Nov 28, 2007
Flagpole Magazine
Interview with a Renaissance Man
By Beth Sale
link to original article
Elliott Earls is the head of the 2D Design department at Cranbrook Academy, near Detroit. He recently spent time in Athens, as UGA’s visiting artist. During that time, he gave a lecture, conducted a workshop, performed at Ciné and installed work in UGA’s Lamar Dodd School of Art Main Gallery, which is up through Dec. 7. The following is taken from an interview conducted the day after his performance at Ciné:
Flagpole
So how did the performance go last night?
Elliott Earls
It went pretty good. We did two sets and there were a few challenges. But I realize, or attempt to constantly remind myself, that even though my work is driven by technology and driven by strange contraptions and robotic drums, which are given to being temperamental, that that’s not what it ultimately is about. It is about trying to make a connection to an audience, so whenever anything technically isn’t working, I’m in the moment trying to remind myself to funnel that energy into the performance. So that’s pretty much what happened. And each set had different things that were positive about it.
Flagpole
Did you perform two sets of the same material?
Elliott Earls
Yeah, two sets of the same material. Sort of. There were subtle differences. But because it revolves around a kind of programming structure, I had originally intended to change the material between the sets. But there was like five or 10 minutes between sets, and what we ended up doing was resetting the initial conditioning and just going with it. So it was different, but not as different as I would have liked.
Flagpole
And you showed your films as well?
Elliott Earls
Yeah. In the other screening room, Ciné showed this 55-minute film of mine, Catfish, and this other thing called ambient composition in G which is an about two-hour ambient musical piece, but it’s also animations that 500 GB of digital junk that has been on my computer micro-edited together combining it with a score that I wrote in the key of G and kind of this electronic music thing and it morphs slowly over a two-hour period and I see it as kind of a contemporary painting and performing, which I envision being displayed in domestic environments or galleries. And they showed the trailer for my new cinematic piece, The Saranay Motel, which is much more narrative. It’s a film about two of Detroit’s least talented hip-hop artists, and of course, I’m one of them. It’s a rags-to-riches-to-rags story. Also, while I was here [in Athens], I worked with a group called ICE, Ideas for Creative Exploration, which is the interdisciplinary component of the art school. And we conceived and shot two high-definition video scenes for the film.
Flagpole
So those are going to be added to the footage you already have?
Elliott Earls
I think so. I think that we did was actually quite interesting. We shot at DT’s during open mic night, in character. I worked with Jordan Dalton, who’s a music student and art student here, and with some of the other students. I had written a song earlier that takes claw hammer-style banjo music and fuses it to hip-hop, which I guess in fact there is a genre that this fits into, and in character we went to DT’s Down Under and shot the piece… It was strange. Very strange and interesting.
Flagpole
Can you talk about your hip-hop character?
Elliott Earls
The film is about a kind of process of raising one’s awareness. This character lusts for success and is just not very talented. And as he starts to realize things about himself with this kind of raised awareness, and starts to live for this intrinsic set of principles, he starts to begin to change. But the stuff that he’s done earlier in his life ends up getting popular. So there are basically two things that are happening: one is that he wasn’t very good at hip-hop; and he starts to become more interested in bluegrass and claw hammer old-time music through his associations with an Amish unholy man whom he went to see to try to become more popular. Through his experiences with him, this character learns that his whole life has been a joke and a sham, so he starts to reinvestigate those things that he authentically likes. However, he created so many enemies earlier in his life that these unscrupulous people remix this claw-hammer music that he’s making with hip-hop; and it becomes very popular. So as he realizes that he not interested in hip-hop and as he realizes that his whole life has been a joke, he’s actually becoming very popular for the thing that he realizes is shallow. If that makes any sense? In the film it makes sense.
Flagpole
This seems like it might be a bit autobiographical.
Elliott Earls
Oh, it’s totally autobiographical. And it’s about the struggle of the artist. I’m using the story as a vehicle to talk about what I think one of the central struggles for most artists is, and me in particular, which is fame and success and all that stuff. Of course I actively want all of that. But where in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is all that stuff positioned? That’s what this film is about. Is it important to have all of the trappings of success? And I would say yes, but only if it’s gained the right way, which I would say is by doing something that you really love. And also that you completely believe in. That’s what at the core of the film, and it utilizes blank parody to try to talk about those things.
Flagpole
You do music, film and graphic design, if you can call it graphic design. Which one do you feel is more true to your personal expression?
Elliott Earls
That’s a tough question. When you say which is more true to your personal expression, I would almost invert that and say that the expression is more true than the form. I’m struggling in a way, and I have been struggling to make a connection to an audience and with an audience. You hear this thing in art schools a lot, it’s a cliché; young students say, “Well, you know it doesn’t really matter if anyone ever sees my work. I’m gonna paint and make sculptures and prints. It’s just for me. I don’t care. It’s all bullshit.” There’s this idea in undergrad schools a lot that there is this romantic notion of artists working alone in their room. That is a lot of what it’s about. You have to have your head down, your butt in the chair working and all that stuff. But after you’ve done that, and after you’re faced with the concerns of everyday life, feeding yourself, having a family. It’s also on a level of expression, the audience becomes important. And not pandering to them, but seeing the work in relationship to an audience. I think that I love the process of making work, but the work is about a connection to another human being, even if it’s only one person. But the work is about trying to make a connection to other people. It’s a long way of saying that I don’t think the issue is medium or media, it been this constant and ceaseless search to try to figure out how to leverage all of this stuff and make a connection.
Flagpole
It seems almost that the idea of cross-media exploration is intrinsic to your work. When I look at your work, it seems that the form just totally follows content. But I read on your website that the form is ultimately what is important to you.
Elliott Earls
No, no. It’s more that I think that there is a kind of modernist false dichotomy between the two. Form and content are inextricably linked. I’ve often said it’s counter-productive for us to talk about one without talking about the other. But that’s just not accurate. It’s actually the opposite, which is that modernism in a way is about a kind of analytical knife that splits the two. It says, okay, here’s form, and here’s content. You have your idea and then you have your form. I think that a more contemporary way to look at it is that simply obviously you can’t talk about one without talking about the other. But I would say that once again for me I think that my work is perceived as being very formal. I think because there are strange colors and very baroque typography, highly manipulated aesthetic, that people often confuse it as being Formalist. And I am concerned with form, but it’s because it’s fused to the content. So I see them together. It’s probably a progression. Earlier in my career, I was much more formally oriented. And as I’m maturing, I realize that all that stuff has to be in service of something else. So I still think that aesthetics and form, and issues of beauty and ugliness, and all that kind of stuff, and Formalism as a pure philosophical category, is important. But I think that it is to a degree less important than what it is in service of.
Flagpole
So, you had some work that was called “Heroes.” There’s this dichotomy of kind of like pubescent subject matter with comic books like heroes and some of the imagery, combined with intellectually informed references in so many pieces.
Elliott Earls
I’m a child. I think it’s strange. There’s this kind of raised awareness. I’m definitely drawing on comic book imagery and a kind of naïve form of anti-mastery. Because, if I do say so myself, historically, I’ve been able to make things look like what ever I want. So I’m more interested in anti-mastery. I’m more interested in making things look just wrong. I’m interested in the joy of life that is associated with being young. But a lot of people often mention how young the work looks. And that does strike me as odd. And it’s not something that I perceive.
I’m interested in youth culture, but it’s not like I’m following that stuff. As a matter of fact, I kind of lose what the stuff references when I’m actually making it. Whenever I’m making something that visually looks strange to me, I know that I should arrest the exploration process and move into a refinement process. So it is weird that there is an intellectualized aspect to the work. A lot of people perceive the aesthetic as dealing with adolescence; I would say just being young. In a way, I’ve actually thought that I if what I said is true about my ability to make things look the way I want them to look, then what about cultivating a kind of aesthetic that might actually deny that it is a different body of work? That’s something that I’m thinking about.
Flagpole
It seems interesting to me that you retain this kind of youthful look – I hate to say naivety – but yet you have such a strong grounding in academia. It is completely obvious that you’re very knowledgeable about art theory and all kinds of history.
Elliott Earls
Yeah, it’s the world I live in. It’s really amazing actually. Cranbrook is based on a Utopian artist model out of the Arts and Crafts Movement. The students live above the studios, and the studios are across the street from where the artist-in-residence lives. So, as an example, two of my best friends at Cranbrook, and the next-door neighbor, are the painter-in-residence and her husband, who is the chair of the art history department at the University of Michigan and a scholar of German photomontage and has written books on Anselm Kiefer. So when we sit around the dinner table, this is the stuff that literally every day we’re talking about. Some people are interested in football, and I’m interested in contemporary art and historical art, everything that comes with it.
Flagpole
So where do you gain your knowledge? Are you an avid reader?
Elliott Earls
Yeah, I think so. I don’t know. I think it’s not even so much that. I’m currently, as an example, reading a book on the Post World War One Avant Garde, El Lassitzky, Alexander Rodchenko and Laszlo Moholy-Nag. That kind of thing is just a constant process. When someone says, “Are you an avid reader?” it makes it seem as though I have a plan or something. I gain knowledge from conversation, from negotiating this kind of intellectual environment that I live in, and reading. I think a lot of it is really, if truth be told, even just osmosis. With this specific book that I’m reading I’m actually looking at this and thinking, “Wow, a lot of this stuff that I’m doing bears a really distinct relationship to some of the ideas in this book.” I’m making notes about that and writing about it. But I don’t conceive of it as being a program. It’s more osmosis than anything.
Flagpole
You have a philosophy about the future of design. I’m interested to hear what would be the difference between this designer that you envision, and a fine artist? And how does Kurt Schwitters fit into that?
Elliott Earls
I think that we live in a kind of neoconservative time where people in academia – not everywhere mind you – but in academia, as well as in our institutions, they really have a kind of conservative agenda. I think that the design press or media, the academy- and by the academy I specifically don’t mean the Cranbrook academy of art, I just mean schools… and the museums have a kind of conservative agenda that defines design almost exclusively in terms of a problem solving methodology, as well as in terms of a designer-client relationship. But if we are to look at El Lassitzky, Kurt Schwitters, ….the Cabaret Voltaire, or John Heartfield, a lot of these individuals were polymaths. They were both artists and graphic designers, as an example. There’s a lot of lip service that’s given within design education to Post WWI Avant Garde, as example. It’s not exactly as if it’s a popular position. You hear “oh that’s not design, there’s no client involved.” I mean, I get that. I do client-based work, among other things. What I’m advocating is a much more inclusive and broad-based definition of things that is still rooted in discipline. I’m not necessarily suggesting that if we had a design history test, I would score a hundred, but I might be able to pass the test fairly well. So the point is that the work I’m making is informed and based disciplinarily in very traditional graphic design. I’m just advocating for an opening up of those distinctions. I often use the analogy that James Joyce and Dean Koontz, or whatever his name is, Stephen King are on the same shelf. They’re available simultaneously. Only within academia and these institutions is there a need to shove everything into a box. I realize there are problems with the argument.
Flagpole
I agree. In what we might call the “real world” of musicians and performers, what you do might be considered an exception to the norm, but not necessarily something to cause too much of a flurry. But in academia and institutions, there is this need to categorize everything. How do you feel about your placement in academia? Do you feel it confines you, or restricts your creative exploration?
Elliott Earls
Not at all. It’s really invigorating, partly due to the structure of Cranbrook, and how amazing it is. Mark Callahan, who is also a graduate of Cranbrook, is working in ICE here at the University of Georgia. And as articulated in that program, obviously someone around here gets it, not just Mark. The institution is placing some financial and intellectual weight behind this idea of multi-disciplinary, trans-disciplinary work, just kind of opening things up. Most of my best friends are tenure-track professors or artists, so this is going to sound like I’m dissing all of them. I’m not. I respect them tremendously. But I conceive of myself primarily as a working designer and artist, and almost secondarily as an academic. That’s the model that Cranbrook is based on. I’m an artist-in-residence. I’m not a tenure-track professor. I think that a lot of tenure positions can be a kind of narcotic that lulls you to sleep. There are exceptions to the rule. And the person that I was just talking about before, Matt Biro the art historian, is a tenure-track professor and he’s amazing. It’s not an indictment of all academia.
Flagpole
How important do you think it is to make groundbreaking work, or revolutionary work, something that’s completely original?
Elliott Earls
Well, there’s the myth of originality which I kind of get down with that you can always trace. With any artist, they say, “Oh your work reminds me of so and so.” You can’t work in a vacuum. I know that there’s overlap with a lot of different things. So I don’t know that it’s so important that the work is original. I do think when you were talking about revolutionary or groundbreaking, I mean, yeah, I’m a sucker for all those heroic modern myths, and I still believe in them actually. And I do think that’s an important criteria for work: to try to innovate. And I think there’s a kind of paradox there because innovation is often an extrapolation of something that exists. And as informed, relatively speaking, by contemporary art and design or literature and as my work may be, I try to let it come from a different perspective, if that’s possible.
Flagpole
Do you work in your studio on a daily basis? And how important do you feel it is to generate a bulk of material? Do you prefer to be selective with your output?
Elliott Earls
No, no. Actually I was asked this in a lecture as well. A woman brought up the issue of Marcel Duchamp, and how he made basically five pieces. Each one of them is an icon of art history. And then I said that you had Pablo Picasso, who had lunch with making art. I work all the time and I love working. I called a friend of mine when working out this song for this scene that we were going to shoot here for my film with the students in ICE. I was working with Jordan Dalton. I wrote the song and recorded the song back in Detroit. But we were working out a different arrangement, and things just clicked. And I all of a sudden understood how this song was to be performed. and it was completely different. It was with a stand-up bass. The point I’m really getting at is that, in those moments where you think, “Oh, it’s just lunch.” And you’re actually just making stuff. And I did feel some pressure because I knew that we were going to go out later. But it was a casual relationship to the work. All the foundation had already been laid. All the super hard work had already been laid. And then you have this kind of break-through, or this kind of raised awareness, in a situation where you just weren’t really expecting anything at all. That’s the kind of thing that I’m constantly striving to do. Doing a lot of hard work, hard work and trying and struggling to make the work leap forward. And then in those moments when you’re not really thinking about it, and just grooving on it, usually it clicks. And you have to be self-aware enough to say, “Hey that was it.” So I try and make a lot of work actually, which is hard because I run a grad studio as well, and I have three children and a wife.
Flagpole
Let me ask one more question. I’m really interested in some of your writing. I wrote down one specifically that I really enjoyed. It’s like poetry: “Growing Spirochetes in glass dishes without safety glasses.” I love the text in that.
Elliott Earls
Well, thank you very much. That was simply about designing typography. Yeah, I don’t know. Sometimes that stuff clicks. I’m glad that you said that. I’ve been writing, but it’s just recently that I’ve been putting that stuff on my website. I realize how diverse, or how broad-based a lot of my work is. I noticed that people had a hard time understanding, because they would just see bits of it. So I’ve really been working on trying to provide a framework for people if they were even remotely interested. They could go to the website and there’s writing about it, and I’m trying to provide diagrams. I try to make it not dry and academic. I’m not interested in that.
Flagpole
Do you think you’ll ever publish a collection of writings?
Elliott Earls
Yeah, I would certainly hope so. The problem is the time. I’m so excited about all of these different projects that I’m working on; I’ve got four or five major projects. So the only thing that has kept me from producing a book is that to a degree it’s about looking backward rather than looking forward. So it’s almost as if I have to hire somebody, or would like to hire somebody, that would work on that, because I want to keep moving forward. For five years I’ve wanted to do that, but I just have a hard time justifying spending six months doing something like that.
Flagpole
Maybe it’s an art historian’s job.
Elliott Earls
Let’s hope so.