[Scene Change] Good Job: A Conversation between Terese Svoboda and China Marks

The grotesque Pinocchio-nosed image on the cover of my new hybrid text Theatrix: Play Poems was made by China Marks. We met at a wild 70th birthday party. She was part of a friend's study of geriatric artists — ha! laughs purple-haired China, geriatric? Recent exhibits are accurately titled: “China Marks, Not Quite Human” and “China Marks: Time Traveler”. Although I found this sculpture most appropriate for my title, it is her more recent work, primarily “sewn drawings” and “sewn books,” that has most inspired Theatrix. We share hybrid forms, the seductive line, visual wit, an interest in patterns, appropriation of found objects and images,  narrative drive, idiosyncrasy and flamboyance. Here is an excerpt from Theatrix: Play Poems published by Anhinga in March.

What? is your line

I think I’m panicking
I think I’m panicking
etc.
crying practice

[windowless]

quick, a dream:
one of you accuses the other

What? is your line
the gun is fake but you need a license

Miss Vulgarity comes forward in
a lack-of-bathing-suit competition

a different voice speaking “I”
to an “audience”

and rants: and you and you and you
and it wasn’t like that

brief interview with an innocent bystander
before the lover slash narrator finds his way over

floating along and then the queen says
women were at best queens then

WE

the chorus     too loud
but that is opinion
answers back: even the building is burning

[insert choreography]
where who keeps the extinguisher where backstage

Men and Their Ways

As ornery and subversive as a video by Matthew Barney, Marks' broadsides, books, and text-based drawings both invite and repel interpretation. Some pieces exercise Oulipian restraint, using only text found on the fabric itself, but more often texts appear in bubbles, titles, commentary and dialogue that she sews into the image by a computerized embroidery machine. Her visual iconography is often  found re-imagining 14th to 19th century tapestries in the style of Max Ernst meets Donald Barthelme. Part of the fun is trying to decipher the original. She's rethought a drawing by Peter Paul Rubens of “The Battle of Anghiari” and a lost painting by Leonardo da Vinci, and she doesn't hesitate to acknowledge her sources, providing a link to the original. But it's hardly an imitation or even “in the style of” — the original is the springiest of springboards.

Winging It

“I don’t know if the fellow on the left really wants his wings washed,” writes Marks, “or has something else in mind. But their eyes have met. The one bent over her laundry, who answered his question with another question, is waiting for his answer. Something deliciously fraught is going on. Whatever it is, we have a ringside seat.”

To me "deliciously fraught" suggests play. And there's theater in "ringside seat” that depicts situations of tension and conflict, like a circus, play, film or novel. Like me, she is in the audience as well as on the stage, often, as China says, “surprised, sometimes thrilled at what I see, or so bored and restless or unhappy that I make drastic changes, until my own jaw drops….”

Terese Svoboda & China Marks

T: Theatrix: Play Poems is not so easy to appreciate read aloud as my other work, although there's still sonic considerations. More of the play in these poems occurs visually, in the spacing and typography. I make visual decisions that are not completely foreign to yours. My choosing where to place a piece of text is similar to your positioning text where it sometimes "rhymes" with a brush stroke of sewing.

C: Of course there’s drama in my work, because I tell stories. I am a compulsive story-teller, ask anybody who knows me because I answer questions in the same way. Though I suppose there are other ways to do it, I not only draw, but also must draw attention to my art. Story-telling is a useful strategy for women, to get children to go to sleep or eat their vegetables and to keep men from killing us and to get people to spend some time looking at at my latest drawing, maybe even buy it. Women who lived to tell the tale were probably the best story-tellers.  It must be built-in to at least some of us by now. Look at you.

T: Are we engaged in Q & A?

C: We are engaged, darling, kiss me.

T: I'm puckered.

C: How/why did you come up with Theatrix? I mean, there’s theatrics, but capitalizing it and changing  cs into an x changes everything.

T: Best to cap a title anyway, and it's all about play: “trix” as “tricks:” and even the multi-colored breakfast food. It's also a portmanteau of “theater” and “-trix" — the suffix that turns masculine agent nouns ending into feminine. You get to re-hear the last syllable of “theater” and gender-switch it, a performance all on its own.

C: Didn’t notice the gender switch, very nice! And why do you think you were able to “cut loose” with Theatrix?

T: You, dear. All the sotto voce's, those mutterings, lie at the core of what's important. In that, I believe, we are joined. I no more put down two words on paper and I see sparks between them and the page and the space and sometimes each letter, yet I endeavor to thread a story through, with bits that remind the reader of his own story. Your storytelling is never straight-forward narrative either.

Monkey Boy and the Magic Beans

C: Never straight-forward. A curator said she’d recently noticed (after 7 years) that the man sitting in the flower in “Monkey Boy and the Magic Beans” had a black eye and wondered why. I said I didn’t know why. The characters in my drawings live their own lives. As I keep saying, I am only part of the process, a process that wakes me up in the middle of the night with suggestions, concepts, apercus, most recently to reset the direction of something I’d already been working on weeks, but it was right to do so. The drawing is much better already.

Then also, seduction, to pull the viewer close, using the dynamics of the plot, if there is one, decorative elements, workings of the stitches and sewn lines, textures, what’s matte and what shines, the very plasticity of my figures. I make these drawings to have access to this material.  I am the first to be engaged and then my drawings pull viewers in. But I make it up as I go along, revising endlessly, simultaneously making it and watching it happen under my hands. I give myself over to the process and it all comes from that, the interminable process..

You mentioned the spacing and typography in Theatrix. Made me think about the charged spaces between elements in my drawing, my decisions about grounds, possible colors and patterns, what typefaces to use for certain texts but not for others. Text can take forever, re-written as the drawing changes. I draw the more-or-less human figure. I believe that there is an intuitive homologous knowing when human beings look at drawings of human figures and a need to see such things.

T: The cover image on my book, although singular, evokes a multitude of animalistic and human identifications, crippled, deceitful, yet innocent. Is that complexity evident early on in your work? Monochrome you are not.

C: I am after as complex a truth as possible. Your play begins before it begins and begins several times more in Theatrix. And it is as if there is a giant hand (the artist’s mind?) manipulating the characters and speaking for them. Simultaneously cozy and strange. Reminds me of when I was a child and we used the back of a sofa as a stage, with stuffed animals as the actors…. moving them and speaking for them as we liked….

T: That's exactly it. I have used my own tiny theater experiences, the ghost-texts of Shakespeare, Beckett, and downtown experimental theater and “sewn over it,” with some animation (see “Cast”) of characters that are not usually animate because why — animists are pre-animatronic.

C: Theatrix, the morphing, the high-jinks, the this-into-that, compression and expansion of time, etc.

T: All those things you do as well.

C: The only thing is, it goes both ways: my current drawing is derived, not literally of course, but formally, from Theatrix, which is crammed with tricky bits. The little drawing I began to work on a while ago, has been punching well above its weight, requiring many revisions, waking me up in the middle of the night to work on the text and title, insisting I get up at 4 this morning to finish the sewing, maybe. Have to look at it again, but I think so… Still must write the text file, sew it out and sew it on, clean up the edges, make and sew on the hangers. Another day or two… But I need to know.           

My title is a cue for applause, but of course this isn’t a theatre.

Will this do? “Applause” Or does it need parentheses ? Or should I put it in parentheses but without italics? Please advise.

T: Brackets.

[Applause]