The Mildred's Lane Complexity - Interview with J Morgan Puett - August 2012 - Transcript

IP I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about Mildred’s Lane, how it started, its founding ethos and what exactly ‘the complexity’ is?

MP Well… I think that it just evolved out of my practice since I was a young artist and really – to go back to any origins it might have is to go back to the way I grew up in the South. Then, I think that throughout my adulthood and as an artist, fashion designer and an amateur architect, at the intersection of all of those things was a very social practice, a very socially engaged practice. (Even when I was in art school). And I think that I only became a fashion designer because of all of those interests merging and out of those experiments and boutiques in Manhattan, you know that’s where I met Mark Dion and our whole extended friends and family just started doing things together and I was using my store-front installations in Manhattan as a site to experiment, do installation work. I was always an installation artist really - in love with that material, complex world but the store front installations really were where I was able to have a real, socially engaged thing happening and I lived in this tower hill house which is five miles away from us (meaning mildred’s lane). My brother owned it but I was renting it and living here half the time then in town in my store fronts and people were actually coming out with us every weekend… when we bought this property in 1997 it was already functioning like that, we were always bringing people out… and then I got pregnant, and had Rabbit and just slowly, you know Robert Williams I think technically would be the first artist who proposed something on that site when we bought it. And I think it was in 1998 we scraped away that building that was there, there was an old building in place of the main house and moved all of that rubble and fieldstone as a foundation over to the garden and we worked with students making the garden, we worked with Nils Norman but it was really Robert who came for a visit who and created this sixteen foot stickman, Burnileus, he called it (you need to ask him about it). And burnt, to ward of the spirits and to bring on a goodness about the foundation of the place, he built this amazing stick creature over the course of a few days and set it alight, creating a massive bonfire. And that set the precedent of all of the bonfires that we still do to this day. And every little artistic gesture was about bringing people together to celebrate whatever the event was and that was the first… John Kessler’s daughter was 6 years old at that time, Julliette, and it really made an impression on her. She still talks about it today and she’s 19 years old. And then we immediately started talking about the Alchemist’s Shack then…

…my vision for the site was always that we would have these artist projects and build the structure around the conceit of the nineteenth century farm which we had acquired and just continue that out but with a very contemporary edge to it… And, I’ve always been in love with vernacular architecture, it’s what makes my heart beat and as an amateur architect that’s been my kind of vision and P-body (MD) is also on board with that vision and so we immediately realised that the farm was incomplete or that it had decayed into something else. We rebuilt that building based on the footprint of an original barn and chicken coop that was there in that same way, kind of stuck together, grafted together… and then , as a designer, I graft on a local grange-hall architecture porch which is standing out like that? It’s based on all the local community grange-halls around here. Grange-halls are community buildings in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, it’s where you would come and trade your wares, barter your grains, trade animals, buy livestock, have town meetings. The grange-hall is always a meeting place, a community meeting place. I though that would be great, conceptually, to give that gesture and that nod to community building because that building was designed with a communal living situation in mind. It would be a community kitchen, a reference library and then little hotel rooms in it and it's slowly becoming that now... But once I became pregnant it became a family house... I always thought I'd be living in the Mildred House... Which we've been trying to preserve but it's slow... I mean, we have no money so it's all done on the generosity of our friends and Mark and my projects where we can afford to spend a little bit here or a little bit of award money... it's all just pieced together over the years since 1997...

... I was always collecting these vernacular architecture books so these images that inspired that building were of Pennsylvania vernacular spring houses... and we actually built that little lane that goes out to it... in the 2009 session, we had a guy come out and teach everyone how to do backcow... and now Robert calls it 'liminal lane' so there's a liminal lane that goes up to the Alchemists Shack... it's hard to talk about because everything's interconnected, embroiled and constantly churning... but every project site – and there's dozens which you don't even know about.... Amy Yeo has a folly in the woods... Did you see Mark Dion's Momento Mori graveyard?... And the Grafters Shack?... And then the Kimberly Heart piece up in the quarry...

More than anything it's about people... it's about the people who come and do things there and it just kind of organises itself (even thought I'm technically the director of the thing) Mark and I are co-curating with all of our friends... Robert has curated people to come and speak during his project... any time an artist is running a project (for a decade or more) we'll build a session around it and a kind of swarming of seminars and events around it but it's always changing... So already next year Nihls Norman is planning to run a session, last year Claire Pentecost and Brian Holmes ran sessions so it's shifting and slipping around all the time. You can't put a finger on it, it's not an institution and it's not even a home entirely anymore... although it is a home and it is a school... it's something that is about the experience... it's more about the shared experience that people have when they're there that's really exciting for everybody I think. What's co-evolved amongst everybody is that they come together and they are the best they can be, it's the possibility of re-thinking how we are in the world which is really for me at the heart of it. And it's not just a linear thing, it's a cluster. As you can see there's Alison pebworth going on, there's Amy Yeo working out a project, it's not just one thing going on, it's complex, it's a complexity, that's why we call it the Mildred Complexity.

I'm trying to make a series of project-dresses that will hopefully fundraise for the projects we're doing down here... there's so many different pieces to it... it's got to be hard to write about it, I find it hard to write about it and I'm right in the middle of it... you have to experience it, you have to be a part of the dinners and talk to everybody whose involved. I see people change right before my eyes from year in and year out, and I've changed, it's really something... It makes us all better... And we're certainly getting smarter... At least I hope so.

...It is really an emergent curriculum... I like to leave it really porous... and that's the thing that institutions cannot handle... they want to predetermine every little thing so that everybody knows and what that comes down to is a financial issue but here, us being bone-broke anyway, we can afford to take the risk of waiting until the last minute... It happens really slowly and then it crescendos, and simultaneously something is crescendoing elsewhere and we're not going to finish that so we'll do another iteration of it which gives us an opportunity to look again at the material of the previous syllabi and carve it into something until it becomes something... and it's so young... even though we've been doing it over a decade... I think that there's going to be a moment where there's a lot of stuff happening (like right now) but it will be more defined... the buildings will be more complete. I mean The Mildred House is a repository full of stuff waiting to be installed in the Grafter Shack and in the thorough house. So we're constantly moving things around, shifting and rearranging and a lot of that happens in the fall and the spring when the weather breaks and we can start moving things... Today, one of our artist friends Paul Barto, is going to be engineering the rooftop for that building and we'll at least get that far by the end of the week... he is also going to lead a session either next year or the following year to come up with an algorithm for the thorough house project 'Mildred's Lane renovating Waldon'... So we do do some broad stroke planning out into the future but never so much as we encapsulate it, it's always porous... because we meet people all the time on our travels and then all of a sudden we meet someone who's doing work which speaks to the alchemists shack so we'll invite them to come and present their work at those sessions... or other artists/theorists who are also bumping into people who will speak to that project will co-curate into it so nothing's ever solid, it's completely porous. Sometimes that drives us a little crazy but I've learned to trust, accept and take the risks... I think it's harder for some people who work in traditional institutions and fields but I kind of know my boundaries and I'm a big risk taker, I can extend myself in a lot of different places and know... Now that I have the studio I can get centred real quickly... I don't know exactly what's going to happen next year or who the staff will be ...there's always some continuity but I think that most of the continuity is me and P Body...

There's lots of different stories and at the moment we're trying to put them down because we're doing this MoMa installation and we're taking the opportunity to archive all the stories and all the projects...

What I'm doing for the next two years is educating him [Rabbit] I'm actually taking him out of school and doing this project called 'Home School' so every invitation that I get is an opportunity for me to take Rabbit to that part of the world and I've posed a question to our friends and colleagues “What's important for us to know in the 21^st Century?” Is it really just reading, writing and arithmetic the way Americans teach it in schools? Or do we need to tool up and don't we need other information?... We're going to Tokyo in September and then I was invited to do something for the Triennial in Tiblizi, Georgia and we're going to do that project there... It's all going to be streaming/skyping into the MoMa installation so we're going to do a series of lessons at MoMa too. And then we'll be back in NY, live in that installation, exchanging lessons there, creating swarm with all the people who have been doing things at Mildred's Lane and will be represented in that project... I call myself the Ambassador of Entanglement for a reason and that's because, as an artist, that's where my practice is right now. It's in this very strange atmosphere, I don't really know how to describe it apart from I think of it as a mediation rather than directing...

We have a comportment manual so when the fellows come they go through a two to two-and-a-half day orientation of workstyles and I teach them what that means. I teach them that it's a practice that they do out loud, in public with each other, that they're practitioners that are bringing their tools to a place and it's a systems thinking... you bring your artistic talents out of the studio and into the domestic environment and apply them to washing dishes, arranging the dishes on the shelf, to sitting at the table and you don't take any of those things for granted. In every aspect of life you apply those skills and tools. Everybody has different talents so when you do that collectively great things happen. I keep trying to raise the bar... I sometimes describe it as we're the finishing school to art school, they come to us once they're out of graduate school in that unknown moment of 'what do I do now?' it's the best moment to infect people and give them new choices and new possibilities...