Tama Hochbaum in Conversation with George Lawson

GL:  Recently you've been repurposing some of your imagery in projects that seem to be moving away from wall-mounted presentations into 3-dimensional space, for example an installation of the Silver Screen images at a Cineplex using vinyl over window glass, and some assemblage works presented as banners meant to hang from the ceiling independently from the wall. Also you’ve been revisiting and updating your Alice in Wonderland material that I think you have destined for a book. What do you feel like saying about this impulse to come off the wall?

TH: I have been moving away from the wall, in small increments, starting years ago. When GLG was in Los Angeles, we mounted a show entitled, It Takes a Train. All that work was mounted and back-framed with a French cleat that presented the images floating about an inch away from the wall. The recent dye-sublimation printed works, Silver Screen and Silver Screen: Dancers also float an inch or more away from the wall. Some years before, I had an exhibition at Cary Town Hall, a large modern space not far from where I live. One element of that show was the presentation of Dark Drive I and II, a series of banner-like pieces I hung from the railings of a second floor atrium space that jutted out a bit beyond the floor below. They hung, in two groups of 4, essentially floating free from the wall.

All this precedes the current work that moves not only away from the wall, but in the case of the Cineplex installations, out of the gallery and into the world. The project was commissioned by Nancy Kitterman to mark the grand opening of Silverspot Cinema. She envisioned my images on the windows of various storefronts throughout University Place. She hired Taj Forer, co-founder of Daylight Books who had published SILVER SCREEN, to produce the exhibition. Six enormous designs were installed, created by me, variations on the images in the book, and designed to fit the particular window spaces available. Some of them are 8 feet tall and 20 feet wide.

The banners you mentioned hanging from the ceiling were a part of a one-night-only event titled, The Ephemerals. There are three 96” scrolls, titled Legacy I, II and III. Hanging them from the ceiling made them feel even more ephemeral than they already were. They skirted the floor, stopping about an inch or two above. They hung freely, and moved in the breezes. These works contain images of my parents, my children, the shorthand my mother was an expert in, my father’s handwriting in his notebooks and stock ledgers, a few Silver Screen stars blended with shorthand strokes and three images from the forthcoming Alice Through The Looking Glass - a harkening back and a tease, of sorts. A trailer. 

GL: Moving away from the wall is one kind of un-tethering, and you've cut another sort of tether by moving away from a sense of your images as encapsulated, complete compositions. You've repurposed them, like a repertory of stock, using works that were previously presented complete in themselves, now as raw material to create new compositions. This reclaiming continues a kind of cascade, since the images were appropriated in the first place from their cinematic sources. When you see your original composition altered and evolved as in the large window vinyls at Silverspot, does it change your relationship to the original set of decisions, the ones you settled upon to produce the first iteration? Do you feel something has been lost? Does the original piece feel less definitive?

TH: Interesting question. What is the original piece, one might ask? Is it, in the case of the Silver Screen shots, the images I sent to you some three years ago, existing on a computer screen only? You chose eleven for me to print onto aluminum for the PhotoLA fair. We made a catalog of those images before they ever appeared on any wall. The portfolio was expanded for a show at Daylight Project Space, the first time all the images were presented on metal. They generated the next portfolio, Silver Screen: Dancers. These were shown at GLG, San Francisco. The series at the Daylight gallery space was expanded to produce a book. Before the book, there was my inclusion in your booth at Miami Projects. I also produced a portfolio box of Silver Screen images printed on metallic paper. SILVER SCREEN was published in the spring of 2015. This new iteration, the 6 installations at the Cineplex, seems to me to be its definitive manifestation. These images started as enormous presences in cavernous movie theaters in the early part of the 20th century. I reduced them, grabbing screen shots of the TV broadcasting these stars, these films. They were presences on my iPhone screen. They were images on aluminum; they were visages on a page. They now are huge sets, public art, enveloping the viewer. They’ve returned, almost, to their original size. 

GL:  Quite a genealogy. So the original piece isn't even yours. At some point you just hopped on, like onto a train. And the train is made up of a director, a cinematographer, a lighting designer, a makeup artist, and of course the stars of the silver screen, themselves, all the names that scroll at the end of a film. Then they passed from celluloid to broadcast to your iPhone to digital output on paper, metal, vinyl, scrim. It really is like a locomotive. From the moment you encountered these images on your TV (and even this was a re-encounter since you'd watched most of these films in the past), from right when you started shooting them, you were applying aesthetic decisions particular to the mode of presentation at hand, a kind of repurposing from the beginning. And in retrospect they function like memories, each memory built on the last.

TH:  I love the dark and moody essence of the noir films, the sleek and sultry stars. Lauren Bacall at the top of the list for me, a nice Jewish girl from New York. Bette Davis was a revelation to me in Jezebel, a movie I saw with my mom at her last residence. Lillian Gish, whom my mom had talked about years before but whom I hadn’t noticed till I started really studying the whole of the Silver Screen genre. 

GL:  So then, how important to you is the idea of appropriation? I mean this both in the formal sense it is used in the art world and in the personal sense of you calling your own, these images that have now entered the slipstream of your memory. How central is it to your thinking and your art that these images have their origin in other people's creativity and are now repurposed? 

TH: I had scorned the notion of appropriation in the past, shook my head at artists who went there. I am now, I realize, there. Big time. I have realized, only recently, that appropriation is somewhat central in this project. As you say, I am the metaphoric last car on this cinema train, this locomotive that houses and carries a director and cinematographer and on and on. However, for me, the project, the taking of these photographs, was solely a creative experience, on the one hand charged with the emotion of documenting something connected to my mom, who loved these movies from the time she was a young woman, and on the other, filled with the excitement of shooting something in the moment, utterly new, the broadcast happening now in my dining room or bedroom, my own private cinema. I had to grab the shots as the scenes passed—get it now, or miss it.

GL:  Were you worried about copyrights?

TH:  When I first started showing people these images, my sister, a New York graphic designer, worried about copyright issues. I spoke to a copyright lawyer who advised me that these images were ’transformative’. I think I’ve carried that with me.

GL:  Your lawyer said the images were transformative? How cool is that? I find it delightful that there is a legal concept that would get at the heart of your art. It's a kind of deconstruction. Behind it there must be specific guidelines for what constitutes the kind of metamorphosis you only accomplish in your dreams. It would seem you are in the clear, but do you have any lingering concerns over your ownership in the pantheon of creatives that contributed to this imagery? Does it really hinge on transformation? If so, can you talk a little about your own aspirations for creating a transformative image? Apart from the legal definition, what does the term mean for you? 

TH: Hmm, now thinking he said ‘transformational’. But still, yes, reassuring and very cool. There are lingering concerns that it might not truly be mine, finally, deep down. I have manipulated, stretched, darkened, recomposed, tightened, enlarged, blurred and blasted out these faces, these stars, but clearly, I’m a thief. I have been my entire artistic life.

GL:  Every artist works within an historical trajectory, swathed in precedent. How about in your most recent work?

TH:  In the most recent work, I have made a slight departure from the singular capture from the TV screen; I have blended these Silver Screen stars with shots of the strokes of shorthand, something my mother was an expert in. In them, the stars take a clear back seat, coming in and out of focus around the strokes and marks of shorthand. I am also blending portraits of both my parents with either shorthand or, in the case of my father, with his own handwriting in the notebooks and ledgers of his that are beautifully stored in my sister’s apartment in New York.

GL:  So you feel like you are bringing more to the table?

TH:  I am appropriating again in these images, but this time it’s reshooting a studio portrait, certainly without the long list of contributors a Hollywood star would have. Here’s an interesting fact: the piece I see as my first true artistic work was an etching of my family. I drew my ancestors, my grandparents and my father as a young boy, working from photographs, with trees and columns winding their way through their bodies and the picture plane, the trees and windowsill outside and inside the room I sat in. Using someone else’s photograph, though blending it with my own drawing. 

GL:  That’s a good segue into o question I wanted to ask you about the persistently autobiographical nature of your work. Do you think all artists work more or less autobiographically and you are just more literal about it, or is there a specific character to your use of your family and immediate surroundings as your main motif that sets you apart? The sustained focus on your mother, for example, started well before her death when she was in convalescence, and is now several years old. Do you foresee a culmination to this cycle or is it open-ended?

TH: I think probably yes, everything is autobiography in some sense. My work is just quite literally so. I have used the people in my family in my work from my earliest days as an artist. I worked from family photos as a printmaker. I have done self-portraits from my first days as a painter. Once I had children, they were added to the cast of characters in my work.

I think the loss of my father at an early age has made me want to constantly keep family in my work. From my earliest images up through what I designed even last week there have been either images of myself or my family, or a tribute to, a recognition or inference of, a veiled presentation, a memory, a metaphoric appearance of, their faces, their bodies, the places they lived or the approach to those places. It is a significant question for me; how do I proceed?  Will I finally move away, substantially, from the force of my ancestors and my children? To be honest, I have no idea.