Hans Ulrich Obrist interviews Lena Cobangbang on CRATER VALLEY PLATEAU
Is this series of photographs still related to the ones you’ve previously shown such as Terrible Landscape and Overland?
Yes, somewhat since they all depict landscapes. But the first series was more didactic and literal in trying to replicate scenes of disasters from collected newspaper clippings, while the second series was about the idea of stasis and utopian states. Yet for this series, these landscapes, although obviously set-up to look like as either other-wordly realms or picturesque tableaus, they are intruded by their absurd seriousness in being these “perfect” views.
But they are obviously not perfect, especially in choosing to depict in some photographs here such as erupting volcanoes and dead cows in verdant fields of polyester carpeting and cripples perched on astro-turfed knolls. There is an element that makes these pictures quite disturbing and yet they choose to suspend the tragedy of it by being humorous or whimsical instead.
I guess, it’s a conscious act for me to really digress from all that seriousness. The humor makes me look at the picture more, again and again. It’s a sort of set-up or gag where you don’t know where it will lead you. Like in one, it’s just sometimes beyond me why I put in this surfing little man holding a homunculus in a bloody wintry bulbous, pockmarked landscape.
I notice that these photographs still depict landscapes but you’re using less and less of food here as material.
The only material that’s still food related though is the use of flour in simulating snowy terrain, and vinegar and baking soda to effect the explosions of a volcano. The use of such chemicals is rather more akin to elementary science fair projects - tried and tested to never fail yet the results are always unpredictable depending on the proportions used.
Are they still related to the general idea of landscape painting or do they instead refer to the whole process of picture making or painting in general?
If I did attempt that with Terrible Landscape, with this series I still feel rather tied to it. It seems my unending obsession and frustration is in not being able to paint them, not because I don’t know how, but the constraints of space and time makes it even more so seemingly unworkable.
So would you have rather painted them instead?
Yes and no. Painting and photography are two different media and formats which have their own way of presenting certain images, some would work better when they’re painted, some as photographs.
Plotting out or planning these tableaus actually took some time – browsing for pegs, sketching plans, shopping for appropriate materials or ingredients…. How I’ve arranged these however, have taken a more organic and random route, as it had been quite difficult to control, particularly the flow of the simulated lava and the modeling of the mountain peaks to how they looked like in the pegs. It’s become at the end, an approximation of a hokey Ab-ex painting process.
So if they are, are they parodies of Ansel Adams since some of the photos here are in black and white.
Hmm, it’s only when you’ve mentioned it that I’ve come to see it that way, but that’s just one way of viewing it. However that makes all such “intrusions” even more to the point.
When I was looking for pegs to base my tableaus on, I was mostly looking through a lot of tourist pictures on flickr that teeter between wanting to be these majestic mountainscapes that try to either imitate Ansel Adams but which rather usually end up as kitschy repros of Constable or Turner (?)
At the same time, I was also taken in by the lunar photographs on the Life magazine website where their datedness has been rather transcended by its very alien nature, no matter when these pictures were taken, these craters would still basically look the same, more or less. I think Ansel Adams photos has that certain tincture, even if these are not alien realms, they still resemble such in their near perfect “grandiosity”, where contrast and contour are all seamlessly balanced out to give us a generic picture of a craggy snowy-capped mountain ranges where Bambi and her clan can freely frolic around its highly reflective pools and lushly brushed vales.
But why generically title the show as such –crater, valley, plateau?
To state the obvious but the obvious is oftentimes not that obvious because viewers always look for some other meaning beyond it. To satisfy that curiosity guess we’ll still have to dish out that shit and so to make the work be more than what they are but of course I’ll always have an agenda beyond what’s presented.
Craters and valleys can easily be represented or pictured, you already know what that is. But a plateau is something that’s midway, a cut-off mountain, an interruption to reaching the peak. In sex, orgasm is actually a plateau, not a summit to be reached because it just spreads, it endlessly spreads because once you’ve “peaked”, you plummet down fast to zero. But the very idea of peaking, what is that really? How high can you really be high, how drunk can you really get drunk, what is the ultimate orgasm? I think once you’ve reached that, it all becomes nothing, and the place where you realize all those things is a nowhere place, you’d feel lost and yet sense its strange familiarity. The very realization of this is actually very nauseating, this state of being momentarily filled with everything and nothing all at the same time, it’s very overwhelming to be waveringly blissed and emptied out especially when that occurs in very indeterminate cycles. It has to be that way because you don’t want it to be a routine. If it becomes that it becomes utterly dull and there’s nothing more to look forward to anymore when you want to take a hit or drink or have sex or read some ultra hibrow philosophical shit or whatever it is that you do that where you get the most kicks like probably clean toilets or floss your teeth or, yeah of course painting.
But more and more when we realize right now and really observe how places change over time, it’s really more of a case of us, consuming the place, the land; the so-called developments our shit, the re-ordered landscape our puke. Maybe we like to live in our own crap and thus call it a wonderland. The so-called sublime is really unattainable that we have to kitschify it, be recognizable, be evocative of our lowly sentiments on the human condition when they’re really all are inexplicit exquisite things. We can’t truly claim them, we only hold on to such illusion of privilege when they’re idealized. Those who incessantly work to flesh out that ideal are however branded as fascists, but we all dream that, therefore we are all inherently that, fascist. Art just legitimizes that grandeur dreaming to power to conjure such a place or a state, which to some people would be very dangerous to bestow upon.
How so?
Like duh? I, for one, was psychoanalyzed to have criminal tendencies. So when all else fails, I might just start killing curators or dullard collectors, he he he. No, but really, I might just end up as a forensics pathologist or a bum or a pimp. I don’t really care anymore. The reality of taxes takes out all the fun. We should all aspire to be like Kaczynski. We should just explode when we can’t take it anymore.
Is this series of photographs still related to the ones you’ve previously shown such as Terrible Landscape and Overland?
Yes, somewhat since they all depict landscapes. But the first series was more didactic and literal in trying to replicate scenes of disasters from collected newspaper clippings, while the second series was about the idea of stasis and utopian states. Yet for this series, these landscapes, although obviously set-up to look like as either other-wordly realms or picturesque tableaus, they are intruded by their absurd seriousness in being these “perfect” views.
But they are obviously not perfect, especially in choosing to depict in some photographs here such as erupting volcanoes and dead cows in verdant fields of polyester carpeting and cripples perched on astro-turfed knolls. There is an element that makes these pictures quite disturbing and yet they choose to suspend the tragedy of it by being humorous or whimsical instead.
I guess, it’s a conscious act for me to really digress from all that seriousness. The humor makes me look at the picture more, again and again. It’s a sort of set-up or gag where you don’t know where it will lead you. Like in one, it’s just sometimes beyond me why I put in this surfing little man holding a homunculus in a bloody wintry bulbous, pockmarked landscape.
I notice that these photographs still depict landscapes but you’re using less and less of food here as material.
The only material that’s still food related though is the use of flour in simulating snowy terrain, and vinegar and baking soda to effect the explosions of a volcano. The use of such chemicals is rather more akin to elementary science fair projects - tried and tested to never fail yet the results are always unpredictable depending on the proportions used.
Are they still related to the general idea of landscape painting or do they instead refer to the whole process of picture making or painting in general?
If I did attempt that with Terrible Landscape, with this series I still feel rather tied to it. It seems my unending obsession and frustration is in not being able to paint them, not because I don’t know how, but the constraints of space and time makes it even more so seemingly unworkable.
So would you have rather painted them instead?
Yes and no. Painting and photography are two different media and formats which have their own way of presenting certain images, some would work better when they’re painted, some as photographs.
Plotting out or planning these tableaus actually took some time – browsing for pegs, sketching plans, shopping for appropriate materials or ingredients…. How I’ve arranged these however, have taken a more organic and random route, as it had been quite difficult to control, particularly the flow of the simulated lava and the modeling of the mountain peaks to how they looked like in the pegs. It’s become at the end, an approximation of a hokey Ab-ex painting process.
So if they are, are they parodies of Ansel Adams since some of the photos here are in black and white.
Hmm, it’s only when you’ve mentioned it that I’ve come to see it that way, but that’s just one way of viewing it. However that makes all such “intrusions” even more to the point.
When I was looking for pegs to base my tableaus on, I was mostly looking through a lot of tourist pictures on flickr that teeter between wanting to be these majestic mountainscapes that try to either imitate Ansel Adams but which rather usually end up as kitschy repros of Constable or Turner (?)
At the same time, I was also taken in by the lunar photographs on the Life magazine website where their datedness has been rather transcended by its very alien nature, no matter when these pictures were taken, these craters would still basically look the same, more or less. I think Ansel Adams photos has that certain tincture, even if these are not alien realms, they still resemble such in their near perfect “grandiosity”, where contrast and contour are all seamlessly balanced out to give us a generic picture of a craggy snowy-capped mountain ranges where Bambi and her clan can freely frolic around its highly reflective pools and lushly brushed vales.
But why generically title the show as such –crater, valley, plateau?
To state the obvious but the obvious is oftentimes not that obvious because viewers always look for some other meaning beyond it. To satisfy that curiosity guess we’ll still have to dish out that shit and so to make the work be more than what they are but of course I’ll always have an agenda beyond what’s presented.
Craters and valleys can easily be represented or pictured, you already know what that is. But a plateau is something that’s midway, a cut-off mountain, an interruption to reaching the peak. In sex, orgasm is actually a plateau, not a summit to be reached because it just spreads, it endlessly spreads because once you’ve “peaked”, you plummet down fast to zero. But the very idea of peaking, what is that really? How high can you really be high, how drunk can you really get drunk, what is the ultimate orgasm? I think once you’ve reached that, it all becomes nothing, and the place where you realize all those things is a nowhere place, you’d feel lost and yet sense its strange familiarity. The very realization of this is actually very nauseating, this state of being momentarily filled with everything and nothing all at the same time, it’s very overwhelming to be waveringly blissed and emptied out especially when that occurs in very indeterminate cycles. It has to be that way because you don’t want it to be a routine. If it becomes that it becomes utterly dull and there’s nothing more to look forward to anymore when you want to take a hit or drink or have sex or read some ultra hibrow philosophical shit or whatever it is that you do that where you get the most kicks like probably clean toilets or floss your teeth or, yeah of course painting.
But more and more when we realize right now and really observe how places change over time, it’s really more of a case of us, consuming the place, the land; the so-called developments our shit, the re-ordered landscape our puke. Maybe we like to live in our own crap and thus call it a wonderland. The so-called sublime is really unattainable that we have to kitschify it, be recognizable, be evocative of our lowly sentiments on the human condition when they’re really all are inexplicit exquisite things. We can’t truly claim them, we only hold on to such illusion of privilege when they’re idealized. Those who incessantly work to flesh out that ideal are however branded as fascists, but we all dream that, therefore we are all inherently that, fascist. Art just legitimizes that grandeur dreaming to power to conjure such a place or a state, which to some people would be very dangerous to bestow upon.
How so?
Like duh? I, for one, was psychoanalyzed to have criminal tendencies. So when all else fails, I might just start killing curators or dullard collectors, he he he. No, but really, I might just end up as a forensics pathologist or a bum or a pimp. I don’t really care anymore. The reality of taxes takes out all the fun. We should all aspire to be like Kaczynski. We should just explode when we can’t take it anymore.
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