Tracey Snelling

Interview by Alina Cohen

Tracey Snelling’s sculptures, installations, and films conjure vibrant, uncanny environments. Since the Berlin-based artist began exhibiting in 1997, she’s created a series of rooms and performances that riff on the women in film noir (Woman on the Run, first exhibited 2008) and choreographed strange and mundane rituals that people might carry out in the privacy of their own homes (Bedroom Installation Performance, 2008). For the Swatch Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale, Snelling designed an immersive piece, Shanghai/Chongqing Hot Pot/Mixtape (2019) filled with video; found objects; draped neon lights; and off-kilter, miniature apartment buildings, all inspired by her travels around China. Though Snelling’s works might look, at first, like architectural models or dollhouses, their weird, unreal flourishes and scales take them decidedly into the realm of sculpture.

Snelling was born in Oakland in 1970 and moved to Manteca, in the San Joaquin Valley, when she was seven. The landscape, and its plain, unsentimental buildings continue to inspire her artwork. She’s currently building a piece that resembles a mock-up of Four Seasons Total Landscaping, where Donald Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, recently held an ill-fated press conference.

Recently named as the honoree for the 2020 Foundwork Artist Prize, Snelling spoke to me from her studio in the Kreuzberg neighborhood of Berlin. An abbreviated version of her giant, 3-dimensional collage works, which she calls “Clusterfucks,” hung on the wall behind her. She also showed me a sculpture that resembled a series of multicolored apartment buildings and a glowing, LED sign that simply read: “FUCK.”

Alina Cohen (AC): Why a “FUCK” sign?

Tracey Snelling (TS): Many things that have happened this year, from Trump’s actions to the pandemic, have been a nightmare. Even though I’m in Berlin, all of my family and many of my friends are in the United States. It’s ridiculous that on top of COVID, we’re dealing with this incompetent leader who won’t take it seriously or set up anything so people can be safe.

AC: Why commemorate the Four Seasons Total Landscaping snafu with a sculpture?

TS: When I heard about the press conference and the obvious mixup, then saw images of the Fours Seasons Total Landscaping lot—next to the Fantasy Island adult bookstore and a crematorium—I felt compelled to build it. Four years of listening to Trump's lies, racism, and sexism, and watching the destruction he (and his cabinet and lawyers) caused has been frustrating, to say the least. This press conference was like a comedic gift. It sums up the ridiculousness of the past four years. For the video in the window, I combined footage of the press conference with clips of Giuliani trying to flirt and have sex with the young reporter in the new Borat movie. I overlayed audio of uncontrolled laughter, fart sounds, Michael Scott’s yelling in The Office, and the unintelligible teacher in Charlie Brown. I’m mocking Giuliani and Trump on their level, a la Beavis and Butthead. The biggest challenge was commenting on the whole thing with something besides intense rage and anger. For this particular work, humor is most fitting. It gets the point across without preaching or overwhelming.

AC: Were you interested in the aesthetics of the three buildings themselves?

TS: What really compelled me was the situation: It’s so crazy that someone would book the place by accident and then just go through with it! Was it the same person who set up Trump’s tiny desk for another press conference? Is there a mole in the White House playing elaborate practical jokes? The whole episode was just so wonderfully, beautifully hilarious. But visually, it also fits right in with what I like to build: really mundane, banal spaces. The Fantasy Island book store’s architecture interests me. It’s an older building with this plain, Americana aesthetic. I find that kind of space beautiful. I’m not sure why.

Four Seasons Total Landscaping and Fantasy Island Adult Books, 2020

Wood, plaster, paint, metal, lights, lcd screen, media player, speakers, transformer

15 1/2 x 27 1/2 x 17

AC: Your work seems to riff on architectural models and dollhouses. What’s the allure of those forms?

TS: Although my works reference architectural models and dollhouses, they are neither. I consider them sculptures. I don't use a particular scale, and scale can even shift within one work. It’s more important to me to capture the mood of an existing place or create a narrative of an imagined place. By adding video (from popular film, or my own footage), I can incorporate intense or edgy material that isn't normally found in small scale works. I can draw in a viewer, then share subjects that might initially turn some people away. I’ve also captured places and buildings that will soon be destroyed or “updated.” In these cases, I feel like I'm saving a bit of history. I often turn the viewer into a voyeur, creating a Rear Window scenario where one can peek into all the windows without getting in trouble.

AC: Can you give me an example of one of those updated or destroyed buildings that interests you?

TS: Here in Berlin, I was inspired by Kotti, this apartment complex and shopping area near where I’m living. It’s kind of rough. There’s some drug dealing going on there, but the building is really fascinating to me, and at some point it will either be renovated or torn down for something new to be built there. When that happens, it just feels sad. I was talking to someone about Route 66 the other day, and I like thinking of the cultural sites along it. I would love it if these places could stay around and be preserved, but I know that doesn't always happen. Many have disappeared already, and soon there will only be images and memories of these roadside motels and attractions.

Right now, I'm building the Brutalist “Mouse Bunker” that’s here in Berlin. It’s a crazy building, which was constructed in the 1970s. It housed animal experiments for a long time. Now the city wants to tear it down—I think it has a lot of asbestos inside. The dealer Johann König is trying to save it as an art space. I wouldn’t necessarily call the building beautiful. It’s somewhat frightening. It looks like a giant battleship. But I find it fascinating. I feel this compulsion to save part of it. Whenever I build and recreate something that exists, I feel like I possess a part of it.

AC: Tell me about your plans for next year’s show in Tokyo.

TS: I’ll be doing a residency and project at Tokyo Arts and Space from May to July next year, postponed from this year. I’ll examine various festivals in Tokyo, then build small-scale versions of them, combined with lifestyle props and projections. The whole thing will explore the idea of “Hare and Ke”: “Hare” is a word for special days and places used for celebratory events, and “Ke” refers to ordinary everyday life. The project will run concurrently with the Olympics. It’ll be my first time in Japan. I'm very excited to go there and experience it!

AC: Your 2018 Bedroom/Living Room Installation Performances (in your First We Take Manhattan solo show at the Kuenstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin) featured artists and actors who adopted different roles in your living room and bedroom-like installations. What kinds of instructions did you offer?

TS: I based all the performances on my idea that we’re all freaks when we’re alone. Our actions are a mix of the strange, beautiful, and mundane: watching tv, looking at the computer, or eating, for examples of the mundane. And the strange things run the gamut. It comforts me to think that everyone’s this way—I felt so weird when I was growing up, and then I realized we all are strange.

It was intense to rehearse with fourteen artists/actors while trying to finish sculptures for the show. I met with two different performers/performance duos a night. For some, I gave very loose instructions and watched them rehearse. A few had their own ideas, which worked out well. For other performances, I gave very specific directions.

For one performance, I had a specific story in my head: These two men meet once a month to wrestle, as an unconscious way of experiencing close physical contact with another man. They come into the room, take off their clothes, oil their bodies, wrestle on the bed, then drink beer and watch tv before wrestling again. Though the performance appears very sexual, they don't interact in a sexual way, and there's this fine line psychologically, which I really like.

I’d experimented with performance before, in my Woman on the Run installation (first exhibited in 2008). My friends and I were the actors in the videos that played throughout the work. But the Bedroom and Living Room performances were my most intense, involved performances. I performed too. When I added people to the spaces, a new world opened for me creatively.

There was one final layer: The performances were filmed, then displayed on the tvs in the two rooms, so you could sit on the bed in the bedroom and watch what had happened earlier in there. Someday, I’d really like to build a set of eight–twelve rooms, either in a line or four on top of four, with various themes and performances. With so many rooms, I could explore the nuances of mundanity mixed with strangeness in a more in-depth way.

Men Wrestling (part of Bedroom, Living Room performances), 2018.

Life-size installation with performance by Ron Helbig and Christopher Adams-Cohen

AC: Your work for the Venice Biennale was inspired by your time in China. Can you tell me more about what brought you there? Tell me more about how your personal experiences, memory, and invented narratives collide in this work.

TS: I’d visited China twice before—first, for a residency and exhibition with Galerie Urs Meile in Beijing, then for a residency and exhibition with the Shanghai Zendai MOMA in Zhujiajiao. I'd wanted to return to China for some time, and had heard about the Swatch residency in Shanghai and the possibilities to show in the Venice Biennale with them. The residency is located in a beautiful, posh historic hotel on the Bund, smack in the middle of the tourist area. That was surreal. During my trip, I revisited Chongqing, a huge city on the Yangtze River. Shanghai seems tame when compared to Chongqing. I took photographs of both cities and incorporated them into my large building installation. It’s made of wood, but also covered in plaster. The building tops act as gift shop shelves, displaying items I bought or found on my trip. Some are trophies from the many trophy stores near the art stores in Shanghai. One even has “Venice Biennale” printed on it. I bought it specifically for the installation, accidentally broke it while setting up in Venice, duct taped it, and included it in the final installation. It seemed fitting to have a fake Biennale trophy held together with duct tape. Inside one of the building windows, I also included a rap video from a Chongqing friend about the city’s pollution.

In addition, I built a sculpture of the secret bar that was down the street from our residency in Shanghai, plus a KTV lounge and a tattoo shop. I received two tattoos while I was in Shanghai, and the video of the tattooing plays in the small-scale shop.

AC: What tattoos do you have?

TS: One is the Chinese character for “love.” I also have a tiger on my right shoulder, which I got during my Bedroom Installation Performance. Then I have Chinese characters going down my back that mean, "wait for the clouds to part to see the moonlight," and a dragon on my left shoulder. I chose the more romantic, soft tattoos that I got in Shanghai since I already had these dramatic, stronger tattoos. A kind of balance or yin/yang... My first tattoo is a cross on my middle finger. I gave it to myself when I was fifteen and into punk aesthetics (not religious, although maybe my early Catholicism creeped in).

AC: Why bring a tattoo artist into your performance?

TS: During the middle of the exhibition, I wanted to do something different from a standard artist talk. I arranged an evening called “Whiskey, walkthrough, and Performance. The event ended up being like a party. I read a poetic statement about my art and life, then my tattoo artist friend gave me the dragon tattoo. Some other friends are part of an improv thrash metal band called Hertzangst, and they played in the living room. It was a blast!

Woman on the Run, 2008

Life-size installation with video and performance

AC: Is there any relationship between what art can do and what a party like that can do? Are you interested in creating communal relationships with your work?

TS: It was really nice to bring people together. The first time I used performers in life-sized installations was with Woman on the Run. At first, the characters sat in the rooms, not really doing too much. I like the idea that those were more like live sculptures than performances. With newer work, I’ve leaned into more active performances. I think it brings a lot of life into my rooms. With the Bedroom Installation, I let viewers come in and sit on the bed, look through the magazines and drawers, and watch the footage on tv of the performances that had taken place in the rooms. It has this strange, David Lynch quality. I like that.

Anyways I’m not usually a party thrower. But it was so much fun and I loved having my friend's band play in the living room! It was like mixing theater, my love for movies and my art all together.

AC: You’ve been inspired by film noir and pulpy genre stories. Any particular favorites?

TS: Psycho (1960), was a big influence, and Hitchcock films in general. I’ve referenced the Bates Motel in my work. I love the trashy, over-the-top elements of John Waters’s work. He used his friends as actors, shot where he didn’t have permission, and made these great films with incredibly low budgets. David Lynch is a big influence. I like how he twists reality. In a way, he's working in film noir, but he’s doing something different from anyone else out there. Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas (1984) is a big influence too.

When I was young, my parents took my sister and me to the drive-ins to watch movies, or I watched horror and sci-fi films with my dad on tv. Film noir, too. I really became interested in the film noir genre when I took a course on it at the University of New Mexico. I love the moodiness, flawed characters, visual elements, and drama. I chose to go to school in New Mexico, in part, because Albuquerque had the appearance of a neo film noir set. This was pre-Breaking Bad times, but their choice for Albuquerque as the main setting was brilliant.

In 2006, Selfridges in London invited me to propose a new large-scale installation work. I focused on creating a film noir-influenced work. Two years later, we unveiled my Woman on The Run installation, complete with a life-sized motel and 4-12 foot tall buildings. It was both an homage to film noir and a feminist consideration of women’s roles throughout the genre: Women tend to be femme fatales or innocent victims. There often isn’t much depth to their characters. I explored these limitations through an immersive installation: Viewers put themselves in the protagonist’s shoes and decided for themselves how the story would end. Through the installation and narrative, the main character Veronica Hayden (played by myself) takes on more nuanced development, but the degree of that relies heavily on the viewer’s interpretation.

Last spring, I had a show with Cokkie Snoei, my Rotterdam gallery. It was based on films that I love or I find interesting. I made sculptures about Paris, Texas, Wild At Heart, Don't Look Now, Belle du Jour, Urban Cowboy, and Easy Rider. I don’t necessarily love Urban Cowboy, but I find it interesting because it’s just so different from my reality.

AC: This year, in response to the insanity of 2020, you created Lost Year Motel, a sculpture of a glowing motel with films playing inside. Why did this, in particular, seem like the perfect response to current events?

TS: At the beginning of the pandemic, I found myself returning to one of my perennial subjects: motels. I started drawing them and making small motel signs. It was a kind of escapism, focusing on the adventure of road trips and the excitement of staying in new places for only a night or two.

My Italian gallery Studio la Citta had invited me to stay in Verona for several weeks in September/October to make a work for an exhibition. I was happy to leave Berlin for a bit and lose myself in the long hours of an art deadline. Since I seemed to be focusing so much on the motel subject, I decided to build a big beautiful motel with a pool. Though Lost Year Motel is a form of escape, I added the title so it could comment on the hardships of this year: The rooms are quiet and lonely.

I used several video clips from my 2012 film, entitled Nothing. It’s slow and has one actor, so the clips worked perfectly. It’s about a young woman who’s a maid in this small, rundown motel in the desert. She has a shitty boyfriend and a shitty life. She goes through people’s things in the rooms that she cleans and tries on their identities. In the end, she has to decide whether she wants to change her life. I wanted it to feel like the desert: so hot and dry that you can barely move.

What really interests me, and is one of the main themes of Nothing, is the point when a person decides to take action. You could be in a horrible, or just not great situation, and stay there forever. I’m curious about turning points, what makes people finally act.

Clusterfuck 9, 2019

Mixed media installation with projections and performance

Photo by David Pace

AC: You’ve also made film loops with footage from popular movies.

TS: In 2005, I created a sculptural installation called Tenement that had a multitude of different videos in the windows. One was from Three Women, by Robert Altman, and it featured Sissy Spacek unpacking groceries...over and over and over. She’s just forever unpacking groceries, which is a strange idea. Then there was a video of Jack Nicholson, from Carnal Knowledge, yelling, "Where the fuck is my shoe horn?" over and over. Much of life is made up of really boring simple acts over and over, and then there are really beautiful wonderful things that pop in here and there.

AC: Tell me about your “Clusterfucks.”

TS: Sometimes, they comprise entire rooms with projections and sculptures and collage covering all the walls. At other times, they’re smaller collaged works on panels. I’ve probably created about a dozen or more “Clusterfucks.” They’re often really loud and chaotic, meant to overwhelm the viewer.

AC: So they reference the clusterfuck of popular culture and advertising?

TS: Contemporary issues, too: women’s rights, gun violence, Trump. Consumer culture and internet culture. I found a video on Youtube of a young woman eating a giant pizza. People keep sending her money so she’d eat more. Online, you can get tens of thousands of followers and become wealthy for doing stupid things.

There’s a huge Vietnamese market called Dong Xuan here in Berlin that’s really amazing and a go-to place to gather “Clusterfuck” material. I’ve found strange 3-D lenticular photos there, as well as led signs, such as my nail salon and doner kebab signs. In addition, I hunt the local flea markets and small shops for material.

AC: How do you make sensitive work about places where you’re an outsider or a tourist?

TS: I just try to be open, soak in my surroundings, and then put it all out there. I work really intuitively, and I try to be sensitive, of course. If I opt to make work about a place, it’s because that place is really fascinating to me. I’ve fallen in love with it, in a way.

Alina Cohen

Alina Cohen is an MFA candidate in fiction and a writing instructor at the University of Montana. She previously worked as a Staff Writer at Artsy.net and has published freelance work in publications including The Nation, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal Magazine, and The New York Observer.