Stanya Kahn
A video artist who defies characterization.
By David Jacob Kramer
Photographed by Sarah Soquel Morhaim
In many of Stanya Kahn's video pieces the camera follows her around Los Angeles as she assumes eccentric identities, in costume, cracking a barrage of jokes, offering dubious advice and telling stories that she seems to be making up as she goes. She is captured by a hand-held camcorder and manipulated by loads of consecutive split-second edits amid dense
sound work. Kahn comes from a live performance background and is as funny and engaging as she is disorienting and discomfiting. Kahn's work was a standout in the 2008 Whitney Biennial and has been included in shows at the Getty Center, the California Biennial and PS1.
We talked at Kahn's Highland Park home about her most recent exhibition, "It's Cool, I'm Good." Made up of three videos, the title piece features her idiosyncratic wandering and nattering, this time on crutches in a hospital gown, her head and limbs bandaged up, sometimes riding a dirt bike around the desert or struggling to get a corn dog into her gauze-filled mouth. The other two pieces document Kahn's mother and best friend as they go about their days, each candidly discussing personal trials, sometimes austerely reflective, other times cracking themselves up.
DAVID JACOB KRAMER: There's an intensity and a natural comedy to your performing in front of the camera. How do you get yourself into that zone?
STANYA KAHN: In "It's Cool, I'm Good," I was surprised by the feeling of being bandaged up. I had stuffed a wad of gauze under my lip and taped my lip to the side of
my face. I was slurping my saliva and had a big wax glob over one eye so I couldn't see
all the way, speak properly or use my hands. I'd taped these sticks to the sides of my legs so I couldn't really walk, and then I'm naked under the hospital gown and there's this flapping vulnerability. So it went from a visual idea to this physical element that put
me in a vulnerable state. A kind of speaking came, an attitude and set of behaviors that I also hadn't planned. All of a sudden this sort of obnoxious person came through.
DJK: Many of your videos follow you performing as a certain "character," only they're more abstract than characters. They contradict their own back-stories. You explain that bandaged character's injuries like, "really bad sunburn," then later "shark attack," then later "I got my head stuck in the pickle jar."
SK: The pickle jar explanation is a line from a blonde joke. But yeah, the story is unstable. Sometimes people use the word "character," but I think of myself as going more into a state of being that might represent issues or ideas. I like to interrupt the way we usually identify character. I'm hoping to create a space where the viewer has to do some of the work.
DJk: There's no real plot to "It's Cool, I'm Good" either, but there are nuances and connections.
SK: I think of these things as little threads of narrative. I'm trying to say that it's not so
important what happened to this person, but how she's coping.
DJk: It ends with your character in the bed of a pothead she met through a Craigslist Casual Encounters post. Was that maybe a reference to a happy ending?
SK: No, more like, was that her last make-out session before dying? Or is this person like, "It's cool, I'm good. Everything's going to be OK?" I'm interested in that ambiguity because it's one that I live with, never exactly sure if things are OK or if they're about to fall apart.
DJK: In the exhibition, you incorporate other documentary-style interview pieces featuring your mother in "Sandra: and best friend in "Kathy." They are natural performers too, and their humor -- when they talk about difficult, often gnarly experience -- mirrors the comedy of your hobbling about bandaged up and wounded.
SK: In "Sandra" and "Kathy," the subjects are alive in the act of recollection, using humor and a performative kind of story-telling to address things that happened. Those
pieces share an interest in how we make meaning out of trauma and how humor plays a big part in that. Humor seems to function as a strategy that ends up reworking meaning -- I don't just mean, "Oh, humor gets us through hard times and we make the best of it by joking around." There is that; but then there's this other level where, when you put humor right next to trauma, another meaning evolves. Trauma reworks your sense of reality, about life or the world. It gives way to new language, because when we have a different understanding of things, we have to figure out a different way to name things. It reorganizes your perspective. Humor does the same thing. Part of why we laugh is we're suddenly seeing things in a different way than we had.
DJK: Your use of location isn't literal either.
SK: I think about the physical locations almost as psychological spaces, and this is not meant to sound pretentious, but like in a Samuel Beckett sense. Time is also jumbled up; it's day and it's night, and it's night and it's day, and we're traveling around the clock and through space, hopefully disrupting a traditional use of location, more as a way to identify real spaces in a character's life. Part of why I chose expansive landscapes and exterior shots is because there's already an interiority at the center of it all with this person and their mind, and a kind of narcissism that's inherit in that. The performer is constantly saying, "Look at me! Listen to me!"
DJK: Do you embed your own self in these people?
SK: There's always personal stuff embedded, but I'm not interested in making an autobiographical piece, per se. I get a certain drive from my lived experiences and then I see if I can construct them into a story that could ring with meaning. I spent years performing in hats, glasses, ski masks, hoods and burlap sacks, obscuring my face because I wanted to make sure there was not a personality distracting from what I felt was more interesting -- the stories, or the images and actions. Now, the masking has become more subtle. But I think that's why I never did stand-up comedy, because I was like, "I can't just stand up there and be me."
David Jacob Kramer is the co-owner of Family Bookstore in Los Angeles.
Family Bookstore Takes Us to L.A.
sound work. Kahn comes from a live performance background and is as funny and engaging as she is disorienting and discomfiting. Kahn's work was a standout in the 2008 Whitney Biennial and has been included in shows at the Getty Center, the California Biennial and PS1.
We talked at Kahn's Highland Park home about her most recent exhibition, "It's Cool, I'm Good." Made up of three videos, the title piece features her idiosyncratic wandering and nattering, this time on crutches in a hospital gown, her head and limbs bandaged up, sometimes riding a dirt bike around the desert or struggling to get a corn dog into her gauze-filled mouth. The other two pieces document Kahn's mother and best friend as they go about their days, each candidly discussing personal trials, sometimes austerely reflective, other times cracking themselves up.
DAVID JACOB KRAMER: There's an intensity and a natural comedy to your performing in front of the camera. How do you get yourself into that zone?
STANYA KAHN: In "It's Cool, I'm Good," I was surprised by the feeling of being bandaged up. I had stuffed a wad of gauze under my lip and taped my lip to the side of
my face. I was slurping my saliva and had a big wax glob over one eye so I couldn't see
all the way, speak properly or use my hands. I'd taped these sticks to the sides of my legs so I couldn't really walk, and then I'm naked under the hospital gown and there's this flapping vulnerability. So it went from a visual idea to this physical element that put
me in a vulnerable state. A kind of speaking came, an attitude and set of behaviors that I also hadn't planned. All of a sudden this sort of obnoxious person came through.
DJK: Many of your videos follow you performing as a certain "character," only they're more abstract than characters. They contradict their own back-stories. You explain that bandaged character's injuries like, "really bad sunburn," then later "shark attack," then later "I got my head stuck in the pickle jar."
SK: The pickle jar explanation is a line from a blonde joke. But yeah, the story is unstable. Sometimes people use the word "character," but I think of myself as going more into a state of being that might represent issues or ideas. I like to interrupt the way we usually identify character. I'm hoping to create a space where the viewer has to do some of the work.
DJk: There's no real plot to "It's Cool, I'm Good" either, but there are nuances and connections.
SK: I think of these things as little threads of narrative. I'm trying to say that it's not so
important what happened to this person, but how she's coping.
DJk: It ends with your character in the bed of a pothead she met through a Craigslist Casual Encounters post. Was that maybe a reference to a happy ending?
SK: No, more like, was that her last make-out session before dying? Or is this person like, "It's cool, I'm good. Everything's going to be OK?" I'm interested in that ambiguity because it's one that I live with, never exactly sure if things are OK or if they're about to fall apart.
DJK: In the exhibition, you incorporate other documentary-style interview pieces featuring your mother in "Sandra: and best friend in "Kathy." They are natural performers too, and their humor -- when they talk about difficult, often gnarly experience -- mirrors the comedy of your hobbling about bandaged up and wounded.
SK: In "Sandra" and "Kathy," the subjects are alive in the act of recollection, using humor and a performative kind of story-telling to address things that happened. Those
pieces share an interest in how we make meaning out of trauma and how humor plays a big part in that. Humor seems to function as a strategy that ends up reworking meaning -- I don't just mean, "Oh, humor gets us through hard times and we make the best of it by joking around." There is that; but then there's this other level where, when you put humor right next to trauma, another meaning evolves. Trauma reworks your sense of reality, about life or the world. It gives way to new language, because when we have a different understanding of things, we have to figure out a different way to name things. It reorganizes your perspective. Humor does the same thing. Part of why we laugh is we're suddenly seeing things in a different way than we had.
DJK: Your use of location isn't literal either.
SK: I think about the physical locations almost as psychological spaces, and this is not meant to sound pretentious, but like in a Samuel Beckett sense. Time is also jumbled up; it's day and it's night, and it's night and it's day, and we're traveling around the clock and through space, hopefully disrupting a traditional use of location, more as a way to identify real spaces in a character's life. Part of why I chose expansive landscapes and exterior shots is because there's already an interiority at the center of it all with this person and their mind, and a kind of narcissism that's inherit in that. The performer is constantly saying, "Look at me! Listen to me!"
DJK: Do you embed your own self in these people?
SK: There's always personal stuff embedded, but I'm not interested in making an autobiographical piece, per se. I get a certain drive from my lived experiences and then I see if I can construct them into a story that could ring with meaning. I spent years performing in hats, glasses, ski masks, hoods and burlap sacks, obscuring my face because I wanted to make sure there was not a personality distracting from what I felt was more interesting -- the stories, or the images and actions. Now, the masking has become more subtle. But I think that's why I never did stand-up comedy, because I was like, "I can't just stand up there and be me."
David Jacob Kramer is the co-owner of Family Bookstore in Los Angeles.
Family Bookstore Takes Us to L.A.
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