The making of myths - A conversation with Cate Giordano

Welcome to the Onassis AiR Conversations. My name is Myrto Katsimicha. I am a curator and cultural worker based in Athens and your host in this series of recorded encounters with the participants of Onassis AiR. Founded on the principles of learning and doing with others, Onassis AiR is an international research residency program in Athens initiated by the Onassis Foundation in 2019. They say that what happens in one place stays in that place. I cannot find a better way to describe all the things that have been happening inside the Onassis AiR house since I first entered as a participant of the Critical Practices Program in Fall 2019. The truth is, it is not easy to transmit an open-ended process of relationing, which is very personal and relevant to a specific place and moment in time. How can I then give you a glimpse into that process? Everything starts with a conversation. Throughout this series I'll be speaking with the Onassis AiR participants to shed light on their artistic practices and needs, as well as to reflect on ways of being and working together.

Today, I am very happy to be speaking with Cate Giordano, an Onassis AiR (Inter)national resident 2019/20. Cate spent one month in Athens making objects and exploring parent child relationships through the lens of classical sculpture and Greek myth. In this conversation, we discuss about the ways narration is used to create power structures looking into their past projects, as well as into the research that they conducted in Athens. For this conversation, we have also invited Xenia Vitos, a visual artist based in Athens, in order to expand on the notion of storytelling and world making that they both share in their work. Cate, welcome to Pali-Room!

Cate, you are a visual artist based in New York. You shoot film, you make sculptures and you perform in various states of cross dress. Taking as a starting point the Greek myth, and more specifically, the story of Zeus giving birth to Athena, the goddess of female virtue, your research delved into themes of power and masculinity, which are recurrent in your work. I was wondering whether you could expand a bit on that, on the way that classical antiquity and Greek myth are connected to your research.

Basically, what I was working on for the past year and a half before coming to Onassis was on three different projects. In one of them —ROME— I had recreated the Roman baths in this skyscraper in Times Square. I had made myself —I call it my nude armor— my nude suit. I basically made a suit that was a breastplate that kind of looked like this armor from ancient Rome or ancient Greece. I did that, but it was like a male chest, like my flesh colored chest and then a penis. And then I created these senators that were kind of standing. Basically, I was envisioning like if I were this Roman patrician in a bathhouse in ancient Rome. I had the good fortune of being in this fair called "SPRING/BREAK Art Show", which happens every year in New York. They're really awesome and I have done a lot of work with them in the past. They gave me this really awesome room, which was this corner room on the 23rd floor of a skyscraper in Times Square. So, I had this really perfect room. The performance was basically me posing with these other two sculptures that were these nude senators conspiring and then I was sort of just posing there with my attire or lack of attire. And so, that kind of launched for me this sort of theme of working with the idea of autocracy in that particular piece, thinking about how power is actually wielded and how power is actually translated. Of course deals were being made in these baths, the kind of back channel of power. I started working on this piece that is about Waco, which was an armed standoff that happened between this cult leader named David Koresh and the FBI in 1993 and ended up with this really horrific massacre. So, I play this cult leader in this video. He had multiple wives, and to me, that was shifting this idea. The ROME piece was about power in this really epic scale. Everyone knows the grandeur of the Roman Empire and also its implications around the world and it has all these connotations. And then, the Waco piece -The Final Wife- to me was more about how on a small level someone could have that kind of control. In the third piece -REX- I played Henry VIII who also had multiple wives and also obviously he infamously beheaded two of his wives. He was married multiple times. I play him and I sort of embody him and I also play multiple other characters in that piece. But anyway, the three of those things, all to me, tie into the sense of sort of processing what it is to wield power and then the toxicity of it and the hyper masculine sides of it and the psychology of it. I haven't quite resolved all of these things, but I feel that in these three pieces I'm sort of working through that and just thinking about it and sitting with it and also embodying these kind of horrible people, like taking on these attributes of being these men in particular that have this urge to control and dominate. I also think about how that manifests just in general, in society, in art and then culture. That was what I was working on before I came to Onassis AiR. My research project played into this in a lot of obvious ways. I feel like Zeus takes it to this, thinking about the Greek gods and how in a lot of ways that lore plays into the foundation of these power structures. How Zeus is just represented as this sort of ultimate autocrat, but also he is a God and a myth and is not really real, but it was interesting to me that he sort of took on this hyper feminine virtue of childbirth, even though the context of it was kind of violent about how he gave birth to Athena through his head. Also, there is another myth where he incubates a fetus in his thigh, which I didn't really tap into in my research and analysis, but I was interested in this hyper-masculine God that was Zeus and how he was in a lot of ways the foundation or a very early example of how this kind of power is wielded. It wasn't really an actual person, but it was a religious figure at the time that impacted the psychology of pretty much all of Western history.

I am thinking exactly through what you said so far the layer of the narrative structure, because myth is a narration. It is a story. In your other works, you approached some more real-based examples of people and leaders, while in the case of Zeus it is also how power is constructed through narration.

Yeah, and also, it is interesting to me thinking about Zeus, who was a person whose inception was through myth. In reality, when I play Henry VIII I am using that as a launching point and creating a myth in another way. I am basically taking these historical figures and I am loosely basing it on that, but I am not holding myself to an actual literal interpretation of what happened and I think that's also the case. I am not the only person that does that. I mean, pretty much any book or movie, anything that represents a historical thing that happened, is going to be mythologized in a lot of ways. But it is taking something actual where you weren't there and you have no experience of it personally and you are basically putting your own experiences into it. So, I feel like we create myths out of people that were real. But, I think ultimately, the source of my research for all of these things and anything that I've ever made is through making stuff and sort of figuring out how form plays into it. And then later on, I might add in a character and add in video, but the root of my research is through making objects.

That takes me to the next question that is exactly about this, about your creative process, because your research took the form of you making a lot of objects in the space.

I think, when I got to Onassis, my first move was to buy a sewing machine.

I remember that.

Everyone's desk was a computer and some stuff and mine was immediately like just an explosion of fabric and all these things. I just started sewing stuff and thinking about the research project that I had proposed. At first, I felt like I really wanted to rebel against the research project. The things I started making were hyper-feminine. For example, I made this sculpture that was basically this boob udder.

There were some huge boobs going around!

Yeah, but I was also tying that into the idea of birth. So, I just took it and stretched the subject to a lot of different areas. I just let myself go. That felt really great because it was really awesome to have that dedicated time to just think and to just take things and stretch them and to actually explore this thing, even if it wasn't literally exactly what I had said in my proposal, but it was definitely related to it. I feel that I had the space to take that and run with it and not have a deadline or not have anyone breathing over my shoulder being like: "What are you doing making that udder?".

Going back to your works and your films, your works often take the form of films, but I feel that there is a strong performative and also sculptural element that cannot be separated from the film as the medium, that you choose sometimes to work with. It seems to me that you are constructing worlds that represent real and everyday characters and I was wondering if you could expand a bit more on that and on how the characters are related to the space that you construct.

I think that the characters couldn't exist without the objects in a lot of ways. I don't work in the way where I make the objects and then I film. I make an object, film with it, go back to that thing, maybe don't even use that scene, go back to another thing. So, I have this really back and forth way of working. I think sometimes when you see my films —in particular, I have a video "After the fire is gone", where I play the Dolly Presley character— in lot of ways the characters are just people that are kind of archetypes that we see in video and we see in popular culture, etc. Thinking about "After the fire is gone", which was the case that I worked on for years, literally before I started shifting gears with the ROME project, Dolly is really just a pretty normal person. She works, she is married to this insurance salesman, but I think what makes it absurd or what makes it a detachment from reality in a lot of ways is that there is a very clear separation between her internal-ness, which is sort of denoted by when the sculptures come into play and from the scenes without the sculptures. Also, when she is interacting with the sculptures, it creates a weird psychological space, because she is doing something completely normal or normal for her or whatever, but she is doing it to something that can't respond or emote or have any kind of response to her. I think the everydayness of the characters is offset in a lot of ways by the sculptures.

Since you also brought this up, I wanted to ask you about your relationship with this character, because, as you said, a lot of times you are taking on these roles and you perform yourself.

I feel as though I have no interest in these characters existing, unless I play them, for some reason. I think when you are in your movies and you play multiple characters in your movies, there is this element of control in that. I control this character and in a lot of ways you realize that they are all sort of an extension —though you can watch the movie and you actually do read them as separate characters and you kind of forget that I am playing multiple roles in the films, but I think at a certain point you're really just watching me. You are basically watching my interpretations of these people, but it is also to me about whose perspective is it. Which character's perspective is it ultimately? So, I think it calls into question why it is important that I play other characters. What is it doing and why is it important and what is that saying about the psychology of the piece? I don't have all the answers to that. I just do it, because I feel like I need to.

In the case of "After the fire is gone", if I am correct, it was both a film and an installation, right?

Yeah. It is a single channel piece, which I think you saw at Onassis, that is just a movie that you can watch and then it is also an installation. The installation was purchased by the Margulies Collection in Miami. It has a nice home, a great home. When I got that show for "After the fire is gone", I had done installations where I was performing. For me, these objects serve the purpose of this video, because I was performing with them. But then, that shifted my thinking about it when I knew that I was showing it as an installation. I had never done that. That was really hard for me to wrap my head around. Then, I went back into those scenes —the scenes that you saw with the sculptures. I went back into those scenes and I remade all the sculptures or most of them. I went back into the diner scene. I basically remade all the food. It was like treating the objects seriously and I think it took me a long time —just in my practice— to understand that the objects were also something to be shown. So, now I feel like in a lot of ways that I make a lot more sculpture and I am invested in them as sculptures.

What are you going to do with the objects that you made here?

I don't know for sure, but I definitely think it was going to be a launching point for some other ideas that I just haven't had the time to explore yet.

Before bringing Xenia into our discussion, I just wanted to ask a last question. Now that you're back in New York, you must be reflecting on what happened when you were here. I was wondering, how did your ideas develop during your stay here and how do you see them now forming?

Well, I first thought that the research project that I was doing was going to be kind of an extension of the things I was already working on in a lot of ways. I am using this hypermasculine. I am working on these things that I have to deal with, like power and autocracy and whatever. I am taking this idea of this Greek God, Zeus, who is the ultimate autocrat. But then, when I started making this sort of feminine objects, like the udders, what I started reflecting on was just the relationship, in general, between child and parent, between father and daughter, the parent-child relationships. What it actually kind of brought up in me was just the idea of how to explore the parent-child relationships and how that is the sort of the foundation for all of the things that you do. Then, thinking about the thing that I proposed, the Athena-Zeus dynamic where she was born fully formed with battle armor from his forehead, there is actually a lot of symbolism in that story about the dynamics again between children and their parents. So, I actually took it in a totally different direction in my mind. It became much gentler. For me, it became much more of a gentle subject matter or much more of a vulnerable subject matter in a lot of ways, in a way that I hadn't expected.

From the perspective of the parent role, let's say?

To me, it was less about the parent and more about the child and the complex relationship that that is and how it is something that I think is at the foundation of all the other things I have been working on anyway. It was great to have the space to think about it and to have the flexibility from Onassis for it to develop into that.

I am going to bring Xenia in. I am bringing all of us together into this conversation, because I think that it is always useful to have another perspective on one person's work and also I realized that you two really connected with each other.

I just want to say, while this is being recorded, that Xenia is one of my very favorite artists of all times. It is true! But also, I think, there are definitely things about our practices and our work that I think are very overlapping. There are a lot of things that separate and bring us together in terms of our work, but just in general, I think Xenia is a fantastic artist. I have a lot of admiration for your work and I'm really happy that you are able to join us for this conversation.

The fact that strikes me is this theatricality in both of your works and in your staged work and the exhibition that I've attended with the box and the room. Despite the theatricality you present something real. It is not fake. The artifice becomes a starting point for another kind of story.

I think it is a decoration upon a truth and it is taking it in different sort of magnificent or fantastical tangents for both of us. Those works were very personal, with real people and real stories, whereas Cate takes herself through also real characters, but not direct real characters in her life. It is that exaggeration and decoration upon ourselves.

And for your work, I think, especially with the show where you say "I think I'll stay in bed, thank you very much", there's a real sense of the banal and you take that as a launching point and then you turn it into something that is kind of fantasy, but it is actually not fantasy at all.

Yeah, it's true.

In the other show, too —you had two shows up when I was in Athens. In the first show in a lot of ways, when you take objects, not even objects, you take things sometimes that are just things that were already there, like when you took... Was it your mother's dressing gown?

My grandmother's dressing gown.

Your grandmother's dressing gown and you cut out the boobs and did this thing. It's like being able to alter something that already was a thing and to do it in this way that is pretty critical. The way I read it is very critical.

Humoristic.

And it's also funny. But to me you are able to kind of tap into this sense of —I wouldn't just say boredom, but I feel it is like this sense of entrapment in this way that you are talking about things that you were expected to do or the expectation or the crushing expectations of what was expected of you and not just you. I think, specifically with women, the idea of nurturing and child rearing. The way that you talk about those things in the objects that you are making is pretty palpable to me. But you do it in this way that feels very natural. It just feels like you just decided to cut the boobs out of this dressing gown, but there is nothing forced about it.

Like the connection with your objects that you make. That is another link that we have, I think, the process of hand-making stuff as well. It is like another form of escapism.

Yeah, I love doing that. I like sitting in my studio with some wire and stuff. It is very meditative to me.

Exactly!

That is how I really actually think in that way.

Or not think as well.

I think you also do this, from what we've talked about. There is a lot of thinking that goes on when you are just doing something with your hands and I think some people, like me and I think like you, are like "that's how we get things to the surface", by this physical act of making stuff.

It is like a synapsis of material, thought, and then the development of everything, because it gives you the appropriate time as well.

I also think it unlocks certain things in your subconscious that you are not aware of. I do my best thinking if I am not hot-gluing cardboard on other pieces of cardboard. I don't know how to explain it, but this is really how I get ideas in.

You both kind of approach very similar issues and you try to subvert them, but in a very different way. While we were talking before about the roughness in Cate's work, in your case Xenia, everything is so meticulously made and constructed.

Well, it is not really. It looks as if, though.

I feel like Xenia is fearless in what she makes. There is a real care and there are a lot of feminine qualities in a lot of ways, like stereotypical feminine qualities in how you go about constructing something, but then you make a phallus.

I guess that is where the difference is. Yours is kind of roughly put together.

What I appreciate about your work is that you are not trying to cloak stuff. And not that there is complexity to that in the way that you make stuff, but I just think there is a bravado, I guess. There is a bravado to your work and there's no apology for it.

I don't think I am aware that there is supposed to be at the point I am in it. Maybe when you reach the end, you realize "what did I just make here", which is the case when we talk about handywork. You get so lost in the making, I think, and you also don't know the results until the end. And maybe then you're like "did I go down that road?

Yeah and also, for me, I just feel so vulnerable in general, whenever my work is shown. I have a hard time even watching my work, if other people are there. It is like "Oh God, like, there I am". In particular with the ROME piece, for me, it was like, "Oh, you can see all of me, there are people here and there are people taking pictures here, and I'm completely naked. What am I doing? Who does this?" It is a little bit embarrassing to me. It is not like I don't feel these things.

I do feel that thing as well. I am kind of embarrassed as well about the themes I put into the work.

And then, at a certain point, I am just like, whatever. It is not like I don't feel. I do feel a sense of exposure.

I guess we like that, Cate.

Well, we had a very nice conversation.

I miss you!

I miss you guys. I am glad that you asked me to do this. It was fun and I am glad that you also invited Xenia.

Yeah, me too! It was really nice to see you.

Thank you, Cate!

Thank you.

See you soon! We'll speak again.

Yes, talk to you soon!

Bye!

Bye!

Thank you for listening. If you want to listen to more Conversations, please subscribe to our channel. You can find more about the Onassis AiR residency program and each participant at www.onassis.org. This series is produced by Onassis AiR. Thanks to Nikos Kollias, the sound designer of the series, and to Nikos Lymperis for providing the original music intro theme.