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Eddie Colla: If you want to achieve greatness, stop asking for permission
Deborah Gallin • 18 juin 2020
It seems like every piece of Eddie Colla’s work I see in Paris has a woman’s face staring intently at me, not happily or aggressively, more thoughtfully or wistfully or defensively or courageously or impudently. Many of these women are wearing a mask of some kind. Every one of them is dressed as though she survived Armageddon. Despite describing what could be considered unattractive, I find these women stunning not in the “classic” sense of the term, rather beautiful and surprising at the same time. Each one is captivating.
Eddie and Frédéric Steimer are organizing Carpe Diem Solidaire, an artistic event on June 20, which will bring together more than 150 artists around the world to raise money for COVID-19 research.
I spoke with this ingenious, contemplative artist recently. I’d like to share our conversation with you.
DG : The images I see on the street, on your website, and in all the articles I read seem all to be of women. I know you photograph men, so why am I only seeing photos of women?
EC : I’ve had this conversation with a lot of people. There are two interesting things. The photos are probably 70/30, women. I think people’s impression is that it’s about 95%. People pay a lot more attention to women. People go to an exhibit and ask, why are they all women? And I’ll say, well, they aren’t. The other thing they’ll say is, why are they all Asian?
The idea behind these photos is they are images from the future. My vision of this future is that people will be less and less any one thing: you know, Asian, Black, Caucasian, Hispanic…. Most of the people in those photographs are of mixed ethnicity. People just sort of see a little bit of what they want to see.
I remember the first show I did at GCA.* I was in the gallery one day talking with a lady, and she said, all the pictures seem to be of Asians. And I told her they’re not. And she said it seems like they are. We walked through the gallery, and at one point, I said to her, the people in these three pieces are Black. This person over here is Black.
People see what they want to see. They find what they’re looking for. That’s interesting to me because it’s just it changes the way I see it and the way a viewer sees it when they go to the gallery’s exhibition.**
DG: You went to Shenzhen China and said it was the most successful experiment in telling the story of a place?
EC:
The experiment was with found material in Shenzhen. Essentially this is what it was: I don’t know anything about Shenzhen. I don’t speak or read Mandarin. I would select pieces of signage or old billboards or whatever, and I would collage them together based purely on how they looked. I was doing a residency, so there were people there who speak good Chinese. I told them not to tell me what the sign says until I was done. I would make a piece, and when it was finished, I would ask, what does all this stuff say? And they would just translate the little bits of sign and stuff that I had taken.
The idea was, is it possible to say something about a place just using discarded things you find that people had thrown out? Could you tell a little bit of a story about a place doing that even without understanding what any of it said until it was done?
I did a lot of pieces like that, and some were more successful than others. But one was particularly successful because it conveyed a lot about the ethos of a place like Shenzhen, just from random discarded objects. It’s a little bit like archaeology.
DG: Most of the time, the people in the photos are wearing masks and gloves, and weird clothing and all that other stuff. To me, these look like people who have lived through Armageddon or some vast explosion, and what they’re wearing is what they found. So, it’s similar.
The question then is, with all those found objects on these people, can you tell who they are? Do they become someone else?
EC:
I don’t think the portraits that I do of people are representative of who those people are. They’re portraits of people that don’t exist.
Just to give you a little bit of background on how that all came about. In 2012, I did a three-person show with two other artists. I don’t know if you remember, the Mayan prediction that the world was going to end in 2012.
DG: I thought the world was going to end in 2000 when we changed centuries.
EC:
Well…it keeps not happening…. We took over this giant gallery space, did this massive installation with all these elements to it. We thought, let’s do an installation that represents this post-apocalyptic world. That’s when I started doing those portraits. Eight years ago.
When I was researching that I wondered, what are actual things that might happen that could bring the world to a standstill? The more I looked into it, the most popular theory or most likely theory was a global pandemic, a respiratory disease.
DG: Are you serious?!
EC:
Absolutely. That’s why all that the work looks that way. I made a bunch of those portraits. Then the question is, what happens when these very fragile things sort of start to collapse like economies and trade and all the constructs of modern civilization, order and policing, and systems of government? If it all goes away very quickly, what’s left? What are people without all that? What do we become?
I thought, often when there’s any kind of a crisis, and in my mind, it would be a global pandemic, what’s the first thing that happens? If a crisis is big enough, the military is sent in to try to help. If they’re unable to help or if they fail or if they leave (and you see this in places that we occupied like Vietnam), they leave massive supplies behind…everywhere. A lot of what people are wearing are old military clothes and old military supply stuff. I thought, if something like this happened, a lot of this stuff would remain, sort of “the last stand of trying to stop it.”
Of course, they were wearing masks because, in a pandemic situation, that’s the first thing you do. I did that for a short time. Then I thought, that doesn’t make sense because we would run out of masks very quickly. That’s when I started the models wearing these sorts of homemade masks. You can see it in the work: It goes from them wearing medical masks and masks for respirators…by the time they [the images] get to around 2018, they’re wearing bandanas or pieces of cut cloth and things like that. Originally what I was trying to make was a document of what the world might look like, what people might gravitate to if a majority of our societal structures disappeared.
EC:
That focused predominantly on atavism. Atavism is a piece of DNA that a species has that it no longer uses but still exists. Whales are an example of it. Whales still have the DNA to make feet, from when they were on land. They don’t express that quality because they don’t need it anymore. But within the DNA of the whale, the strand of DNA that makes feet still exists.
The idea was that traits in a species can reemerge if you change their environment. That’s a lot of what I was examining. As people, what is inherent to us, and what is the product of our societal structure?
Originally, I was trying to see what that would look like. I did it for a few years, and my focus changed to what strengths or resiliency do people express under adversity? That’s what the photos became more about later. They were less about a specific narrative of what may have happened to the world and more concerning what are the things we can’t be stripped away? What are the things that are not external? Perseverance or the inner strength to ignore something or just a sort of dignity that you can’t strip from people. That’s what I wanted to present.
There’s another recurring theme in those photos that people have asked me about: the keys around their neck. They’re not in all the pictures, but probably a third of the people have keys attached around their neck. The whole reason I put the keys in the photos was as a symbol of hope. If the world fell apart, you wouldn’t have much need for keys. The idea of holding on to your keys presents the idea that, at some point, this is going pass, and I’m going go home. I’m going to go back. Everything’s going to go back. Otherwise, why would you hold on to them?
DG: In an article written in 2015 for the San Francisco Weekly, you talk a lot about why it’s good to do street work, but you don’t say anything about why it’s good to do gallery work. Why is it good to do street work and gallery work?
EC:
Street work has a lot of limitations. Particularly if it’s illegal, you have to be able to execute it in a reasonable amount of time. You can’t sit there all day and deliberate on whether this might need more red. You have to be able to do it quickly and get the result you want. Certain processes just don’t lend themselves. There’s a tradeoff.
The part I like about it is that it’s in a public space and brings art into the community, which I think is important. I think it changes public space a little bit. Let’s say, every day, you walk to the metro station and go to work. You walk the same route. One day, you walk to the metro station, and there’s this big image the whole way to the metro station that wasn’t there when you came home the night before! It’s not an advertisement; nobody’s making money. It’s very intriguing as to what the artist is trying to do. It’s just presenting you with something. It’s not expecting anything in return. It’s not trying to get a sale. I think that’s a great thing to have in society. It’s just nice to be surprised.
Art galleries are fine, museums are great. I spend a lot of time in museums. But people are busy. They don’t all have time to set aside and go to a museum. I think having art in public places is a very good thing. I think street art particularly is good because there are no committees involved. If you’re doing a mural or a big production, something that’s a legal wall, there are often a handful of people who have a say: we think this is appropriate. Street art has none of that. You can put up whatever you want. If people find it offensive, they’ll destroy it. There’s a democracy to it that doesn’t exist once you get into bigger, legal public situations. I have respect for anybody’s going out and doing what they like.
EC:
Another thing I would say as far as making street art is you have to be careful of too much. I’m not saying no one should do it. I’m saying if you saturate a place with too much, it doesn’t mean as much. In other words, if you have a couple of murals in a neighborhood, they might stand out. If suddenly there’s a new mural on every other street, it just doesn’t mean anything anymore. It becomes diluted. I agree with bringing art into public space. But there’s a thing about saturation that can kill something. You want to leave the audience still craving more, not exhausted.
The thing about gallery work is you can do a lot that you can’t do on the street. I’ve done pieces that are lit in a specific way or backlit. I can’t do that on the street. Maybe I could do it on the street in a situation like I described where it’s a legal wall, and it’s been pre-arranged. But in an illegal way, I can’t do it. There’s also something about being in the studio where you’re not hurried or harried. You can use a much bigger range of materials. You have the time if a process is slow or takes several days because of drying or whatever technical reason. You have more room to expand how you do things.
*
GCA Gallery is a contemporary urban art gallery, Paris 13th
** I invite you to read “Conception Vs Reception” Eddie’s blog post on April 15, 2020, in which he talks about the “complexity of representation.”
Deborah Gallin
is the Founder of Art Works Internationally: Unleash the Unexpected.
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