mean something and they sort of don’t. I think there’s a difference between a kind of social convention, cultural convention of art during the Modernist period and in the Postmodernist period. And even though I kind of hate those words and I think they’re only of limited use, I think there is a difference. I think somewhere, I would say it’s around the time that my generation emerged, as a culture we became much more aware of the limitations of Modernism, that it was very much a white, Western European and America tradition and primarily male dominated. And both feminism and identity politics sort of opened that whole thing up so we became much more aware of the importance of other kinds of art and other kinds of cultures and other kinds of social experiences. And I think that, instead of this very insular linear tradition of Modernism, there came to be an awareness and appreciation of a much broader sense of culture. But with that broader sense of culture there was also, in a sense, less focus to a discourse around what art was or could be. And so there were so many different kinds of work being done from, let’s say, the 1980s on, that anything anywhere was as valid as anything anywhere else as art. So you lost some of the sense of the incredible challenge that Carl Andre making this sculpture out of a metal tile could pose because the galleries were where you went to see art and if an artist made flat tiles on the floor and said it was sculpture then you had to really think about that. Now anybody can do anything, but why do we care? And so I think one of the sort of more negative aspects, I think there are positive and negative aspects of this more horizontal, more democratic culture that I’m calling Postmodernist, is that, and I think it’s only valid to a certain extent, I can use it in order to make this point and then we can throw out the idea of it, one of the more negative aspects is that there has become, with the infinite possibilities of art making, there’s also been more of a, narcissistic, individualized attention to “me and my mode,” “me and my process,” “me and my whatever I made,” and perhaps less attention to really addressing a common context, a common architecture of ideas that I think has been truer in earlier periods.

And so I think it’s very important for younger artists, on one hand, that work is certainly energized and motivated to a large extent by personal concerns or experiences. But in another sense, I think, in order to be really outstanding, it has to come from and address a place that’s a broader understanding of culture. Someone has to be aware of art history or photo history and aware of the important ideas
of our time when they make a piece so it has an anchor in personal experience as well as in public culture.


Read the rest of Johanna’s interview with Sarah Charlesworth and more interviews from the pages of LAURA here.

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