Wynne Greenwood‘s had a big year.
She used to be known as The One Who Did Tracy + the Plastics, a touring video band of her, live, as Tracy, interacting with Nikki and Cola on video, both played by her. That project ran from 1999 to 2006, at which point she broke up the band, went out to celebrate for dinner, and was seated at a table for four.
She never could quite seem to put Tracy + the Plastics to rest.
Until now. Now she’s talked back at it.
At a solo show right now at the New Museum in New York, Greenwood has been recognized within the ongoing history of feminist and queer video art in a terrifically public and productive way.
And reconciling with her younger self has freed her up to move forward, too. She’s fashioned heads who speak in her voice, trying to figure things out together. She’s constructed delicate, shiny, colorful gargoyles that were this year displayed in a basement gallery in Seattle, and then at NADA in Miami, on the flashy fair scene.
Meanwhile, she teaches at Seattle University (she was turned down for a faculty job at UW), and she’s trying to figure out how to be an authority figure with a soft voice, literally.
She sat down for an interview last week in Seattle.
One of the things that’s front and center for you, but absent for us in Seattle, is your New Museum experience. We saw your Gargoyles and a couple of videos at Cornish recently, and we’re about to see at the Frye the second installment of New Report. Let’s start concrete. What’s in the show at the New Museum?
The show is actually an extension of a show that happened last fall at the Cooley in Portland, at Reed College, and the very beginnings of the work that’s in the New Museum for the most part started with the Tracy [+ the Plastics] archive, which was first shown at the Henry—so there are Seattle/Northwest roots as always. But in the New Museum show, there’s 20 video monitors that are showing 19 new documentations of re-performed Tracy + the Plastics work.
Re-performed?
Yes. And alongside those monitors, sitting right amongst them on the same surfaces, are some sculptural heads. Three of them first showed with Scott [Lawrimore] at his gallery, and you wrote about that show, and then there’s three projections of these Heads videos: the two that were at Cornish and a new video I made in residence this summer at the New Museum. They have this studio space next to the New Museum, where I made three new head sculptures and a new video.
But the re-performances. A few years ago, in 2012, I was in between galleries and I had sudden possession of my own inventory, my own work back. It was ultimately a totally transformative experience, to be in a position and at an age where I have the capacity to care for things and to be mindful and to actually be aware and to be taking inventory and really seeing what is my work, what is my body of work.
Around the same time, my friend had gone through the Artist Trust professional development program and was talking to me about what happens to an artist’s estate long-term. How do you prepare and plan for the continuation of your work? And I was really realizing that Tracy + the Plastics—this huge body of my work, my main body of work—was, like, nonexistent, that if I were to leave the earth today it was invisible, it was incomplete except in that moment, as performance.
So I started looking through and accounting for all of the performances I could find the original backing videos for. I found 19 performances, and there are at least two that I can’t find. I started digitizing them, getting them ready to re-perform. I got a city grant from Seattle that was my first funding. So yeah, I re-performed all of Tracy + the Plastics, and documented it.
Where did you re-perform it? Originally, you performed live and on the road in front of audiences, and on this circuit that was really off the grid. How do you replicate those reception conditions?
I didn’t. I cut out all context. The frame of the video, the camera crops right to the projection, so it’s actually like all context is completely cut out, which I think is the only way it could have worked. Hopefully, what it does is also allow for wherever someone is watching this to assume that frame, whether it’s on a computer and you’re at home, where your home gets to become the performance space, or at the museum. That was my strategy. So I performed first in my friend Andy’s basement, which was a really nice homecoming, it was like, “This is what I know, this is where I feel comfortable.”
Was that in Seattle?
Yeah. And then the Cooley turned over their gallery to me the summer before the show there, that was where I did the main bulk of performing. We turned the gallery into this performance space that I had total access to.
Were you alone or did you have an audience?
I was on my own. They did have to work, so they were in their offices and would tiptoe through occasionally. But Stephanie Snyder really believed in this project and really accommodated it in this huge way, so that was amazing.
How did it feel re-performing it? Were you trying to do some version of faithfulness?
I mean, it’s so interesting, it’s like—okay yes, I will answer that question, but also I met you, we sat across from each other 12 years ago, almost exactly 12 years ago, so I just want to mark that—because yes, it also felt like coming to know someone again.
The New Museum was in an entirely different iteration 12 years ago, too.
Yeah, totally. So much happens, so much happens!
Explain it real quick.
Okay, nutshell, my elevator speech. [laughs]
Well, maybe I’ll start practically. I grew out my hair for a year so I could cut it to the exact right way I needed it cut. I thought about—this has been actually one of the strangest things to talk about because I haven’t found the right way to unpack it—but I thought a lot about my body and do I want to lose weight to be my 24-year-old weight? I went down to the drag queen makeup place and got makeup, and talked to the person there about what I was doing, performing my younger self, and they were like, “Oh, you should definitely get this lipstick that looks like your lip color but it’s better than your lip color.” So the physical aspect of it was this subtle thing, when something is like a slight change and that just makes everything different.
I’m 38. That it was a real confrontation with the aging process has gotten a little lost. I haven’t been able to figure out how to really talk about that, as one of the actual huge parts of it. And that it was such a reconciliation in all of these ways, that being one of the foundational ways. It was kind of a laying to rest of my youth work, and my youth body, and my youth way, and a real turning towards what’s next, and embracing aging, and being like, I love this aging body, I love this aging face. I think that in particular because Tracy + the Plastics was so on the verge of media-pop, it just felt very radical and very strong. I want to claim that process.
How old were you when you started Tracy + the Plastics?
I started it when I was 22, and I ended it when I was 29. It was my twenties.
When you re-performed from the videos, were you memorizing what you saw you’d made and reenacting that, or were you fleshing it out?
Both. I definitely tried to stay true to a lot of what was there. And I mean, Tracy + the Plastics wasn’t scripted. Yes, once the backing videos of Nikki and Cola were in place, it then became a script for Tracy, but there was so much space that Tracy’s response could deviate and could be more spontaneous.
Do you mean you literally left longer pauses?
That was just part of it, for a couple reasons. The technology, at first. Editing on VHS tapes, you can’t be as specific as you intend no matter what. You can think you’re cutting here but you cut there. That’s the same shift as what I was just talking about with the aging.
With the lipstick.
Yeah, and the huge thing that opens up because of that little change.
But I also couldn’t remember some things. There was this note. One of the first times Cola spoke and interacted with Tracy, she gives her this note that was the conditions under which she would stay in the band, and it was an entire page filled with her written conditions, and I had no memory of what was in there.
I just had her cues, her responses—Cola’s responses. She tells Tracy to read the letter out loud, so I had to read something out loud. But the two things Cola says are, “especially that guy,” and I knew she was talking about George W. Bush somehow, and “Tracy, do you even recycle,” so I had to reconstruct a new note based on those things. I wrote a good note. It just says George Bush next to a no symbol (like a no-smoking symbol) on one side with a recycling symbol on the other side.
So there were parts I couldn’t remember and had to make up something new, and then there were parts where I intentionally tried to update the politics or the conversation and what happened, or insert this awareness of the re-performing—that it’s not an original, you’re watching a re-performance, you’re watching this archival process.
At the New Museum, only the re-performances are featured. And how long are they?
They varied. I’d say the shortest is 10 minutes. There’s a couple rough draft studies in there that were not really performed live, or not much. Several times I would make a performance for one time, as a way to process or work things out or try out an idea. So there’s a couple really short ones, and then the longest ones are I think about 40 minutes. But typically they hover around 20 minutes. There’s about six hours of video in there. It’s a lot.
You gave me this perfect segue and I didn’t pick up on it. You said you were laying to rest your younger self and preparing for what’s to come. Do you know what’s to come or are you in-between?
Kind of in-between. The More Heads work, which started with a few heads in 2011/2012 at Scott’s gallery, that never felt finished in that form. That often happens to me—I’ll present something like, “This is the final presentation,” and then it’s like nope, that’s not it.
Isn’t that what it’s like being a person? It’s like, “This is totally who I am!” and then it’s like, nope, wait, that isn’t who I am.
Yeah!
There was this woman I once knew who worked at a sister paper to the paper where I worked in Texas. She worked in a different office and so I’d only see her once a week at these staff meetings, and every time she’d come wearing something completely different. She’d be business casual, and then vamp, and then schoolteacher with these tiny little flowers on her blouse, and it violated some very deep thing but it was fascinating. And my daughter next week is considering doing her own personal project where, she’s a writer of fiction, and she’s considering dressing up like one of her characters every single day and she’s concerned that it will be confusing to other people, so she’s trying to think through how to be in a drag that’s also not a drag, so there’s enough of her—whatever that is, because she’s 14 going on 15 and she’s certainly not wearing what she was wearing last year.
Whoa.
Yeah, the stability aspect. I mean, do we get more stable as we age or just more aware that we have to be stable?
What came to mind when you said stable was legible.
When you made those works and then you’re putting them on display, is there any sense of revision, like did you want to make them better? Was there that relationship to time?
Right. No. Really, they were so much better than I am now.
I mean that’s just the opposite, though! You can’t just say that!
No, it was really like, I was watching some of the early ones—that actually have come to the forefront of being my favorite ones—that I, for years, really believed were the worst things I’ve ever made, that those were so embarrassing. I don’t know, it did feel like being in relationship with not a child but, like, a friend, maybe, or someone where you’re teaching each other. There were some things where it was like, I really am embarrassed about this and I’m going to be with this, I’m going to be with you, I’m gonna be with you. A lot of this early posturing and posing and cockiness that they were enacting was like, what? But it was really like I have the capacity now, I have the stability, I guess, to…yeah. [laughs]
Is there a relationship between having a stable or not-stable identity and the More Heads videos? At Cornish, that one video, to me, was a whole bunch of different people trying to teach each other how to act, not how to be.
Whoa. That’s awesome. That sounds right to me.
So what do you hear when I say that to you?
I hear the work being seen. Yes, there is, yes, More Heads is totally related to Tracy + the Plastics and that’s why those two works have been brought together for this show and for the Cooley show. Because I really did run away from Tracy + the Plastics, try to get away from it. I mean, I’ve come to be very grateful to the success of that project. I’m so grateful, you know? And for a while, it felt like I couldn’t do anything else that was as good as that project, or that people wanted as much as that project. I’m talking very candidly about this now. It felt like a tender fear spot for a very long time.
So I also didn’t put myself into my work. I was really trying to not use any of the strategies that Tracy + the Plastics used, which meant that I removed myself almost completely for a while, or I started that process. But with More Heads, I really was able to start picking back up some of these strategies that feel at the core of my practice, including my voice, having my voice actually be the voice, and language, too, and dialogue in particular, and then video in particular.
So I didn’t want it just to be Tracy + the Plastics again being asserted as the thing that was the central piece of my practice—that is kind of the narrative that gets repeated and there is truth to that, so I get it—but instead of continuing to turn back here, I wanted to bring it forward a little. So that’s why those two are together, and I am interested in continuing More Heads and approaching it as a more episodic. That was one thing I loved about Tracy + the Plastics, that it was episodic. It was this ongoing relationship.
And the Gargoyles?
The Gargoyles were made at the Cooley, for the Cooley. When I went to do a site visit, my first site visit there, I noticed the gargoyles. There are gargoyles around the original façade of the library space. The Cooley gallery is located inside the library at Reed, and there are these gargoyles around. They built a new wing onto the original library building, so actually inside of the library are more gargoyles.
I’ve had some kind of peripheral relationship or fascination with gargoyles for a while. My first gargoyle, I made in order to photograph for the cover of a record that never got released.
When?
2007. Some of those songs migrated onto a record that came out in 2012 for that show at Scott’s.
There’s something about the grotesqueness, the strangeness. Are these us? They’re us but they’re not us. They’re humans but they’re not humans. I was thinking a lot about this idea of publicness, for me what’s it going to mean to be public again, and thinking about gargoyles as these—they’re stuck out, they cannot hide, they don’t have a choice.
Do you see them as an analogy for the distortion of being in public?
Yeah. Totally. They’re a way to think about that.
So how is it for you being back in public this way? Having a solo show at the New Museum is incredible in that I would presume and hope you’re supported to make good work and take your time doing it, and you have a greater chance of more people seeing it who are really going to be thoughtful and interested. But it’s also a status symbol to have a solo show at the New Museum, so part of me just felt protective. That sounds patronizing and I don’t mean it to be; I think I would be protective of myself too if I were thrust into an institution like that. So what was your actual experience of going through this thing loaded with status?
Well, it’s still happening.
When does it close?
January 10. But what I mean is the experience is still going to be happening after the show closes. But it hasn’t been as scary as I thought it would be.
Being part of the music industry prepared me in a boot-camp like way. I remember when I put out my first record, a friend saying, I mean this was all about being queer at the time, whenever someone wants to write about you in a magazine, ask if you can be on the cover. There was a lot more magazines, press, promotion, marketing, and in art, you’re not supposed to have a hand in that, or maybe you’re supposed to be chosen and then things happen.
You’re not supposed to promote yourself.
You’re not supposed to promote yourself, yeah. And coming from DIY music, you had to promote yourself, and it was kind of celebrated. But also I think within this deep reconciliation I had with Tracy + the Plastics, I felt kind of immune. I had come to such a core resolution and gratitude. I was able to experience gratitude in a way that I haven’t with that project [Tracy + the Plastics].
If a leading museum decides to show a large body of work from Tracy + the Plastics that’s digitized and old, it’s different than if they ask you what are you doing now, how do you want to be part of this. I mean, they could have just said to you, “What we really want to do is show those 19 original videos.”
Really, Stephanie Snyder and Johanna Burton are the co-curators of the show with Sara O’Keeffe. Probably, other curators would not have brought this project there.
Also, the show is on the fifth-floor gallery, which is curated by Johanna, and the gallery and the residency program are inherently tied to the resource room—showing archival material to bring more of a contextual study of the exhibitions in that gallery.
So even more exciting—it gets better—is that she curated a show along with one of their archivists there from two video programs from the New Museum’s past. One from Bad Girls, which was this show in ’94, this early second-wave show of feminist work, and then videos from Homo Video, which was in 1986. They’re these amazing works from this long legacy of queer and feminist video art that I am totally indebted to. There was a lot of humbling thought put into the presentation of my work and the care for it, and this desire to put it into this history.
I will also say that the new video that I made while I was there is these two new heads in conversation. One is called Brick Wall Head and one is called Butterfly Wing Head and they’re made of materials that I found at the studio space, these fake kids’ cardboard bricks, and these decorative butterflies from the dollar store. I made those first and didn’t really know what they’d be talking about, and then it turned out to be all about compromise. About what happens when you compromise. Your compromise is really dangerous for me, says the Butterfly Wing Head to the Brick Wall Head, and it’s like, of course that would be scary. [laughs]
More Heads started as a response to an invitation to come to Serbia in 2013. And I was thinking, why am I being invited to Serbia, why Belgrade, why this place for me? And I started doing some preliminary research. I had a vague memory of being 14 and knowing there was war, conflict, so I started doing research both into Serbian mythology and also into the ’90s war, and everything kind of ties together. I was reading these very detailed descriptions of violence in these epic poems and epic songs, these specific acts against bodies, violent acts against bodies, being spelled out.
In the mythology?
Right, in these popular songs and popular poems. I just started thinking, what is a detailed description of peace? What is that language? What is that story? So the first video came about trying to think about that, and the line that felt the most right, most possible, most actual was this pink head saying, “I saw this guy shaking with rage and then he asked for help.” And that to me would be detailed peace. That somehow someone has been given the resources to be able to—in a state of total rage and isolation—to summon that request for help.
So then, if peace isn’t this state of being—if we’re not trying to teach each other how to be but how to act—then what is that acting going to look like?
It ties into the broader conversation about how you can have really good intentions and things can still go really wrong, that what matters are not these hidden, ore-like properties that can be mined later through character examination, but it’s what you do that counts because it exists. And video’s relationship to that is a question that I have for you. So you’re teaching at Seattle U and you happen to be teaching at a moment when video is being used as a tool by people who are seeking justice—no justice, no peace. I mean, there’s this real connection between video and the desire for change in a peaceful direction, in other words for video to play a specific role in ending violence. After police shootings, in particular. How does that enter your conversations with students?
Wow.
Maybe it’s a stretch. And maybe it doesn’t.
No, it’s part of the history of the art form, it really is. It definitely comes up as part of what this medium can do, and has done, and one of the texts that I use is Gregg Bordowitz’s “Operative Assumptions,” which he wrote in I think ’91. He very much writes about video-making as a political process, and as an activist process, too. So it comes up in that way.
Maybe this is not quite answering that question but what came up for me when you were talking is this parallel thing where I’m often trying to get students to consider how to be more aware of the messages that are in the media, the media that’s made, just basic media literacy—how are these images being constructed, what are they saying, what are the narratives that they’re following. But at the same time I want them to loosen their imagery. To actually try to get them to think symbolically, or to produce images that are speaking an emotional language as well as a figurative language, trying to get them to be more abstract and more playful and more poetic—but at the same time to be more critical.
How about if we could all be that way? I would also like to be that way.
I know! More poetic and more critical. But also to make sense when you want to make sense, but to not have to make sense and to not be afraid of not making sense.
Part of teaching this art form is to try to teach an anti-oppression curriculum, and to talk about the narratives of oppression that have been so perpetuated by video and by images, by media. So that does come up. It’s very much integral to what I try to get them to do in the classroom. One thing that I’m really thinking about lately in terms of that is… something like the privilege of abstraction. When do we actually need to see the bodies that we’re talking about? And see the actions that we’re talking about? And be concrete and show figures? But who’s showing the figures? Maybe abstraction and symbolic imagery or metaphor, being more poetic, is actually, I don’t know…
Is almost more precise or more specific?
Yeah, and when is it not, and when is it being determined by what body is making the work and what strategies are enabled or make the most sense for that body.
That brings up the issue of representation, both in terms of what’s in art, what’s in video, and who’s making it, and who’s showing it. I have to ask you about the UW job that you applied for that went to Flint Jamison this past year, in part of a series of hires that continue a history there of predominantly white male faculty going back to the beginning of the department—it’s not new, it’s not specific to UW, and it’s not personal to the people who are specifically involved. But I guess the larger question is really about what’s your experience with sexism in art academia? Is there anything helpful to say here?
Structural change is urgent! That’s one thing. Two specific things that I’m exploring in relation to sexism in academia and the art world are professionalism and speech. I’m becoming aware in a new way of quote-unquote feminized speech patterns and authority, because that’s how I speak. I think I’m broadly asking, okay, how are we supported in showing up as teachers of art?
I feel myself shutting down, I’m not sure why.
What do you mean by professionalism?
I am showing up more as myself in the classroom, but last year, my first year of full-time teaching, I put in place all of these layers of professional, like, professor, in order to establish authority in the classroom. And I still encountered incidences of that authority being really, what’s the word, dismissed and not seen or not respected. By male students.
Let me ask you, why are you curious about it?
I guess because in art—which is assumed to be progressive or transgressive or outside norms or whatever—I come across denial that sexism still exists, and I think I’m drawn to talk about subjects that people insist don’t exist. And also there’s the idea that it’s not an appropriate subject for people who should be talking about art. I’m trying to fill a conversational gap, and I’d like it to be a conversation that’s beyond whether there’s a gap, I’d like to have the actual conversation. Like, I want to be done talking about whether we should be talking about this.
Oh no, yeah, we should be talking about it. Let’s see. What is there to be said that is helpful?
Maybe I can be more helpful in my question. Is there a way to talk about what works? Like the way you take a detailed description of violence and make it into a detailed description of peace. How do you give a detailed description of respect and representation?
This is a big important conversation. I wish there were more people here to have it with us.
Me, too.
I guess I could just speak to teaching as a practice. It’s a strange practice of becoming part of an institution, part of an institutional voice. It makes sense that that conversation is coming up right now with being part of the New Museum’s institutional voice, and the conversation around privilege, and representation and identifying bodies—a lot of the things that we’ve been talking about.
My call to action for myself right now is that in a position of teaching, I have been given the authority that comes with that position in the classroom—not necessarily outside of the classroom. But I am the teacher in that space, and whether or not they do, people are assumed to listen to me.
I have had experiences in the classroom where I’ve recently been wondering, would that have happened if I was a cisgendered man? Or to be more specific, a white, straight, able-bodied—the list to identify the established institutional authority can go on.
Or even if you were a “tough guy.”
Yeah, right. If I had a deeper voice.
If you were louder.
Yeah. One thing that I’m learning is to explain what I’m doing even more than would be instinctual. I don’t know: Is that even a response to a sexist system?
Is it a defensive response, you mean?
Yeah. But what I’m finding is that it’s generous, and it’s part of my values, and part of how I want to be a teacher to literally narrate my process, my speaking process, my presentation process, for the students, because I think that it’s my job partly to model these other ways.
I think it’s my job to be actively in a process of thinking through authority, different kinds of authority with them, and involve them in that process. They’re doing it anyways, and it’s for the most part probably subconscious, so we can all bring it to consciousness.
This ties into you having this show at this large institution, with a big profile, and assuming the mantle of authority. I remember when you won the Stranger Genius Award in Art, we gave you a satin boxing robe. I assume you wear it all the time?
Yeah, I’m wearing it right now. Under my clothes.
It’s a question of ethical authority.
How do you hold authority and step aside?
How do you make mistakes in front of people you are supposed to be influencing?
It’s really helpful to have a lot of practice feeling embarrassed and being okay with it. Like, really. Just to go back to Tracy + the Plastics, this was a whole public career based on equipment failing, feeling not ready to do something and doing it anyways, things breaking. So that’s just to say that I really value feeling embarrassed. I think we have to value it. To be able to withstand that feeling, that discomfort. What I’ve learned from people, is that embarrassment means you’re on an edge. You’re on the edge of a new thing.
