Q+A with Erin Mullin
TS- Who is your favorite, or most frequently thought of, art philosopher? (or both if they are different people)
Judith Butler was a really important person for me to read in college. It was the first time I began to think about performance as a multi-faceted thing and an act that bleeds into everyday life. That seems crazy but it was really a revelation for me.
N- Which of your pieces was your favorite? Why? Which was your least favorite? Why?
My favorites were the picture of the faces that I drew using minimal lines and the video of my dad as a child. They seem self contained to me and I know that I put some care into doing them. My least favorite is the picture of my face I drew at the laundromat which I did at the last minute and wasn’t happy with.
N- From seeing your work before, I’ve noticed an evolution (not for better or for worse) from very complex intertextual layered multimedia towards very stripped down close to your daily life work, almost like notes to yourself…is this true at all? Can you speak to this?
I guess that’s indicative of where I am in my personal life. Or in my relationship to art and making it. I think I am frustrated with trying to make art and frustrated with myself so my recourse is to keep it simple - to answer more basic questions for myself rather than striving to do something impressive.
EF- Where does your thought process lie in your work? Is it very much in the planning stages or does it evolve in the actual production and/or performance of what comes from you?
There was a notable difference for me in making something for the platform of this website vs. making something for live performance. There’s something about the medium of the internet, the way things seem frozen in time there that fills me with anxiety and makes me feel the need to turn out at least a semi-finished product. I don’t like working that way. I know that I learn best from trying so I would rather figure things out as I go along (less planning) but in the case of the website, I felt compelled to plan things before trying them.
A: How would you describe your relationship with your memory?
Hm. I would say that memory is a go-to when I have to produce something. That’s because I can stand behind it- I can say that this is something that I know so I can make things about it. The act of revisiting a past event and seeing it in a new light has always been very intriguing to me.
C: I saw your relationship to time as a recurring theme in your work. How does time influence you and can you discuss the different ways you manipulated and/incorporated it in some of your pieces?
Time is one of those things that I think escapes our immediate investigation sometimes because it seems like a constant. Time passes, people move at X speeds, this happens at X speed, etc. If we as humans had more awareness than we do I think time would be one of the things that would just totally blow our minds. The possibilities of manipulating time are more vast than we think. It’s sort of stupid but I think people moving, talking slower and faster than usual is really great. Whether it’s something that is manipulated by technology or something the human achieves on their own.
H - I’d like to hear about your relationship to family: what it is that interests you/haunts you/repels you/grounds you/etc. Specifically your relationship to your immediate family (if you want to talk about it) but also about the idea of family in general.
I come from a close knit immediate family, a really supportive one, so I think I’m super lucky in that. But you know, I’m the only person in my family (in recent history) who has pursued any sort of career in the arts. I sometimes think that THAT is why I want to make pieces about my family, because it’s untapped- there’s been no real self reflection (at least through art) in the history of my family. But I think that might be bullshit. It’s also that they are interesting subjects to me. People I know SO well yet sometimes feel like I don’t know at all.
M- Who is your favorite writer and why? Who is your favorite performer and why?
My favorite fiction writer is David Foster Wallace. Actually, I guess he’s my favorite essayist too. His fiction is oftentimes really difficult for me to read- he’s so smart and it’s hard to keep up. It’s intentional, I think, this strategy of trying to challenge the reader, of daring them to quit. He overloads the reader with lengthy descriptions, extrapolations that delve into science and math. And all of these endnotes! In Infinite Jest there are 388 endnotes, some of which are long. It’s boring for me. But then he will drop in a line or an idea or a character that makes hanging in there so worth it. I think it’s important to not dismiss something because it doesn’t automatically excite or interest you.
My favorite performer is Kate Valk of The Wooster Group. I was an intern there and got to observe their process and I think she’s just incredible. She’s so brave and thoughtful.
W- Erin, did your grandmother and/or father respond to your piece A letter to my grandmother/a movie of my father? Were they part of your intended audience?
That piece came really fast upon the heels of my grandmother’s death which is how I came to have access to her letters, journals, and pictures. It was really insane- there were like hundreds of letters from her old suitors in college, young men who were in the army and were away so the rate of letter sending was alarmingly high. The letters read to me like texts or like instant messages- these guys would update her by the hour on the oftentimes banal events in their lives. I never realized before that letters could be so casual. But I digress. I think that piece came out of me wanting to do some digging around in my family’s past, to try to better understand their lives outside of the context of myself. I don’t think that my family was part of the intended audience, in fact I think I would be slightly embarrassed if they saw it.
JF-Tell me about your family’s involvement with your theater and art-making?
My family is not actively involved in my art-making process but they are 100% passively involved in the sense that I think about them often. My relationship to being a member of my family is interesting to me. It is hard to understand myself outside of the context of my family. Simultaneously, thinking about myself within the context of family is problematic because it makes it harder to embrace or understand things about myself that might separate me from my family. Family becomes a double-edged sword that for me right now is a really good place to start.