{"id":50371,"date":"2025-08-07T12:29:14","date_gmt":"2025-08-07T12:29:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/50371\/"},"modified":"2025-08-07T12:29:14","modified_gmt":"2025-08-07T12:29:14","slug":"jeffrey-gibson-tells-michele-lamy-how-rave-culture-and-porn-collectors-inspire-him","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/50371\/","title":{"rendered":"Jeffrey Gibson Tells Mich\u00e8le Lamy How Rave Culture and Porn Collectors Inspire Him"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Jeffrey Gibson, photographed by Sean Frank.<\/p>\n

In Jeffrey Gibson\u2019s<\/a> world, punching bags are beaded, mannequins don jingle dresses, and slogans shimmer in sequins. Working across painting, sculpture, and video installation, the Choctaw-Cherokee artist enlists a variety of forms, colors, and textures to comment on the many injustices baked into American history. In 2024, he became the first Indigenous artist to present a solo exhibition at the Venice Biennale\u2019s U.S. Pavilion. Now, that landmark installation has made its way to L.A. in Jeffrey Gibson: the space in which to place me<\/a>, his first solo museum show in Southern California, now on view at The Broad until September 28th. To mark the occasion, he phoned Mich\u00e8le Lamy<\/a>, fashion\u2019s high priestess of the avant-garde, for a wide-ranging exchange about ancestry, the color black, and the grim state of the world. \u201cThe news is all fucked,\u201d lamented Lamy. \u201cWe need a shaman to show us the way.\u201d Gibson might be the right guy.\u2014OLAMIDE OYENUSI<\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014\u2014<\/p>\n

MICH\u00c8LE LAMY: All right. You are in the forest?<\/p>\n

JEFFREY GIBSON: I\u2019m in the forest at the beach in Long Island.<\/p>\n

LAMY: Wow, I\u2019m at the beach also.<\/p>\n

GIBSON: Where are you?<\/p>\n

LAMY: I\u2019m in Venice at the Lido.\u00a0<\/p>\n

GIBSON: Last year, we went to the beaches in the Lido every day that we could.<\/p>\n

LAMY: That\u2019s what we do when we are here. Even though my immersing in your world was in Venice, you had already said no to me at a point. I was doing something with Selfridges and I wanted to have an artist\u2019s boxing bag, but it seemed too complicated at the time and I was like, \u201cNo, we have to push for you.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

GIBSON: I wish I could have said yes to you, but it was not possible at the time.<\/p>\n

LAMY: So how come we got to be talking together? Where did this come from?<\/p>\n

GIBSON: You were my first choice. I\u2019ve been a huge fan for a very, very long time. I think you\u2019re an incredible creative mind, and I know you spent time in L.A.<\/p>\n

LAMY: L.A. has been so important, and it still is. I lived there 30 years. Are you there?<\/p>\n

\"jeffrey<\/a><\/p>\n

THE RETURNED MALE STUDENT FAR TOO FREQUENTLY GOES BACK TO THE RESERVATION AND FALLS INTO THE OLD CUSTOM OF LETTING HIS HAIR GROW LONG, 2024. Courtesy of Jeffrey Gibson Studio. Photo: Max Yawney.<\/p>\n

GIBSON: I don\u2019t live there. But I\u2019ve been invited to exhibit there.<\/p>\n

LAMY: Which gallery are you with?<\/p>\n

GIBSON: Hauser & Wirth.<\/p>\n

LAMY: So you like to do shows all over the world?<\/p>\n

GIBSON: Well, it\u2019s kind of a new thing. I\u2019ve mainly shown in the US for about 20 years, but I grew up in Germany and in Korea. I went to school in London.\u00a0<\/p>\n

LAMY: But how come you are married to somebody from Northern Europe?<\/p>\n

GIBSON: From Norway? We met in London. I think growing up the way that I did, I really truly believed by this point that love would be happening across all the borders. I just imagined a very different time than the world we live in now. When I met my husband, Rune, within the first eight hours we told each other we loved each other.<\/p>\n

LAMY: Yeah?<\/p>\n

GIBSON: Yeah. He\u2019s an artist also, so I think that\u2019s what brings us together.\u00a0<\/p>\n

LAMY: And now art is a way that we can open our mouths about the horrible time we are living with. Because of this genocide, there have been a lot of people wanting to analyze what happened in the US with people invading the land. What is fantastic is you are an artist from now, but there is this past that has been sort of shoveled away for a long time. Is that something you always had in you?<\/p>\n

GIBSON: I believe very much in ancestral memory and ancestral trauma. We inherit our circumstances, and part of acknowledging the past of my family and of all indigenous people here in North America is about trying to find sanity so that you don\u2019t crumble. I feel very, very fortunate to be an artist because art has given me an opportunity to lean into things that don\u2019t seem practical. They don\u2019t have to be linear, they don\u2019t have to make sense. It wasn\u2019t really until 17 or 18 that I started seeing people like Warhol and Keith Haring and Grace Jones and thought, \u201cI need to be in New York City.\u201d That became my pursuit. I had a friend from Ghana and she challenged me to go to London. She was like, \u201cYou need to get out of here and develop yourself as an artist in a place where people aren\u2019t asking you, \u201cWhat are you? What are you? What are you?\u201d I enjoy being a foreigner because you get to shed one part of yourself temporarily and then pick it back up.<\/p>\n

LAMY: That\u2019s why I moved to L.A. So in London, you were even more free to place yourself there than in the past.\u00a0<\/p>\n

GIBSON: Yeah, and I actually got to look at art. I think in the US at the time, everything was sort of identity politics-driven, which at one point really benefited me, but I didn\u2019t feel like I was learning so much.<\/p>\n

LAMY: Something that I like about London is that it\u2019s really a melting pot of a lot of people and music and everything.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"jeffrey<\/a><\/p>\n

Installation view, Jeffrey Gibson: When Fire Is Applied to a Stone It Cracks, Brooklyn Museum, February 14, 2020-January 10, 2021. Photo: Jonathan Dorado.<\/p>\n

GIBSON: Everybody in London at the time saw me as a Black person. There was no Native American community in London, so my time there was pretty incredible. Goldie had his club, Metalheadz, and there was still a carry-on of rave culture. It was a really big relief to be in London.<\/p>\n

LAMY: You talk about clubs. So, drum and bass?\u00a0<\/p>\n

GIBSON: A big influence for me was Leigh Bowery. He had died just before I got there. Before that, I was in Chicago from \u201892 to \u201896. Chicago house music was my world. Derrick Carter used to play, and then Derrick Carter went to London. London is a very cool place and the people who I met there were really influential. I met H\u00e9l\u00e8ne Cixous, who brought me to Paris and introduced me to her theater and her friends. We did a project together.<\/p>\n

LAMY: Leigh Bowery put you in the mood to do performance? There is a big retrospective right now at The Barbican. I knew about Leigh Bowery, but I was already in the States. I saw him in New York.<\/p>\n

GIBSON: Oh, yeah?\u00a0<\/p>\n

LAMY: For Wigstock. I came back with Michael Clark, who was such an inventor in dance and performance.<\/p>\n

GIBSON: The thing about Leigh Bowery was, first of all, he was about my size. He was a big guy. In gay culture at the time, which was all about muscle and tiny little boys, to see somebody like Leigh Bowery running around the streets with no clothes on and performing his work with Michael Clark, that\u2019s what made me start making garments for myself. If you think about it, it was after the height of the AIDS crisis. When I was in my 30s, I began to understand the kind of politics that were happening more. The urgency, the death, the trauma.\u00a0<\/p>\n

LAMY: The AIDS crisis was before you went to London. It happened in London, too.<\/p>\n

GIBSON: Yeah. I wasn\u2019t really aware of it because I was 18 in 1990. Now I\u2019ve met a lot of those people who lost everybody in their lives during that time, and I can\u2019t imagine. I grew up in the generation just after it, which is a different kind of sexuality and gender. I did a video this past year where I wore my own garments, and it\u2019s based off of the Leigh Bowery performance at Anthony d\u2019Offay in \u201988. I wish I had met him. I think the way that Leigh played with camp was smart. It was very pointed. It had an opinion. It\u2019s aware camp. When I was in my schooling, there weren\u2019t so many people who understood that camp can be a tool of critique.\u00a0<\/p>\n

LAMY: Then when you are in a place like the Biennale, it is more from the past and you make it completely present.<\/p>\n

GIBSON: Venice has a very specific context. I started going to the Biennale in 2005, and I went with a Native American curator named Kathleen Ash-Milby. She was the co-curator for my exhibition. We would be in vaporetto like, \u201cWhat if, one day\u2026?\u201d I saw her go through many attempts, and when I decided to propose and I was selected, there\u2019s a lot of responsibility that I knew was expected of Native communities in particular. I think it would\u2019ve been a mistake for me to go solely as Jeffrey Gibson. I\u2019m not a traditionalist, so if I want to work with something traditional, my first thought is always, \u201cWho is the traditional person?\u201d Ultimately, it is a kind of collaboration, but it\u2019s not like I alter what they do and they alter what I do.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"jeffrey<\/a><\/p>\n

The Enforcer, 2024. Courtesy of Jeffrey Gibson Studio. Photo: Max Yawney.<\/p>\n

LAMY: Yeah. And that huge red splash! What\u2019s going on in that?<\/p>\n

GIBSON: I\u2019ve been looking at a lot of Black American artists in the \u201960s and the \u201970s who really remain true to their practice of experimentation, abstraction, and individualism. Artists like Sam Gilliam, Ed Clark, and even some of David Hammons\u2019 conceptual works. They keep the space open for multiple answers. They\u2019re never trying to shut it down into resolution, and that\u2019s the lesson I take away from them. I think the way that we define each other in the world, by race or by nationality, is not anything I\u2019ve ever truly believed in. I grew up moving across all sorts of borders and it made my life better. That\u2019s the world that I believe in.<\/p>\n

LAMY: So now your next show is in Paris?<\/p>\n

GIBSON: Yes, and it\u2019s incredible talking to the gallery in Paris because in the US, oftentimes I\u2019m confined to conversations around known Native American histories. I\u2019ll make something and they\u2019ll be like, \u201cWhere does this come from in your culture?\u201d For me to say, \u201cOh, it also comes from Korea, and it also comes from drum and bass, and it also comes from rave\u201d\u2014it\u2019s too much for the conversations here to absorb. This is why French philosophers have been such a big influence on me. If I mentioned that in the US they\u2019re like, \u201cWhat does French philosophy have to do with being Native American?\u201d In France, they were like, \u201cFantastic. Anyone coming off the street will be familiar with what you\u2019re talking about.\u201d<\/p>\n

LAMY: Are you Deleuzian?<\/p>\n

GIBSON: I am very Deleuzian. Deleuze makes perfect sense to me.<\/p>\n

LAMY: That\u2019s why you want to talk to me, because I met him the first years I was at university. He was teaching in Lyon on what became The Logic of Sense. Then Michel Foucault says the 21st century is going to be Deleuzian. You are the only one to talk about this in the States.<\/p>\n

GIBSON: It\u2019s funny because the way that those thinkers articulated what they saw in the world really predicted the times that we\u2019re living in. We\u2019re experiencing all of the inevitable conflicts of living that way. Unfortunately, I\u2019m not sure that it\u2019s going to get better anytime soon.<\/p>\n

LAMY: No, because we are at the end of a certain civilization, of those white hetero males and their last fight of power. I don\u2019t know how to prepare more than just having a voice and trying to do something, but I\u2019m pulling my hair. What can we do? I don\u2019t know how it\u2019s going to end. I\u2019m old, so I would like the thing to go faster.<\/p>\n

GIBSON: When COVID lockdown happened in the US, I reached out to two people, AA Bronson and Avram Finkelstein, who was one of the founders of Gran Fury.<\/p>\n

LAMY: Yeah, I know him.<\/p>\n

GIBSON: I spoke to them because I was teaching and my students didn\u2019t want to make artwork anymore. They were like, \u201cWhat\u2019s the point?\u201d So I was asking them about how they continued to make artwork as the AIDS crisis came into their lives, and what I learned was that it doesn\u2019t always change you. If you\u2019re already engaged in communities and then something\u2019s happening, you continue engaging in those communities. Right now it is tough thinking about being an artist because much of what I want to make is for the future.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"jeffrey<\/a><\/p>\n

BIRDS FLYING HIGH YOU KNOW HOW I FEEL, 2024. Courtesy of Jeffrey Gibson Studio.<\/p>\n

LAMY: It is, but the news is all fucked up, and we need a shaman to show us the way. Do you think that boxing helps you to believe in what you do and be strong?\u00a0<\/p>\n

GIBSON: Well, my introduction to boxing came through my therapist. I was talking about homophobia and racism and classism in the art world, and there was anxiety in my head, but I wasn\u2019t able to do anything with my body. He introduced me to a physical trainer. She would hold the bag and say, \u201cWho do you want to hit? Who do you want to kick?\u201d I was trying to imagine a person, and then I realized those things are faceless circumstances. I think I was afraid to be angry at a time in my life, but you don\u2019t want to hold onto anger. If it\u2019s not my problem, I don\u2019t want to carry it.<\/p>\n

LAMY: [I did it] 50 years ago at the Wild Card Boxing Club. It was also to change ambience and be with those guys instead of being at the gym pushing iron. And it was the beginning of women really starting to fight. The bag always shows something\u2014it\u2019s an image, but with you it was a fantastic image.<\/p>\n

GIBSON: The first punching bag that I made, I was meeting with very traditional Native artists out in the reservations in Oregon, Winnipeg, and South Dakota, people who were making their own music, jewelry, and clothing. There was something about the way that they were showing their independence. It commanded respect. One day I was boxing and all of a sudden it just came together. I was like, \u201cOh my gosh, if the bag is dressed, I don\u2019t want to hit it.\u201d That was the beginning of the punching bags. And then the text came in when thinking about incantations that have to do with power and relationships. There\u2019s something about visual self-respect that diffuses anger for me, especially with Native people when it comes to regalia.\u00a0<\/p>\n

LAMY: You quit your shrink after you continued to do boxing?<\/p>\n

GIBSON: Five years later, I tried to include my shrink in a performance. It was at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. I called him up and I was so excited like, \u201cWe\u2019re going to do a session in front of an audience,\u201d and it was going to be about my grandfather and Jackson Pollock. He refused. He said it was unethical.<\/p>\n

LAMY: Wow. What about AI?<\/p>\n

GIBSON: Oh my gosh. Well, it\u2019s such a weapon because it is believable. We\u2019ve already come through this intense media onslaught of the 20th century, and our bodies can\u2019t handle what we\u2019re already receiving. And then on top of that, reality, fiction, creation, imagination is all getting confused even more through AI.<\/p>\n

LAMY: Every time there has been a big change in technology, there has been some kind of war at the same time. Do you think it\u2019s going to change your way of expressing yourself?<\/p>\n

GIBSON: No. If anything, what it\u2019s going to change is the analog ability. I\u2019m one of the last generations who was born into analog culture. Digital happened in my lifetime, but I\u2019m not a first tongue user. Going into this crazy digital era, I feel like the simplicity of making artisanal craft is even more valuable. That will be the direction that I go in for the rest of my life.<\/p>\n

LAMY: You have the rest of your life.\u00a0<\/p>\n

GIBSON: Oh, I will use it, but\u2014<\/p>\n

LAMY: It\u2019s a tool.<\/p>\n

GIBSON: I will use it as a tool, for sure. There still has to be a humanity in how it\u2019s used. There\u2019s supposed to be a humanity in how it\u2019s distributed. When we talk about the separation of classes over who has education and healthcare, it\u2019ll be a similar thing. I think that in art school, to analyze an image was hugely empowering for me. I had an amazing professor who was an early pornography collector. She showed us Leni Riefenstahl films and she would say, \u201cYou have to understand how an image is being created.\u201d So I grew up always questioning who made it and why and how, whether it\u2019s theatrical or real. I credit a lot of those French thinkers for opening up these questions for me.<\/p>\n

\"jeffrey<\/a><\/p>\n

Charles Cary Rumsey (American, 1879\u20131922). The Dying Indian, 1900s. Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Mrs. Charles Cary Rumsey, 30.917.<\/p>\n

LAMY: Yeah, and all this has been developed because of the army. It\u2019s so expensive to develop and it\u2019s to save us, not to save the world. I think Sotheby\u2019s or Christie\u2019s was showing me some AI artists and it was refusing to call them \u201cAI artists.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

GIBSON: Right. I\u2019ve been asked to do AI projects. I do use a lot of digital technology, mainly printing and imaging. Actually, in the sculptures that I\u2019m going to show at the Met\u2014<\/p>\n

LAMY: Yeah, we should talk about your show at the Met.<\/p>\n

GIBSON: In September, I\u2019m showing four new sculptures on the front of the building, and they\u2019re traditional bronzes. I sculpted maquettes in the studio and completed them with digital sculpting through CGI with the foundry. There\u2019s remarkable-looking parts of the sculptures that I never touched. They only existed in a digital file.\u00a0<\/p>\n

LAMY: You thought about it, and then they exist.\u00a0<\/p>\n

GIBSON: And I worked with them for three-and-a-half years before we arrived here. The digital sculpting was pretty remarkable. We have lots of beadwork on the facade, and every single bead was recreated digitally, even though we use real beads in the maquettes. They\u2019re handmade beads, so none of them are exactly alike. In the digital recreation, there\u2019s randomization that happens through CGI, so we actually are producing hundreds of different kinds of beads through a program that just randomizes.<\/p>\n

LAMY: Voila!\u00a0<\/p>\n

GIBSON: We should talk about the color black, Mich\u00e8le.<\/p>\n

LAMY: Okay, if you want.<\/p>\n

GIBSON: I saw your quote, and it was funny because I was talking to my now therapist about watching fashion shows with my children. We were watching Rick Owens, the most recent show.<\/p>\n

LAMY: The men\u2019s show?<\/p>\n

GIBSON: Yeah. I was describing it to him and he said, \u201cI have to see this.\u201d So he watched it and came back and said, \u201cThat was really intense.\u201d I was like, \u201cYeah, we live in intense times.\u201d He said, \u201cWhy are you drawn to the color black?\u201d I said, \u201cThe thing that I like about Rick Owens and Mich\u00e8le Lamy is I believe that they see black as not a flat non-color, but a rich space full of infinite possibility. There\u2019s a warmth to the black.\u201d I had never seen your quote about black being a space before, so when I just read that the other day, I thought that was really fantastic. Black obviously has always been used to represent this time of darkness and of sadness, this time of without.<\/p>\n

LAMY: It was of the punks, the witches, the ghosts.<\/p>\n

GIBSON: Yeah.<\/p>\n

LAMY: That\u2019s why when I saw your show and this huge red construction, I\u2019ve been wearing big red clothes.<\/p>\n

GIBSON: Amazing.<\/p>\n

LAMY: It\u2019s amazing with the black, and it\u2019s nice you saw the show. I hope you will come to our next one. But first, we are going to go to see you at the Met.<\/p>\n

GIBSON: Awesome. Mich\u00e8le, thank you so much for everything you do. It\u2019s such an honor.<\/p>\n

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