Christy Sheffield Sanford
Interview by Simon Mills
SM: Can you outline your background as an artist/writer?
I was the daughter of two commercial artists, who were also painters. My father was my mother’s art teacher; they eloped from Atlanta to the North Georgia Mountains. During the Depression, they moved to Chicago where my father studied at the Art Institute. There they met my godfather, another artist. Both men adored my mother though I think the love of my godfather was unrequited. For years, on weekends and holidays they painted pictures of my mother: the ethereal ballerina wearing pink tutu, the pensive woman in black picture hat and dress of blue roses, the dance hall girl—poetically titled “The Red Silk Stockings and the Green Perfume.”
That trio occasioned one of the great themes of my life: the ménage à trois. The world of painting and subliminal sex was a heady magnet. I remember the coils of oil paint on palettes: alizarin crimson, cadmium yellow, Prussian blue. The little pots of turpentine and linseed oil. Unctuous, poisonous, beautiful. Studios with the light odor of smoking. The end of a day with the taste of ice from a glass of scotch.
Once a year, we’d vacation at St. Simons on the coast of Georgia. On the trip down, we’d pass pine forests and see trees being tapped for turpentine, smell the pulp mills around the marshes of Glenn. The beachside sulfur water made me gag.
My first artistic expressions were crayon additions to Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrated Salomé. The first movie I remember was The Third Man. My father enjoyed Song of the South. Zippity Do Da. I liked Valle’s dark red lips, her power over men, Joseph Cotton’s heavy lidded eyes and gray hair. The tour of the Paris sewers. I won an Easter Bonnet contest, with green hat, yellow daisies. My mother, a fashion illustrator with a dramatic flare, was the milliner. In my teens, I designed clothes and thought I would be a couturier.
When I was 11, my father died of a heart attack. My mother, afraid of gossip, banished my godfather. He was married. In close proximity, I lost two fathers. Weighted with responsibility, my mother became melancholy—yet always functioning and beautiful. Piano Concerto No. 2 in C-Minor [Rachmaninof]. Remnants of aristocracy clung to us. A tragic Tennessee Williams aura hung over our apartment. The absence of a man meant a type of ruin unknown today.
My time is the cusp. Post WWII—romance, optimism, idealism, repression—and Vietnam—disillusionment, cynicism, social activism and Aquarius. As with many of my contemporaries, Carolee Schneemann, Kathy Acker, Laurie Anderson, one task was to slay romanticism, not merely to destroy but to create something in its place. And for me, how to be truthful yet not eliminate beauty. How to be more than a social critic, how to create a new form.
Growing up in Atlanta, nothing career-wise was expected of me. Heavenly Shades of Night Are Falling. I went to Northside High, the ne plus ultra of public high schools; I was expected to marry, have babies, shop and give dinner parties. This, despite parents who were working, poor and democrats. That was the South. I saw the best women of my generation lose their minds through zero expectations.
I studied art in college but was distracted: by virginity, confusion, by a sense of drift. I lost a boyfriend, my best girlfriend fell off a horse and died. I dropped out, came home and went to psychotherapy—radical at the time. A good twenty years of my life were spent freeing myself emotionally and sexually and developing strength of character: resilience, depth, interests. It was a matter of survival. In freeing myself from my mother, I turned from visual art for many years. I tried a peripheral route: French Cooking. I have a London Cordon Bleu certificate.
The first prize I won for my writing, a Florida Arts Grant, was inspired by experiences at Chez la Mère Madeleine, a French restaurant on the outskirts of Boston. A disastrous blessing! Gonna take that Midnight Train to Georgia. The piece was about Ceiling Painting in the Middle Ages. I was able to push my nemesis teacher into a vat of blue dye. I was 42.
In the late 70s, I took an adult ed poetry workshop through a branch of the Columbus Ohio Library. Miriam Flock read my poem from the first assignment. Her simple act of encouragement sustained me for a year until I reached Gainesville, Florida, in 1981.
At a writers’ festival, I found Enid Shomer who wanted to return to writing after a child-rearing hiatus. For years, we attended a Gainesville writer’s workshop, wrote interviews together, spoke nearly everyday on the phone, mostly about our work and poetry. She was brilliant, talented and Wellesley-educated; she taught me quite a bit. Eventually, Enid had success in publishing, and I followed suit.
I sent out "The Romance of Citrus" to 34 places and it was suddenly accepted by three editors at once. From publication in Andrei Codrescu’s Exquisite Corpse, other opportunities followed. For a decade, before heading to the web, I was creating Genre Fusion, my term for joining fiction and poetry and other disciplines based on my sense of their essence.
SM: How did you first become interested in hypertext?
If you mean the hypertext language, I’d say from my first html tutorial around 1995. My initial online project was Red Mona, a blithe erotic ménage à trois collaged onto French Flash cards that come up randomly on a CGI script, with sound files attached. Simultaneously, you can experience a French lesson and love story. Je T’Aime.
Backstory: I was in humid, rainy Florida, fighting to halt the crumbling of an old Spanish-Mediterranean house. A la Virginia Wolfe, I transformed a guest bedroom into “my room.” I was a technophobe, until an accidental click one day at my desk. I downloaded an image into Photoshop, and suddenly there was the call of the wild. Don’t just sit there. Do something to this image!
The programmer who coded Red Mona grew weary of my revisions and additions. He quit answering my emails and insisted I learn html. That was it. Necessity. To this day, I’m taken by the dramatic possibilities of coding the page, much as I imagine the first filmmakers were with the close-up, jumpcut, pan, fade. The various cinematic techniques have become a type of language. Something similar has been happening with the web. The formal inventions that further expression and prove flexible pass into the realm of technique. The medium develops a repertoire.
For myself, I wanted to exploit the dramatic potential in the codified page. Highly innovative scripts were being used for commerce, education, government. To use them for art had, still has, a subversive edge. For a medium to be alive, it must have range and prove its mettle in the arena of drama. Humor, intellect and sexuality tend to undercut that potential. But I am certain the web can emotionally involve anyone to the degree that a film or canvas can.
If you mean by hypertext the act of linking a number of options, I would say almost never. What intrigued me about the web was its possibility as a new medium for art-writing—something on a par with the video or book. Unfortunately, there is an economic element in transmitting art—the book, the ticket, the DVD—and if something can’t be commodified, our society tends to ghettoize it. Paradoxically, much of the medium’s charm involves freedom and cheap availability. Respect.
I was interested in the latest code advances from the simplest tables to the most complex frames. The idea that you could compartmentalize the screen and have dialogues, multiple scenarios, changing relationships amongst the parts was intriguing. From gif animations to Flash, from rollovers to show-hide scripts—every innovation that appeared was fodder. A drag and drop script for image and text that would cross browsers occasioned tears of gratitude. Hours can pass in the night, as I sit at my desk refreshing the screen—receiving dozens of x-rays. I can’t get no Satisfaction.
When Dreamweaver’s dhtml matrix editor appeared and layers could be sent flying around the page on time lines, the concept of space-time, vital to experiments in fiction and poetry, could easily be visualized. Many were looking for anything that would foil the limitations of the page, explode the confines. A window popping out and traveling around the screen was intoxicating.
A loose circle was experimenting with inventions that would carry, would feed the development of a medium. The one of a kind script, like a unique installation in an art gallery, may be exciting and riveting, but does it further experimentation? Are the ideas embodied replicable, expansive? The spirit in which many of us were working was generous. A shared script was common.
The last of the collaborative projects I was involved with was Reiner Strasser’s “Currents,” in which a group of us used scripts and software programs to explore the horizon and the circumference—to plumb space. Nonlinearity is liberating. We were playful but focused. As if we were in a race to unravel DNA!
True, an
artist often works in the dark and hasn’t articulated his/her thrust! We noodle about and suddenly hit on an
idea. Clarity often comes in retrospect. But, overall, I think many of us were
devoted to inventions that spread, that are infectious. This is how you
construct a viable medium. If I’m the only one in the world who can do
something, it will quickly die out.
SM: How has your practice as an artist changed over the past ten years? How has your work progressed and why has it moved in the direction it has?
BODY OF WORK
How has the body changed over the last 10 years?
EYES
My right eye was recently lasered; tiny pricks help drain the aqueous humor. I’ve no discernible loss of sight. I do have a heightened appreciation for light and vision. In glaucoma, peripheral vision is threatened. Edges of the horizon narrow.
My first book in 1989 was Only the Nude Can Redeem the Landscape. A manuscript I’m circulating now creates temporal connections. A finger from the past touches a finger from the present. In the collection are titles like “Watteau on the Saint Johns: Shrimp Vénetien,” “Nosescape [for Depardieu]” and “Desirescape”—scanning the edges of longing, the frayed bits of body needs.
The scroll on the “Feminine” question comments on the browser’s ability to probe beyond immediate perception. Do you conceptualize the reaches of the periphery as a fathomless goldfish bowl, the tails of a diminishing normal curve or the wispy edges of a poached egg.
The Web has a high degree of surface tension but also the intense promise of something around the corner, at the bottom of the page or to the right. Perhaps an answer or reward lies in another window, on a different page. Tantalized, the viewer plumbs these regions.
Like a circus master, the creator can demand the tiger jump through fiery hoops. As always, words themselves and the images must satisfy. The product must convey a breadth of imagination, a solidity of passion. There are levels to address: the medium, the delivery, the art itself, and the form it takes.
NOSE
Mohs surgery, flap surgery, freezes, excisions. Amazing how much can be done to a nose without it looking like a battlefield. What’s a scar here or there? I still have the pug nose I came in with.
I like the idea of synesthesia. Does the text sing or smell? Often that’s an opening for a pejorative remark.But to create a page with the fragrance of orange blossoms or ginger lilies without naming them—what a spicy task.
Has the olfactory quality changed in my work from paper to Web? It is tempting to hope the work is more redolent of sex. More Gorgonzola. More musk.
LIPS
Two lines above my right upper lip have deepened. I’m comfortable with my overbite now, my crooked, gummy smile. Seeing the way an Italian woman in Siena allowed her bra strap show helped. Could be an areola, too. What should not be seen can be considered ugly or taboo. If you choose taboo, that can be erotic. I need dark purple or dark brown lipstick. Orange. My lips lose definition without strong colors.
I’ve always liked the Japanese idea that a masterwork should retain some flaw. This aesthetic features in Persian and Navajo art, too. But, how deep should the flaw be? The sketch line in a painting, the wrong note in jazz: include them.
In paint programs, selection marks remind me of blueprints, maps, the poetry of calligraphy and letters. Playing with inclusion-exclusion vectors, I often take a screen grab of an image with parts selected to be guillotined—sections shaded and outlined with arrows and broken lines. Incorporating this type of image in a Web piece exposes the process of creation and simultaneously presents past, present and future.
EARS
Lovely.
Change in work: able to capture fountain sounds at Place d’Albertas. To sing a variation of a rose is a rose…. To attach to Web pages these and others—a samba, a computer-generated tune.
BODY
Carpel tunnel, rotator cuff? Yes. Ten pounds heavier, a pound a year.
Let us look at the skeleton of a Web page. With hypertext markup language, one sees the familiar language of animal anatomy:
size; weight—bold or normal; Arial, Comic Sans or Goudy
I’m still an experimentalist, a formalist. I can understand why the computer is a nightmare for purists because the medium calls for the interpenetration of arts. The Web as a medium has instilled in me a more matrixial or spatiotemporal view of the universe. In stellar moments, I hope that permeates the work.
SM: I’m aware of the danger of falling into stereotypes here but I know I’m not alone in perceiving your work as having quite a feminine quality. Are you aware of this perception? What has been your experience of working as a woman in a medium which isn’t often associated with these qualities?
SM: There’s been a lot of debate and activity regarding archiving recently, with the realization that digital work is actually more vulnerable to being lost than most other forms of artwork due to the rapid obsolescence of file formats etc. Do you have any concerns about this?
CSS: Yes, it’s rather like the interstate highway system in Atlanta. Probably many cities, but that’s the one that springs to mind. There was a song, “Tearing up Peachtree Again.” The whole geographic infrastructure seemed fragile. Always potholes, cracks, increased traffic and somebody with a better idea on where to put a slab of concrete.
I could spend all my time revising work
to make it cross-browser compliant. How
many artists can plunk out $400 for the latest editor? Some of my work has been lost to browser
changes. I can’t say progress. I’d choke. The Netscape saga was the writing on the wall. Heartbreaking. The sale to AOL and subsequent disregard for
prior work and lack of continued innovation seemed a betrayal. A film or video is fixed; Web work is
dependent on hardware and software.
My concerns have been with ideas and issues, which transcend a browser generation or an operating system edition: the uniqueness of the medium, the conventions, the vocabulary, interpenetration of arts. Many have seen my work in approximation to its intended state. Years later, a few have told me one piece or another was important to them.
Like stage productions, Web projects can be ephemeral. I’ve never attended a Pina Bausch concert, but I own two books—one in German, one Italian—on her choreography. The stills always intrigue me. I’ve had a similar attraction to Carolee Schneemann’s work. Seeing “Meat Joy,” a performance art piece, in Art in America photos was a transforming experience. How one’s work is promulgated remains a dicey but interesting phenomenon. I’m surprised Web work hasn’t been more photographed.
I’m hoping to have a collection, at least of major pieces, on CD-Rom. Two major Web strengths are immediacy and availability. Perhaps works will one day be housed in online libraries or places like Netflix where they can be called up, and the edition will come with its own browser so viewers will see relatively similar pieces.
SM: Robert Coover once wrote, “The constant threat of hypermedia: to suck the substance out of a work of lettered art, reduce it to surface spectacle”.
What do you feel about the constant suspicion that hypertext and New Media art are somehow superficial?
SM: How do you deal with the environmental reception of your work? People read on the Internet in many different ways and situations and these can often totally change the original work. How do you write/create for a New Media audience, which isn’t always a static audience in terms of level? How/where does ‘literacy’ feature for you?
CSS: Experimental anything usually has a small audience.
I attend a traditional writers workshop, full of highly diverse people. I get knocked about quite a bit although we use Edward de Bono’s guidelines for civilized criticism: 1) Say what you like about the work; 2) Ask clarifying questions; 3) State how you think the work might be improved. For twenty-five years, this model has served to resist ego-terrorist attacks and attempts to overthrow democracy and set up a dictatorship.
I pay attention, revise. Over time, I’ve learned who my best critics are and how to protect the work’s integrity against guardians of the conventions. Against fear. Several workshop members would rather die than look at a computer screen; obviously they are not the New Media audience. You’re right, you have a range of levels. Some people peek and peck, others are intrepid. And stereotypes fail; I started down this path at 55.
The audience for Web work grew by word of email. Through my work at trAce and frAme I introduced quite a few people to each other. I was something of a talent scout. Collaborations, classes, competitions, exhibits, conferences. Many of us entered everything and went everywhere. We networked.
If one craves a wide audience and real fame outside academe, that’s pretty rare. Pick another profession or if you’re lucky enough to be able to choose, be the brilliant Joyce Carol Oates or the new Iris Murdock—writers of extraordinary talent and range. Most writers don’t have a choice. They’re contemporary or experimental. That formalist bent probably has to do with an attraction to ideas, concepts, patterns.
I don’t think people expect work of dramatic intensity on the Web, something I was trying to do. My work is layered; there’s an element of simultaneity. If someone catches socio-political/philosophical drifts, how much richer we are. I’m hoping a few thematic chords like longing, vengeance, betrayal will resonate across time and a few cultures—enough for a connection.
Outside people, I have some interests, which are a difficult sell. For example, I like to write about light. When Reiner Strasser and I did Water~Water~Water, I wanted the Water to be the third collaborator. Do readers/viewers discern that? We seduce ourselves and have an exaggerated notion of our own importance.
It’s not beyond me to leave a few notes on what I was trying to do.
SM: What currently interests you? What do you see as the next area that needs to be worked on? Does it involve New Media?
Next area to be worked on: choosing engrossing, satisfying elements of fiction and freeing them from the conventional constraints of the page—without being precious, self-absorbed or seduced by star-makers. Real advancement of an art form is exciting. I’m certain the novel can exist in a space-time continuum that doesn’t fit neatly against the left hand margin. When Madame de Lafayette reshaped fiction to the manageable conflict-crisis-resolution model still used today, that was important. The accomplishment isn’t just novelty; the innovation must be replicable. It must carry.
Does it involve New Media? This seems a fruitful path. Someone must do for fiction what Mallarmé did for poetry.
I’d like to see a future project evaluating that highly charged period of creativity on the Web 1995-2001. I’m not advocating ranking individuals and works but rather focusing on the inherent ideas and their meanings—their usefulness or aesthetic qualities. Somewhat in the vein of my piece, Toward a Theory of Web-Specific Art-Writing.
I am suggesting a quiet, penetrating examination of a movement. I would like to see something comparable to the vocabulary that filmmakers evolved: the jump cut, close-up, pan. Let’s take one browser technique: the pop-up. Many were annoyed, but artists and writers, such as Annie Abrams, used the pop-up differently. One effect was to see the uncontrollable factor, the danger element in interactivity. In some cases, events spontaneously erupted. The consequences were wild and exciting. I liked and used the pop-up as a means of exploring other worlds: the subconscious, dreams, taboos, and parallel realities.
Browsers can now block viewers from seeing my kinkajou and other animal pop-ups at The Pre-Raphaelite Dreams of Violette Poole. Commercial interests won, because they framed the usage of an innovation, and the reaction was to throw out that baby.
One last thought on the future: scripting techniques have already influenced films and videos. Chris Marker’s Level 5 was incredible for its inclusion of computer-inspired images and techniques. And, of course, Greenaway’s movie Prospero’s Books featured a frame set with choreographed nudes in the surrounding frame. I imagine electronic media innovations will become less gestural and more substantive as the new generation of film and video makers mature.
