A conversation with artist Michael Milano

Shannon Stratton

Ascending, In Twills, Score excerpt – Micahel Milano

Shannon Stratton: So I'm here in Atlanta about to have a conversation about ‘cold’ for Drain magazine, and it seemed like a good time start our conversation for the publication to accompany your sound piece In Twills.

I wanted to include In Twills in response to the idea of cold as put forth by Drain editor Avantika Bawa who wonders if ‘transparent, clear and meditative practice can counter lavish, hot and hysterical culture into something cold.’ I am uncomfortable with assigning temperature to 'meditative', 'practice', or 'object,' or attempt to redefine in things along a hot/cold binary. However, when I was thinking of In Twills, I was wondering about it as a piece that takes the practice of weaving, something that is meditative but very intimate and therefore warm, and creates something that exploits the system of weaving in service of a sound - something that might be aloof and abstract in comparison to the tactile nature of object. Is In Twills a 'cool' distillation of the predictable warmth of 'craft' and 'hand'?

Michael Milano: Atlanta in the summer sounds like a curious place to think/write about the topic of the cold, because I imagine it is rather hot; and by hot I mean baroque and hysterical (see how absurd this temperature thing is).

My first instinct as a response to the question of whether In Twills is a 'cool' distillation of the predictable warmth of 'craft' and the 'hand' is to say yes, perhaps. Rather than hot or cold, it is purposely lukewarm, attempting or seeking a balance between the abstraction or aloofness of systems, structures, or patterns, with the commonplace or prosaic quality of woven textiles; however the problem with the term lukewarm is that it implies a lack of conviction or enthusiasm which is not necessarily true or useful. I think that you are absolutely right to recognize that the way that I am working is closely analogous to the process of weaving, except that I am not producing any cloth whatsoever. I chose to work specifically with twill patterns because of the cultural associations denim (which is one of the most common forms of twills) has with labor and the casual; there seemed to me a beautiful duality to this material which simultaneously points to back-breaking labor/work (blue-collar) and an everyday/casualness in our culture (blue-jeans). The sound piece is an extrapolation from a series of drawings I have been making, which are rigorous and laborious meditations on grids and binary structures worked out in casual or common materials, such as ballpoint pens and masking tape. So in this context we might be able to say that I am trying to fill out the spectrum which exists between the hot and the cold, in order to find a temperature which is hospitable and sustainable, because it would seem that the extremely hot and the extremely cold are not ideal places to live.

SS: At the panel the term ‘lukewarm’ was thrown around quite a bit - as the medium place between hot and cold. Those terms seemed to resonate as being equal to or symbolic of some kind of destruction from which we return anew (after the fire or the deep-freeze). Balance or finding balance was suggested several times. What's another term for lukewarm? Is there is a temperature that has more conviction yet still implies a balance? I wonder about the desire for extremes that make something like lukewarm seem weak. In retrospect I think I might pull away from the association of weaving with hotter temperatures (aside from cloth keeping bodies warm). There's something about the possibility of infinity to weaving, so long as the raw material is available, that seems steady and anything but 'hot.'

The duality of the denim twill is intriguing. We work to earn our free-time, labor for the privilege to be casual. Some people work overtime just to afford a fraction of the freedom that others have never had to earn at all - they in fact inherited their leisure. It’s strange how denim has become the American uniform - simultaneously referencing the overalls or dungerees of the cowboy, farmer and factory laborer with the designer jeans of the leisure class. Pride and profligacy in one garment. We talked plenty about the economy at the panel, about the hot-market place and the frozen economy, what temperature is denim? It seems that maybe its hospitableness is lukewarm, or 'cool' I suppose - as in having equilibrium.

MM: I guess the usefulness of the analogy of temperature is that it allows for a whole spectrum, rather than merely a mutually exclusive binary. However, in practice it still seems to work like any other binary, still is an either/or, still is oppositional. In re-reading the prompt provided by Drain for this issue, it struck me that rather than cold and hot, the distinction that is being made is perhaps that between the Apollonian and the Dionysian, in so far as the cold/Apollonian corresponds to the pure, simple, lucid and calm, and the hot/Dionysian corresponds to the frenzied, consumptive, lavish and hysterical. Beyond the shear fascination that this particular oppositional pair continues to be used to analyze our culture, albeit in a disguised form, is the fact that it is also presented in such a way that one is expected to make a choice between the two. This is what leads me to the question: Is 'cold' prescriptive? In light of certain aspects of our contemporary culture, ought one be cooler? Does it now seem irresponsible or untenable to be hot?

In other words, I think that there is an ethical or moral dimension to this notion of temperature that we may need to openly address; though I am not sure that I am prepared to do so. Perhaps this is part of the reason why a term like lukewarm is extremely unsatisfying; not only have we culturally tended to privileged those who take on or exemplify extreme positions (for example radicals, ascetics, polemics, and so on), I am having a hard time thinking of language in western culture that celebrates the middle path; our narratives tend to characterize the middle as a place of compromise and cowardice.

SS: I think you've gone full circle to the reason I thought a dialog about the topic would be good in the first place, since morality plays such an underlying role in our class. This moral dimension is what struck me in the first place and continued to resonate at the panel where everyone sort of staked out different places in that spectrum. Certainly there were those who had a pure vs. chaotic stance that positioned cold as morally superior to hot, others-including me - entered it where hot was generosity and cold the aloof - more of a personification of temperature rather than coded in terms of morality. The fact that lukewarm, medium or mild is cowardice seems so American to me since the culture has traditionally favored the dramatic: either fire or ice. Being caught ricocheting between the two seems no solution since too much cold is just as deadly as to much heat. Hot-headedness can lead one astray, but a cold-heart can certainly alienate.

So how do we get away from binaries? I think I ask myself this daily, as a life practice: how can I be more balanced? But it is true, that level-headedness seems boring, un-romantic, risk-averse and un-creative. It suggests a kind of neutrality or grayness that nobody would aspire to since 'aspirations' require reaching beyond the ordinary.

In Twills is the ordinary though - isn't it? Denim. Twill. So many artists and social theorists have celebrated the everyday or quotidian while studiously avoiding calling it ordinary, average or run-of-the-mill. If we pull out the thesaurus all would be grouped together mercilessly with routine, regular and conventional etc. But the conventional might also be ‘hot’ depending where you are. ‘Hot’ might have been the convention in the American political and economic sphere over the last 8 years. Perhaps a different angle to get at the middle might be appropriate: heart, core, hub, eye, and focal point, focus. Perhaps the middle of the spectrum is focus, is the heart of the matter. So I propose some new way of talking about the merits of the middle path in a way that does not align middle with fence sitter, but middle with heartland. Which does remind me of the twill - a working weave, from the engine of the economy.

MM:Shall we see how far we can take the analogy of temperature?

I think that it is precisely this morality attached to the hot and the cold that is making me uncomfortable; or it may be more precise to say that it is the moral imperative, the 'one ought to...' that makes me suspicious of this sort of delineation; in other words, I might accept the hot and the cold as descriptive, but I will not accept them as prescriptive.

Perhaps one way that we can avoid the prescriptive quality of temperature is by using a statistical model of heat. Temperature is the average heat of bodies at all different energy levels in a given local. If after taking the temperature of a given sector of culture one decides that it is too hot, whatever that means, I think rather than coming to the conclusion that hot is essentially bad, and that cold is necessarily good, one could come to the conclusion that there is nothing inherently wrong with the hot, but that there is perhaps just too much of it; in other words it becomes a question of the quantity and not the quality of hot bodies. What I mean by this is that instead of obligating the hot to cool down, instead of employing a moral imperative, instead of defining the cool as a negation of the hot, one might merely produce the cold not in an oppositional way, but in a positively, productive way; that there is great value in both the hot and the cold, that there must be room for both, but that it might just be a question of proportion.

Another way to avoid the prescriptive and the binary of the hot and cold is to think of them as dialectical elements that never resolve into a synthesis. Rather than seeking the lukewarm, which in this structure we would assign to the class of a synthesis, we might seek to hold the hot and the cold in constant tension, in such a way that balance emerges out of contradiction. While American culture does tend to privilege the polemic, I personally have tended to be most attracted to the fatally conflicted. Someone like Simone Weil fascinates me because I see something of myself in her truly unique combination of seemingly contradictory elements. As another example, I have been listening to some 20th century composers who make mechanical music; people such as Conlon Nancarrow composing for player-piano and Rytus Mazulis composing on a computer are able to combine the cold precision of the mechanical with the hot affect of expression, without producing something lukewarm. (I can share some with you if you are interested; I think it is wonderful stuff.)

I have thought of two narratives that are about the lukewarm and the middle path, namely the story of Icarus, who must fly the middle path between sky and sea, and Goldilocks who seeks the middle road in each situation. However I doubt that theses narratives could or should be held up as exemplary or useful for finding the appropriate language to speak about the value of moderation. I will have to think more about this and get back to you. Also I have not yet responded to the last part about twills and the ordinary, and the economy. Did you know that there is something called a Goldilocks economy? Thanks Wikipedia.

SS: I love this reply, I will get back to you later today and maybe we'll be in our last go round before I send it to drain, I suspect we could go on forever.

The Goldilocks economy on Wikipedia is perfect! Not too hot or cold...

Porridge.

MM:Oh good, glad you liked it. I feel like I have not been addressing the work much, but rather I seem to be interested in talking over it or around it or something. Oh well.

P.S. Technically there is no such thing as the cold; there is only varying degrees of heat; a temperature of absolute zero is stasis, is a near complete lack of motion, is zero energy. It is also an impossible state to reach in reality; it is purely theoretical. Kind of curious.

SS: It’s a question really of modulation then - adding to the hot or the cold in order to reach balance. Blowing on it, so to speak, in order to heat it up or cool it down. I would speculate though that hot is usually considered bad and cold good in this culture, regardless of whether unchecked proprietary desire seems in keeping with American capitalism. It seems that we're at an interesting point, wavering on that point actually, where that proprietary desire (hot) is counterbalancing puritan ethics (cold). Both extremes have been acknowledged as problematic in some way or the other, so is this culture now due for its Goldilocks era? (I think we'll include the Wikipedia link for readers, here).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldilocks_economy

So before we sign off I'm going to corner you on In Twills in reference to cold precision in combination with hot affect: you have chosen in your practice to constantly explore the tension of these two extremes. Hot or affect: craft, textiles, hand, punk rock, religion. Cold or precision: formula, pattern, technique, abstraction. Feel free to expand that list, not that I care so much to relegate all of your eggs to one basket or the other, but it does seem you are mixing things previously assigned one category. I can't imagine your believing you can or were attempting resolution between the two, but by marrying them, what do you suppose you attain? What are you proposing to a listener or viewer about an economy of expression, emotion, materiality, perhaps even, consumption?

MM: This is an extremely good question, for which I have no ready answer. I am actually really stumped as to how to answer what the work attains or proposes to an audience. I think that is it probably provisional; your question is the type that I will have to consider for awhile. After thinking about it throughout the day and this is what I have come up with:

You are absolutely right to characterize the majority of my practice as exploring the tension between what are ostensibly oppositional pairs. You are also right that I am not exactly seeking a resolution or even a synthesis between them, although I am sometimes seeking the space where they overlap. The interests, ideas and practices you listed comprise part of a constellation of elements hung together, which constitutes aspects of my lived experience. And rather than attempting to reconcile one element with another, I am more interested in composing them, in creating compositions out of them, which explore dissonance and contradiction along with harmony and concord. In this way, at it's best; the work may function analogous to a formal abstraction or a composed piece of music. As far as what the work attains or proposes to an audience, I am really not sure. I fear that the work is sometimes merely a demonstration, some kind of proof of certain possibilities: scholastic. Perhaps it attains the same thing that an abstract painting does, the joy of experiencing materials and formal arrangements coupled with contemplation. Or perhaps the work seeks to produce equilibrium as an emergent property, as a new quality that arises out of a specific constellation of elements, like an overtone produced by a cluster of notes.

Michael Milano is an artist living and working in Chicago.

Shannon Stratton is current Director and Curator at threewalls in Chicago, a residency and exhibition program she co-founded in 2003. She writes and curates independently, as well as collaborating regularly with Jeff M. Ward and Judith Leemann. Leemann and Stratton have a forthcoming exhibition at The Museum of Contemporary Craft in Portland in 2010, "Gestures of Resistance," about performance and social practice in contemporary craft. She teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

www.performingcraft.com; www.three-walls.org