purl jam

Ha! Can you remember 1993? Well, I had these two friends who were making this world that somehow actually existed. I felt like I was a guest in that world but then I started adding to it, and suddenly I was in it too. Mat Brinkman, who started the group with Ara Peterson, approached the world as if everything had already been made that we need – so, if every factory shut down, we could survive. Forcefield followed that idea. We lived in this industrial area in Providence.¹ Across the street, there was a factory operating through the night. People coming in and out, huge machines working. We felt like we were building this world from dust.

We were going to art school, but what we were doing wasn’t called art. And we weren’t showing it at art school. It just felt ours – between friends. I was really enamoured with performance, Chris Burden, Paul McCarthy, Mike Kelley, Matthew Barney – this space between life and fiction that felt possible.

It looked like a squat but we paid rent. The fire escape door couldn’t close because the bricks were missing, and our landlord never fixed anything. It felt like we could do anything we liked, but it also felt precarious. Below us was a flea market that happened every weekend, so you had people coming to this building. Like, you could stay for months without ever having to leave. The roof leaked. One winter, our toilet froze.

We were just finding mattresses outside and piling them up as high as we could. It was all a group effort. A couple of people would take charge of something, then all of a sudden… you would walk out one morning and have a huge wrestling cage in your space. Mat and Brian booked bands from all over, and people would come to our space as if it were a venue.

Each person in this group had a different skill. Ara had a film background, so we played in front of this giant 16ft projection. Lightning Bolt,² this other band that was part of the space, had some incredibly loud speakers. So, we had ear-piercing sound and really pulsating visuals. I became interested in knitting… It was something I could bring to the group. And in Providence, there were all these mills that had shut down, so all this yarn was available.

Video quality at the time was very grainy and saturated, so it was about seeing what colours really showed up most intensely. And it was becoming more expensive to find costuming. So, I was like, wait, I can just knit these patterns and customise them to what we need. It was only afterwards that people started sharing images of indigenous cultures with these similar costumes. There was a wig store close by that had pink hair, and I could braid it into the knit. It was really just about trying to make Matt and Ara excited. Each of us trying to challenge each other, it came from that.

It was pretty awful. You’re huffing sweater dust. We would also not perform in art spaces, we’d be at music venues, so it was really hot. And people smoked all the time then, so you just couldn’t breathe.

Well, the people that came were actively seeking this kind of thing out… No one was like, oh my god, this sounds amazing, ha! But it was fun. There was an absurdist side of things, knowing there wasn’t necessarily an audience for what we were doing.

Often, the Biennial is about what artists in New York are important. And this curator from the West Coast, Larry³ was really interested in seeing the “American voice”. He rented a car and went all across the country, asking artists for recommendations. Larry contacted us and visited Fort Thunder. At the same time, we had a show in Brooklyn in this space called Parlour Projects, run by Dean Daderko. We had a video, all these cassettes and DVRs, merch, the costumes. It was this great coincidence where the curators could go and see what we were doing.

They took a huge chance. They were like, “Here’s a huge room, do something with it.” At the time, we were working on this record, so it was this huge blast of energy to get things done. It was like a summoning. We made all these characters, and the space was all dark with video and lights and sounds. People would stay in there and get really immersed.

On Fridays, they were open late, so after work I would take the bus, put on a costume and be in the space. I wanted to hear what people were saying! The first time I went in, someone grabbed my nuts and just stood there for three minutes staring at me. I was like, this is really going to suck. But after that, it was smooth sailing. 

It was hard to move away from. But yeah, Fort Thunder had closed. It was sold and developed. Without that, it was hard…  Everyone was living in different places.

I’m glad social media didn’t exist, because it could develop without the commentary. None of us were very good at verbally communicating, so what I see is a dynamic that was pretty fragile, but pretty amazing too, the creativity. It could only exist for a short time. It was pretty beautiful.

Someone five or six years after me (at RISD), their response… Well, Ryan Trecartin⁴ embraced being queer. And there was a queerness to what we were doing, but I don’t think we identified that at the time. For Ryan, it was this opportunity to talk about queerness in this way that felt expansive, strange and beautiful… I see that being a nice connection.

With the students I teach, it can be so isolating when you have this constant feedback from strangers and social media, and you can really withdraw. So, I think community-building is so important to being an artist. Recognising it isn’t all about individual experience – these “influencers” that are singular beings that seem so separate from all of us peasants. So, it’s that idea of embracing your friends and what they can do, and challenging them. That’s a place I hope people go to when seeing this.