BOMBlog’s new Art Editor, Legacy Russell, shares her thoughts on “public art,” culture’s trans era, and connecting the dots across the globe.

 

Courtesy of Swagger New York and Loeffler Randall.

 

The BOMB crew would like to introduce our latest addition: new BOMBlog art editor Legacy Russell. Legacy, an artist and curator herself, is a perfect fit for BOMB—where the artists are writers, the writers are artists, and the editors are both. American Idolatry, a show curated by Legacy, opens this Friday, October 28 at the Invisible Dog Art Center in Brooklyn. BOMBlog’s Tauni Malmgren spoke to Legacy about growing up in New York and the development of her artistic practice. Welcome Legacy, it’s great to have you aboard!

Tauni Malmgren Welcome aboard, Legacy! First things first, how did BOMB come into your life?

Legacy Russell BOMB and I first encountered one another at Saint Mark’s Bookshop, in the East Village. BOMB set up for me a new kind of discourse, and established for me new role models outside of the traditional ones. I got a chance to realign my understanding of the world just by spending time sitting on the floor and pouring over the articles while my parents shopped. I was probably around ten. From the get-go I knew whatever I did, I wanted to write as a part of it. To entertain myself, I wrote, I read a lot. I wasn’t allowed to watch television—we didn’t even have one in our apartment. I was kind of in a black hole for most of growing up which is why books were such an asset to me. I grew up in a studio apartment with my mother and father smack-dab in the middle of the East Village. They still live there. Where writing and art intersected was in places like P.S. 122, Theater for the New City, Saint Mark’s Bookshop, the Public Theater, and later, Joe’s Pub. Where performance came into play was seeing my first drag show as a kid with my sister and then later my mother taking me to see Karen Finley for the first time. When I saw Karen Finley I was like Shit, what the fuck am I supposed to do now? I nearly went home and poured burning chocolate on myself.

TM Your premier piece for BOMB was about a public installation piece to be built in Woodland Cemetery, Memorial to a Marriage. Will readers see more public art related content? What other kinds of ideas are you developing that you hope to bring to BOMB?

LR Cronin’s piece struck home for me because it mixed the conversation about civil rights, public sculpture, and the body politic together. When talking about the role of race and/or sex and gender within history, the bed always seems to be the spot where the conversation begins or ends. For Cronin to do bed-as-tombstone and then take it to Woodlawn is incredibly astute. It’s a piece that quite literally will go down in history.

As for “public art” . . . it’s incredibly loaded as a term with a provenance that is ripe and exciting, and arrogant and staid, all at once. Art is inherently public, so sometimes it seems like terminology like “public art” is just intended to ghettoize specific genres of art practice from that which is placed within a white-walled exhibition space. It’s been used and misused in so many ways that it sometimes becomes this bizarre value judgment. What is the opposite of “public art”? Is there such a thing? The buying and selling of art on the contemporary auction block might be the opposite, but even that is inherently performative and public in its excess, in its adolescent posturing and swagger.

Right now we are going through somewhat of a puberty in contemporary art wherein people are trying to play around like the blurring of performance and social engagement and participatory art and public sculpture, all these other terms that basically mean “coming into contact in public space” are somehow not a hearkening back to the happenings and performative actions of the ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s and the “Culture Wars” of the ‘80s. Art right now is pretty insolent in this way. So many contemporary artists are trying to forget the lineage they have sprung from or are unaware of it altogether. They don’t even realize how this gives more power to the critics and curators to contextualize various modes of art practice, and that seems so upside-down to me. These days, I hear artists talk about media art and visual culture as if it didn’t actualize itself until after the rise of Apple appliances and it just shocks me. I’m like, Hi, how are you—let me introduce you to Nam June Paik.

If anything, I want to look at the figurative “Punnett Squares” of contemporary art practice. Nothing stands alone anymore and we’re fooling ourselves if we are pretending that the rock we’re standing on we carved out on our own. My hope is to see a more integrated approach to shaping history. We are in a trans era of culture; I want to embrace that.

TM Embracing a myriad of influences seems to be something both you and BOMB have in common. Is there something you haven’t seen that you want to add to the conversation?

LR The thing about BOMB that is so great as a printed publication is that it is, without a doubt, a work of art in itself. Who says digital content can’t have the same dynamism, the same completeness? For example—what happens when you have a DJ put a conversation between two artists about music? What about when you mix artists from vastly different generations, making use of similar media but in radically different ways? How can we step away from text as the sole focus and figure out new ways to integrate other modes of expression and visuality? I love BOMB’s use of video, audio . . . I’d like to see more of that.

I also think a lot of rich content lies beyond the boundaries of New York City. I hope to get some more reports in about what’s on the rise across the United States, across the continent, across the globe. It’s in this way that we’ll be able to connect the dots, see artists in a more complex light, as informed by their surroundings.

 

Legacy Russell is BOMBlog’s Art Editor. She is an independent curator, artist, and cultural producer.