Originally from Washington, then Brooklyn based Wynne Greenwood returned to the Northwest to premiere her newest piece, Maps to Radical Imagining, specifically created for the Tollbooth. “How do you map a hope, a flower, a muscle, a gaze, a breath, an exhaustion, an attempt, a history, or your community? You are here”, is Greenwood’s starting point for this exhibition. Greenwood also gave a lecture/performance at the Tacoma School of the Arts (SOTA)-a public high school for creative and performing arts students located in the urban downtown Tacoma corridor.

Jared Pappas-Kelley: Do you think that performing as Tracy + the Plastics is acting? Performance art? A band? How do you explain this to your grandma, and does she get it?

Wynne Greenwood: I haven’t ever really explained it to my grandma.  Usually I say I had a show, and so maybe she might think it’s something like show and tell, and maybe it is.  I say I’m in a band, I also say I’m a video artist and I just recently was able to push the words “performance artist” past my tongue.  I guess I don’t really consider it acting, maybe re-enacting.  You know, maybe it’s the difference between civil war re-enactors and Hollywood-actors.  I’m performing a band.

JPK: I’ve been thinking a lot lately about artists who tour their own work or take their projects on the road (like Vanessa Renwick or Bill Daniel). It seems like you’re always touring and one is just as likely to find your work at an art space, museum, or club. How does this effect how you approach your work?

WG: I think what touring has effected most is what I need from my work.  What I’ve come to need is a home, a sense of safety and trust.  I demand that from my work and, consequently, from my audiences, wherever and whoever they are. 

JPK: I recently read an offhand comment you made about how gallery affiliations are not something you are actively interested in. With a lot of artists, that’s basically all they want out of life. How does this fit with what you do?

WG: Well I honestly don’t know how a gallery would even be able to represent me and my work.  It’s not like people can buy performances.  It just amazingly eliminates my work from that context.  At least I feel like it does.

JPK: You’ve been able to break this line between visual artists and music performers. For example, artists like Matthew Barney may put out cd’s, but non-art people aren’t going to buy it. In the same vein, bands have been relegated to take a less active role in art making. How do you think you broke that line? Could this only have been done as an (essentially) solo artist? Is the guise of electronic media a prerequisite for something like this?

WG: Well I think having a really strong community and precedent for total world-making gave me a path.  I think about being a band on an independent label and how the bands have total creative control with their music, recordings, and artwork.  

JPK: Relating to the last question, now that I think about it, it seems almost related to rock-operas in the 70’s, like Mr. Roboto. Of course, I picture Styx in this arena crowd, doing these crazy things. The differences with you are (at least from your performance here) 1. a lack of a formal stage, and 2. creating or marketing musical work in an independent form rather than a popular one. It seems so important to you that the barrier between performer and viewer be messed with, or at least that the viewer becomes a more active participant, can you explain this?

WG: Yeah, I guess that makes me necessarily not a pop performer.  I guess I’m learning right now that maybe just performing my performance is enough to get the audience thinking about stuff that could potentially be revolutionary to their world and the bigger world they do participate in.  I just haven’t been able to let go of the idea that we are all in this space together and what can happen, can be so much more than just the audience watching the performer.  It’s such a special occasion when people are together in the same room, watching and listening, being present for the same thing.  It’s been really rad to explore the performance of the audience and the spaces between the stage and the not-stage--  the spaces between listening and being listened to.  When I first started playing shows as Tracy + the Plastics I would get wasted a lot before and during performing.  It was the act of taking the space of the stage that was political and revolutionary to me.  But as I began to be offered spaces and stages I really had to look at what was the revolution.  With that space of the stage I was being offered a lot of power, a lot of time, a lot of authority.  And it was so comfortable at first.  I really had to reevaluate what I was doing up there.  Did my lesbian body make that stage automatically radical when I stepped onto it?  And if not, what would?  The power of the microphone and the stage can be used in a lot of different ways for a lot of really awesome things.  I began to find it most empowering to offer spaces to the audience that I was offered as a performer on the stage.

JPK: What was your primary response when the Tollbooth approached you for an installation?

WG: I was so honored to be asked to make a work for the Tollbooth, but also, so so excited to make a new kind of video and in a public space!!! 

JPK: What appeals to you about a project like the Tollbooth?

WG: The Tollbooth is totally accessible.  It’s free!  It’s on a street in downtown!

JPK: What were your biggest concerns when approaching the project?

WB: Making something that was relevant to Tacoma, to the actual place of the Tollbooth.  Also, I didn’t want the project to be too abstract.

JPK: How do you think video and paper based work lend themselves to a public art space?

WG: Well TV is becoming almost public when it’s in restaurants and bars and waiting rooms. I’m sure almost all of us know how to watch TV.  And so, by default, we know how to watch videos.  I like the Tollbooth because it is a TV in this structure that kind of abstracts it from being TV.  And paper is everywhere.  It’s homework, it’s news, it’s letters, it’s tax returns, it’s paychecks, it’s posters.  It has a really humble and accessible authority, one that is easily torn up or tucked away.

JPK: What was the idea behind Maps to Radical Imagining, and how does it fit in to your past work?

WG: I was thinking about how we locate ourselves within a community, a town, a group of people and history and buildings and happenings.  How do we locate hope and possibility, and what does the map to those things look like?  Also that if we can imagine where we are and where we’ve been and where we want to be, we are that much closer to being there. 

JPK: As part of the Maps to Radical Imagining installation at the Tollbooth, there was also a lecture for the students at SOTA and a performance that evening for the public. What was interesting about this for you?

WG: The future.  Getting to talk about my past and present in order to maybe inspire someone’s future.  That sounds so cheesy.  But really it’s so true.

JPK: What was your favorite question a SOTA student asked you?

WG: I don’t remember the exact wording of the question, but in essence this kid somewhere around the 2nd row sitting down asked me about making something too abstract.  I just remember having to really think about when, why and how I choose to make the meaning of my work explicit.  It took me to the answer that I really do trust my audiences.  But also there’s a really important time to know when to be unforgiving with your meaning.  To demand that someone gets exactly what you want them to get.  It’s powerful to be deliberate.

Oh, but there was also this girl who asked if it was normal to like have colors for things that she did.  To be totally overwhelmed by the sensation of color and sound and all that.  It was awesome to be able to be in a position to say “yes you are normal” to this girl who maybe walks around and thinks she’s a weirdo and maybe tries to not be her total self. 

JPK: Part of putting on this performance was the fact that it was at a public high school, for high school kids, in a sort of blue collar town with certainly a lot of military, and you are dealing with nonprofits, the school asked specifically for us not to be overly “political”. I know you felt sort of challenged by that, especially since it was just a couple of weeks after the election. Did you think ultimately you were able to say what you wanted?

WG: Well that was really the first time I’ve given a talk like that.  I think I was learning just as much about it as everyone else who was there. 

JPK: After viewing your show, an artist friend of mine told me how excited she was to go visit the Feminist Cultural Archives (which she thought was real). How does this make you feel?

WG: Well hopefully she’ll be excited enough about the idea of going to the Feminist Cultural Archives that she’ll start them in her living room. 

JPK: How was your project at the Kitchen with Fawn Krieger?

WG: It was totally life changing.  We designed and built a performance space that included audience seating and entrance into the space.  Every day, for three weeks, we worked to build this space.  The process taught me how to honestly trust a project, a collaborator, and a vision enough to challenge it.  There’s an interview about it at www.artwurl.org in the interview section.  I think it might be specifically at: http://www.artwurl.org/issue7/popup8.html

JPK: What are you currently working on?

WG: I’m working on a new performance/video project called “NEW REPORT” w/ k8 hardy.  We are a militant lesbian feminist news station called “WKRH” where we are always “pregnant with information.” And next I’ll be starting a series for TV called “Huge Days.”

JPK: Whose work are you excited about lately?

WG: Oh, I totally read this question as “what are you excited about lately?”  So here’s that answer: 

So much.  Rock collecting, collaborations, 2005, LTTR, little sisters, big sisters, accessible abstraction, not giving up.