Interview: Noah Simblist

If any of you caught the Collecting and Collectivity show at Conduit last month, you got a little taste of what Dallas artist Noah Simblist does while you are working your crappy day job. He took some time to talk with us us via email about the show, his artwork, the Dallas art scene, blog comments, and changing the hearts and minds of Young Republicans.

Could you talk a little about how the Collecting and Collectivity project came about, all of the elements involved, etc?

This project started with conversations between Charissa Terranova and I. She was then teaching art history at SMU and we wanted to construct some programming that would bridge the art and art history departments. Theoretically, we were both interested in the legacy of radicalism in the avant-garde. Today with an art market that has been able to assimilate just about any idea, no matter how subversive, we were wondering just how subversive ideas could participate in art institutions – if at all. This also came at a time when the Dallas Museum of Art was getting a huge gift from the Rachofsky, Rose and Hoffman collections which highlighted post-war and contemporary art. So we decided to put together a symposium, some lectures a graduate seminar, a panel discussion at the College Art Association conference and the show at Conduit.

We approached Nancy Whitenack from Conduit to ask if she wanted to collaborate and she was very excited. We also wrote some grants and raised the money from SMU’s Meadows School of the Arts, as well as the Art, Art History and English departments. Charissa took a job with UTD’s Central Track residency program midway through which made the process a little more complicated and in the end she had very little to do with the exhibition. She contributed to an essay and UTD funded the brochure for the exhibition.

At the same time, I was editing an issue of Artlies about collectivism with Michelle White from the Menil and the whole project became a monster that lasted about two years. We started with an idea and then raised the money and then the organizing started. This involved contacting people and trying find the right mix for the symposium and the Conduit show. This was a long and complicated process and I’m happy to move on with my own work but it was very rewarding and there were some amazing people involved.

What has been your experience working with Glasstire, Art Lies, and other publications? Glasstire, like our blog, allows for comments on your articles. Do you ever read them? Have you ever gotten any really bad ones?

I have loved writing for those publications. I found that it has helped me to stay connected to the art community and to participate in a kind of dialogue in a way that wouldn’t be possible otherwise. Sometimes the “dialogue” on the message boards or in the comments on Glasstire can be pretty childish and I try not to participate in that. I do read them sometimes but try to ignore them for the most part. The worst comments that were ever written about me had more to do with a review of my work that Charissa Terranova wrote. It became pretty clear that the backlash had little to do with my work but more with taste – a reaction against minimalism or conceptualism that was attached to me in a very generalized way. I didn’t respond because I didn’t think that the criticism really had anything to do with me and getting involved would be a losing battle.

You moved to Dallas from New York four years ago. What has been your experience here, working with galleries and local artists?

When I was in New York, I worked for a print publisher, a print dealer and an artist as well as teaching part time. Since moving here I have had much more time for my work but also the freedom to come up with projects like Collecting and Collectivity and writing for Artlies and Glasstire. I find the Dallas community to be like the Texas art community as a whole, pretty unpretentious and open to work together to try new things. That said, I don’t think that Dallas has a very strong infrastructure for critical thinking. There is the Core Program in Houston and Art Pace in San Antonio and Austin has a PhD program in Art history. While the Dallas art scene is ambitious and exciting in many ways it still uses shopping and couture as the main model. In many ways the artists supported by the commercial galleries in town follow suit. Although I do think that the recent panel discussions and video screenings at places like Conduit and Road Agent and the great work that Paul Slocum does at And/Or points in the right direction.

I was surprised when I first read about your exhibition at the SMU Pollock gallery, "Protocols of Zion"- it seems more like something you would see at And/Or than a primarily conservative Methodist university. How has your academic career affected your work?

Well, I decided to do that show at SMU for precisely that reason. I thought it would have greater power in the space that it was about rather than from the outside looking in. I self consciously organized the exhibition to be about and for the university community. That way the line between fact and fiction was harder to judge. This actually got me into some hot water with the SMU legal department. I also put together a panel discussion in the show that brought together Rick Halperin, a professor of history and expert on human rights as well as Mark Chancey, a professor of religious studies to talk about the tensions between divine right and human rights in the Israeli Palestinian conflict. We had a very diverse crowd that included Jews, Christians, Muslims, teachers and students from Political Science, History, Art, Art History and Religious Studies plus some people from the Dallas community. It was a very powerful conversation bringing together some ideas that generally don’t get talked about at the same time.

In many ways this show and the panel as a part of it shows some things about my experience at SMU. While the administration and student body are for the most part pretty conservative, it gives us something to talk about. So that when I bring up the connections between art and politics in my classes I’m not preaching to the converted. I really feel like I bring up challenging and complex issues that aren’t being talked about otherwise. This idea of dialogue that is at the center of academia is also increasingly at the center of my work. I think that working in an academic context has allowed me to follow this path much more easily than if I had staid more in the commercial art world. I do think that there are lots of spaces of overlap but they are rare – especially in this country.

Your work spans a pretty wide variety of mediums- sound pieces, painting, drawing, video art. What are some of your future plans?

I have a whole bunch of new ideas and some old ones that I want to extend. Some new ideas include a piece about Palestine, Texas (not far form Dallas) and the ways that the American west has been used as a kind of promised land that takes on a similar utopian and messianic character. This is especially interesting to me given the new rise in Christian Zionism with people like the Rev John Hagee that I talked about with the Protocols of Zion show that are based in Texas.

I also want to do a project about the history of African American and Jewish American relations. The 1960’s was a time when Jewish Marxist activists were deeply tied to the civil rights movement. The NAACP was founded by blacks and Jews together. The history of this relationship has unfolded in a complicated way and unfortunately there has been prejudice from some factions on both sides against the other since then. But I am interested in the use of Zion as an image by African American Baptist churches and how it relates to Jewish ideas of Zion, which today is mostly connected to the state of Israel. A tangential aspect of this is the phenomenon of Black Hebrews (African Americans who believe that they are the descendants of the ancient Israelites) who live in a small town in Israel called Dimona.

I’m also going to participate in a project run by the International Committee Against Housing Demolition this summer. They are an NGO that works as an advocacy group for Palestinian rights. They will be building houses in the West Bank destroyed by the Israeli authorities. I will be working with them and recording the experience with video and audio as well as using some interviews.

All of these ideas are more thematic at this point but they might become installations with video, audio, drawings and text like the past projects that I’ve worked on.

Photo: Painting by Noah Simblist, 2004