As feminist scholars, child psychologists and literature professors have demonstrated, the trials and adventures of fluffy and fuzzy creatures who populate children's stories are serious stuff. In this tradition, Los Angeles-based artist and musician Marnie Weber's mythological characters are powerfully empathetic because they are humanly flawed, reconnecting viewers with the awestruck personal identification they felt as children with the cursed and blessed characters in fairytales. Weber captures the polar emotions of such fantasies: enchantment and entrapment. Her works are smart and witty, if also deeply indebted to familiar criticisms of traditional "happily ever after" gender scenarios offered by feminist writers such as Anne Sexton and Anne Rice.
Weber attended the University of Southern California in 1977-79 before receiving her B.A from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1981. Her first solo show in London was held at the Emily Tsingou gallery in 2004 and sampled ten years of her artistic practice. The first collage series on view featured Weber's alter ego "Happy," a lost little girl in a bunny-suit wandering a forest populated by creatures who were hybrids of animals and feral women clipped from porno magazines. She had previously been introduced in New York City through two solo exhibitions in the late 1990s, with the then-named Jessica Fredericks gallery. There she showed surreal videos and collages combining clippings from pornographic magazines with fairy-tale creatures. In all of their forms and incarnations, Weber's creatures possessed a perverse, exaggerated beauty combining compelling vulnerability with grotesqueness.
For her third outing at New York City's Fredericks Freiser Gallery in 2001, Weber's approach became more sophisticated and complex in its formulations. The work involved a video installation, a large-scale photographic collage and a group of costumed mannequins and revolved around the story of a princess trapped in limbo. The video (housed inside an iridescent plastic castle) showed the princess as she watched a pack of cursed creatures that inhabited a grotto beneath her castle. The shiny, pastel, yet ominously threatening creatures' costumes seen in the video were also displayed on mannequins in the gallery. Constructed from basic materials in cheerful colors, the characters included a homely, pregnant bunny with her breasts adorned with butterflies, her foot wedged in a concrete block, and her mouth open in complaint. Also on view was a warthog posed like a self-righteous magistrate and a somber possum, tied to a pole, with his head lowered like a repentant criminal. These inanimate sculptures seemed like creatures frozen in the midst of recounting their stories. They were phantasmagorical characters, but their expressions and allegorical circumstances were recognizable and made them sympathetic, despite their superficial strangeness.
Similarly, the ghost girl protagonists who occupy 'The Spirit Girls' series of photo-collages, videos, band performances and a rock-opera, a sampling of which will be on view with the Emily Tsingou gallery from 19 April-19 May, evoke empathy as much as interest in their oddness. The band called "The Spirit Girls: Songs that Never Die," emerged from a 2004 allegorical rock opera Weber created to tell the story of a group of dead girl musicians searching for an audience. The girls, in Kabuki make-up and dainty nightgowns, play dreamy, dark and hauntingly surreal music with Weber on the keyboards, Dani Tull playing guitar, Tamara Sussman on bass, Debbie Spinelli playing drums and Tanya Hayden on cello. Their mournful music makes listeners yearn to liberate them, despite the trouble the girls would plainly face in marketing their intellectual, postmortem music in today's flashy, trashy pop-culture.
Marnie Weber has an upcoming exhibition at Fredericks Freiser gallery and one with LA's influential Patrick Painter gallery later this year.
ANA FINEL HONIGMAN: Do you consider your art feminist art?
MARNIE WEBER: I come from a different approach when I think about my own art. I work in fictional narrative and my characters tend to be female as it is easier for me to live vicariously through them than it is for me to live through the male characters. It's more of an acting approach. Sometimes there is the lead character, as in the new series, "The Spirit Girls". Their story goes like this. They were a group of girls who formed a band in the 70's but they all died tragically and then came back as spirits to play their music but it's futile because no one can see them or hear them except animals. I relate to the lead singer as she sets out on her own in an attempt to leave the band but gets caught up with a group of hobo clowns who use her as a vehicle to channel spirits in a small town fair circus side show. I have just recently introduced these male characters, those of the hobo clown, ghost clown and rodeo clown. I am having fun with clown sub genre alter egos. I really operate in my own world and it turns out quite often the work is perceived as feminist because of the strong dominance of female characters.
AFH: The clown subgenre is fascinating. Why do you think clowns simultaneously evoke feelings of fun and fright?
MW: As a child I had a very strong emotional response to the comedian Red Skelton who dressed as a hobo clown on a television show and looked sad and pathetic. He would empty out his pockets and have no money and rub his belly as if he were hungry. My mother said it made me cry and I'd say "poor him, poor him" but I wouldn't let her turn it off. So there was a great deal of empathy on my part. I think people really connect to conflicting emotions, happy and sad, fun and fear; it seems the best operas have that quality. "Pagliacci" was a big inspiration for me and with the clowns I've been working on. I really try to hit that middle ground of conflicting emotions in my work. I love it when people say they don't know if they should laugh or cry when they see my films. I did a lot of research into the hobo clowns and it was Emmet Kelly who introduced the first hobo clown during the depression as a way of lightening up a tragic situation. American towns were filled with wandering "hobos" as they called them back then. They were broke, homeless, hungry out of workmen. My father told me that when he was a boy his mother would give them food and every morning there was a line up out his back door. So the hobo clown has a personal connection to me. The ghost clowns just seemed like another way of representing sadness in a clown. I'm just getting into rodeo clowns but they are a strange group because their job is to entertain the audience while there is this really angry bull thrashing around chasing them. The bull is in a lot of pain from having his testicles tied up. Those clowns, you got to love 'em.
AFH: Don't you feel that our fear of clowns comes from our guilt at feeling schadenfreude watching them suffer? It's not that different from rock stars, is it? When you think of the Mick Jagger singing "If I could stick a knife in my heart/Suicide right on the stage/ Would it be enough for your teenage lust? Would it help ease your pain?"
MW: Yes, that is true. Which is probably why in Pagliacci the clown father tells his daughter everyone wants to make love to the daughter of a clown. On the flip side this emotional drive allows us to feel sympathetic joy.
AFH: And what are your thoughts on other artists' uses of clown imagery? I know Bruce Nauman's 'Clown Torture' terrified me as a kid. Even more than seeing Stephen King's "IT."
MW: Well I saw "Clown Torture" as an adult and so it wasn't so scary but I thought it was really funny and painful.
AFH: Do you consider pain to be part of the beauty of your work? There is certainly a poignancy and pain to the Spirit Girl's story and their, literally, haunting music.
MW: I do express a lot of pain in the work because I like visual art, which has a great deal of emotion in it, but I like to balance that pain with humor. I think emotion is a surprisingly difficult issue for artists to address without appearing corny or sentimental. That is why the balance of pain and humor is so important. It makes them easier to access. I think a lot of my interest in this has come from being in bands for years and people in music tend to express a great deal of emotion on stage and in their lyrics. It only seemed natural to carry that into my art.
AFH: Are you comfortable with been seen as a feminist artist, even if that wasn't your intention?
MW: I am being comfortable with being seen as a feminist artist if the definition stems from the original source as being treated equally as if I were a man. The art world has been known to use it as a marginalizing label, however. Labels make people more feel more comfortable and if one needs that to approach the work, well there's nothing I can do about it; at least they are experiencing the work.
AFH: Your work fits in with the aesthetic of the Riot Grrl movement from the nineties. Did you feel an affinity for that movement's aesthetics or politics?
MW: I feel a great affinity for the movement and like it when that generation buys my records and is inspired by my music. I am older of course but would have loved to have had something of that nature to be part of when I was a teen. The whole "Spirit Girls" narrative was born out of my love of going to see bands in the 70's but seeing no women on stage. It must have been very empowering for girls of that movement's age and hopefully it lives on in the number of women doing music now.
AFH: But the Spirit Girls continue to be displaced. Why is that?
MW: Yes "The Spirit Girls" do seem displaced. That is a combination of the fact that they are spirits living in a mortal world and that they died as teenagers and they still have that teenage sense of not fitting in. They wear clothes from another decade, which is combined with white gloves, and hats, when they are in their formal attire, which represents some sort of repression carried over from their mothers' era. Much of their motivation is an attempt to be free.
AFH: Do you think music has regressed, in terms of gender equality, since the Riot Grrl era?
MW: It did seem there were more women in music during the "Riot Grrl" period, but maybe I don't know what's going on. It doesn't make sense because now that people have proven with so much success on the Internet that they don't need big record companies, there would be no reason for any inequality in music. But when you flip through the papers, male bands do dominate. I don't quite understand.
AFH: How separate do you think an artist's identity should be from critical responses to her work?
MW: I don't think an artist's identity is as interesting as their work and should be more of a side note. Most artists I know distill the best and worst parts of who they are and channel it into the work so you get
a crystallized version of their identity.
AFH: Do you subscribe to the notion that artists need to be "tormented" to produce interesting work?
MW: I don't really think one needs to be tormented to create interesting work. I think having lived through some adversity in life helps find one's own voice, however. Sometimes kids straight out of art school with not much life experience have a harder time with that. It can take years of toil or it can take some difficult life experiences to draw upon to make interesting work which has some kind of depth, beyond what is purely visually appealing. On the other hand I know inherently good artists who grapple with so much OCD it's difficult to produce anything or meet deadlines. A happy balance of torment is best.
ANA FINEL HONIGMAN is a critic, PhD candidate in art history at Oxford University and Senior London Correspondent for the Saatchi Gallery's online magazine.
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