Beth Caird uses text, video, sound and field recordings, found ephemera, paper, digital files, gestures, and read words as performance. Beth's practice is founded on creating images from differing viewpoints of an imagined brain with a differing neural pathway (such as creating videos shot from the perspective of a mosquito or alternate sense of self).
Current questions that ground Beth's practice are; what can our brains do, who are we really, how would we like to be with one another, and what should we do now? Beth graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Art (Photography) Honours from the Victorian College of the Arts in 2014. She has exhibited in multiple solo and group exhibitions,including: Rules for Leaving a Small Town, West Space (2014); The Bureau of Writing at the 20th Biennale of Sydney (2016); and recently curated a group exhibition, There Is A Pain - So Utter at Gertrude Glasshouse. As an artist, writer and editor, her work has appeared in various publications including: sub-editor with Aodhan Madden for un Magazine 9.1 and 9.2 with Editor Pip Wallis (2015); Beth presented work on Chris Kraus' book Where Art Belongs at the Royal College of Art conference Aliens and Anorexia in 2013. Beth is a current Gertrude Contemporary Studio Artist (2017-2019) and is involved in a forthcoming exhibition curated by Faith Wilson and Esme Hoogeven at the artist-run initiative Blinkers, in Winnipeg in the province of Manitoba, Canada, later this year.
Gertrude Gallery Coordinator, Siobhan Sloper, spoke to Beth about her practice and recent projects.
Beth Caird: To me Lozano's infamous Dropout Piece speaks to me deeply as it is founded in a practice of life and life as practice. It represents that even when we are in moments of quiet, stillness, grief, becoming or daily routine — art is imbued into us as we are alive. Lozano never intended her Dropout Piece to ever be public knowledge. Only after her death this artwork discovered in her private notebooks. It made me examine what it means to constitute an artistic life.
Lozano created Dropout Piece in a time of great depression and personal anguish, which I feel enormous compassion for. I feel an affinity with artists who cannot not make — who even in the privacy of notebooks and the alienation of depression, can still be generative and generous to themselves in their existence. I am careful not to romanticise Lezano’s personal pain. Rather, I choose to look at what she continued to do - her performance - as an activated choice which was critical in the development of performance art in the 1970s. To me, Lozano’s work is deeply grounded in a hopefulness of the shared commonality of a future tomorrow, a tomorrow that with or without a studio, an exhibition, a show or a pageant —art can and always will be with us.
BC: I found the reception of the work affirming and positive. I feel lucky that I got to know, work and trust Blue Oyster director Grace Ryder, and that she asked writer Iona Winter to respond to the exhibition with a poem, MŌTEATEA. I think the arts ecology there is different in that it has a much smaller population and land size, so the people creating, curating and looking at art are a smaller, more focused audience. I think it’s impossible not to note how Creative NZ at this time fund small organisations and provide funding for individual artists projects in a way we do not currently experience in Australia (austerity makes individuals desperate). I do not feel that same, or similar desperation in New Zealand. I look up to and admire curators I have been able to work with, particularly Melanie Oliver, Grace Ryder, Sophie Davis and Chloe Geoghegan, and the work of Talia Smith and Rebecca Boswell. In 2015, Melanie, who was then at The Physics Room before moving to be Senior Curator at The Dowse Museum in Wellington, ran a workshop at Cass Station, near Arthur’s Pass in New Zealand. This workshop looked at expanded forms of art writing and, to me, represents the laterally minded expansive field of curatorship occurring in pockets of New Zealand. These artists and curators are incredible in their commitment to the multiplicities of form that people, artists, writing, art, performance and design can intersect and inhabit. That workshop really informed and shaped my life and I got to meet other artists like Anna Rankin and Evangeline Riddiford Graham, who are some of the brightest, kindest people I have ever met. It was inspiring to be amongst so many people committed to a widening of how and what we experience art and writing as, and I feel lucky to have formed these friendships since 2015.
BC: When I was studying art at VCA, I had a crit with one of my teachers who sharply told me to stop making artworks that could be pieces of writing. This conversation helped define for me a delineation between what needed to exist as an artwork, and what needed to exist as a piece of writing. Then one of my parents died, and nothing needed to exist. These have all been good conversations with myself in deciding what artworks need to exist as. Since then, I have these conversations with every artwork I make. I question if this could be a piece of writing, and if so, I make it. That being said, I don’t believe in those boundaries needing to exist in the first place. In my process, I always start with words and writing. I will 'write out' a video or an image, similarly to a film script before I begin anything. I actually think of myself as a painter. The images I make are situated in a writing practice to begin with, and always depart from there to a finished painting - in that it is an amalgamation of process, materiality and subject that is as open as paintings is to its future use of possible colours. My artworks exist because they cannot be pieces of writing, and that is an enjoyable puzzle to sift through.
BC: At the moment I am reading about two main areas that will be the foundation for new work created in late 2018. I have been reading and studying Catherine Malabou’s What Should We Do With Our Brain? as well as her writing on The Fold. These pieces of reading came after reading Sarah Ahmed’s writing on the Contingency of Pain. Malabou’s writing on brain neuroplasticity has helped inform my practice of creating images from differing viewpoints of an imagined brain with a differing neural pathway to my own.
I am reading as much as I can about rock climbers in the USA and the correlation between the amygdala (at the base of our brain near the hippocampus, the home of our fight or flight response) in their brains and why, in the brains of the world’s best rock climbers, their fight or flight responses do not fire - if at all, barely at the rate of an average humansfight or flight response. Are Alex Honnold (who free solo rock climbed El Capitan in Yosemite National Park), Tommy Caldwell and Beth Rodden incredible at rock climbing because their amygdala doesn’t fire and subsequently they do not experience panic like we do? Or does their amygdala not fire and a panic response not occur because they have trained, for thousands of hours, since childhood, to re-train their neural pathways to react differently under stress?
These questions about neural pathways, with Malabou’s writing, are grounded in questions at the heart of my practice; What can our brains do? Who are we really? How would we like to be with one another? And what should we do now?
I am also reading a lot about Orcha Whale communities and activities — as a way to process and let go of somatic bodily trauma as they do together.
SS. What are some artworks that make you think - 'I wish I had thought of that'?
BC: 'I wish I had thought of that', that happens constantly, and is a really thoughtful experience, I think all the time about the performance artwork by activists, Crying For Ana Mendieta. I don't wish I could steal credit, I just wish I could have experienced it, seen it, been part of it. There are a few artworks where I feel so strongly that I think, 'I wish I made that', but two artworks do stick out in my mind. I think so often of Mierle Kaderman Ukeles' Maintenance Series, specifically her work, Washing, Tracks, Maintenance (1973) where she would go to art museums and scrub the museum steps with soapy water using a bucket and mop. It was a really powerful work. Yesterday, I read the line of this Helen Gardner essay where she begins by saying she has the rage of 'the person who does all the housework'. I feel like that line, and Ukeles urgent scrubbing of museum steps back in 1973has an intergenerational bent-linear connection.
Also, Ronni Horn made this copper sculpture that was commissioned by Donald Judd (Judd commissioned 12 artists for his project down in Marfa while he was alive, only 1 of the 12 artists was a woman) called Things Which Happen Again, it's at the Chinati Foundation, near the Judd Foundation, in Marfa, Texas. It was incredibly moving, I lovedits form, and it has always stayed with me. I would like to have made it, and also have it gently rolled over me. I would like to go and visit it again.
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Beth exhibited a video work An Awful Leisure at a film screening as part of artist Spencer Lai's exhibition A smile forms into a grimace mid-slumber as the earth spins— it’s funny, such is the sound of laughter — it is like god’s hands on the shoulders of a troubled world at Bus Projects, 31 October - 24 November. The film screening took place on the evening of the Thursday, 22 November.
