Peter Sarkisian turns TV sets into digital sculptures
By Devon Jackson | portraits by Jennifer Esperanza
If you’ve ever seen a Sarkisian film or video sculpture, you know straightaway that there’s very little about his work that’s narrative or even conventionally entertaining. It’s arty, and intentionally so. It’s a heady, one-way journey that plays on opposites. It’s also challenging in a way that can upend our faith in the images moving across the rectangular boxes in front of our eyes, whether on the wall or in our hands.
“We’ve always assumed these images belong in a square,” says Sarkisian from within the big, box-like studio he recently built near his northeast Santa Fe home. “Why does that convention persist? Why are we looking at rectangles? I’m trying to blur the line between the viewer and the image plane in a way that causes the viewer to get involved in a more experiential way. So suddenly the viewer stops staring in this reverie and says, ‘What am I staring at?’”
In his 1999 piece White Water, for instance, we hear liquid-y sounds and see a stainless steel bowl turning to milky water in a whitish room. Out of the bottom emerges a naked woman (Sarkisian’s future wife), who then turns on her side. She seems to smile. After a minute or so, it’s over. The previous year he released Dusted, perhaps his most famous piece, showing a naked couple confined inside a white cube. They wipe at it from the inside and, while an ethereal female voice whispers inaudibly, clear a view into their world. We see into their cell, which rather resembles an orgy as the cube becomes more and more smeared with their hand wipes. The cube is about the size of a love seat, and its dimensionality compels us to peer in, walk around, and perhaps wipe its sides ourselves.
Playing with the form as much as the medium of what we call television, Sarkisian’s videos really just remind us of the enormous plasticity of moving imagery. He shoots most of his films himself. He uses equipment no more sophisticated than that found at the community college. There are amazingly few special effects, if any, in most of his pieces, and virtually no computer-generated sleight of hand. He’s a filmmaker, an artist filmmaker, whose genius resides in how he arranges images and projects them. It’s why his films are as much sculptural as they are digital, and it’s what separates his work from video artists like Doug Aitken and Bill Viola.
The result is works that rely on us being there. Their sense of humor and playfulness, their contradictoriness, come through viscerally. Most have a trompe l’oeil nature and M.C. Escher-like quality that, as the neuroscientist Vilayanur Ramachandran has said of perceptual paradoxes, “titillate our senses and challenge all our notions of reality and illusion.”
Hands of a Similar Man (1999), wood table, rubberized cloth, video projection, audio.
Morocco is There (1996), found shoe, paint, video projection, audio.
When Sarkisian started out somewhat accidentally on his art-filmmaking path a little over 20 years ago, it was well before the omnipresence of the internet and smartphones, before streaming and bingeing, and even before TiVo and DVDs, when television was still in thrall to major networks and advertisers. Back then it was dominated by shows like Murder, She Wrote, Home Improvement, and ER, and MTV ruled the cable television landscape.
In fact, Sarkisian’s anti-TV inclinations came from his resistance to music television. “MTV turned me off from technology,” he says. “That’s partly why I’ve used video—to work against the influence video has on us as viewers. I use it to its own demise. To undermine it.”
The challenge, of course, is not being absorbed, like almost everything else, into TV’s insatiable maw.
As media critic Mark Crispin Miller put it in his essay “Deride and Conquer,” part of Watching Television, a 1986 Pantheon anthology on popular culture, there’s a “spectatorial posture which TV requires of us,” and “our spectatorial inaction is the only sort of action possible.” Or as New York Magazine critic Matt Zoller Seitz wrote just over a decade ago in response, television “had incorporated self-awareness, even a mild pantomime of self-criticism, as a means of defusing distrust and ensuring its own survival.”
Ironically, Sarkisian grew up without electricity or running water, and with a spotty TV that occasionally got PBS (and little else). This was the 1970s in Cerrillos, New Mexico. His parents, painter Paul Sarkisian and sculptor and ceramist Carol McPhee Sarkisian, had relocated from Pasadena to New Mexico when their only child was six. In California, the Sarkisians had a rich circle of friends: physicist Richard Feynman, who played bongos in their living room, as well as curator Walter Hopps, filmmaker Stan Brakhage, actor Dean Stockwell, and artists Ed Kienholz, Llyn Foulkes, and Richard Pettibone.
After a brief stay in Albuquerque, the couple bought Cerrillos’s old schoolhouse. Paul took the gym as his studio, Carol the schoolhouse. The gym also served as a roller skating rink, where Georgia O’Keeffe liked to go when she visited. “We’d roller skate together in our gymnasium, she in her long black robes,” recalls Sarkisian. O’Keeffe would call him “Sonny” and sometimes gave him rocks and colored glass. Carol made some of her black gowns, several of which are now in the O’Keeffe Museum vault, and when O’Keeffe’s vision faded, she went to Sarkisian’s father, who helped her devise a system of painting to compensate for her failing eyesight.
In addition to growing up around colorful folks, Sarkisian found creative stimulation in the New Mexico outdoors. “When you grow up like that your senses are heightened,” he explains. “To have come from that childhood and now working with technology is interesting. It’s a contradiction but it also infuses what I’m trying to do with purpose. To get back to that kind of thinking through technology.”
As a kid he was always in touch with what was happening in nature. There were no screens, literally or metaphorically. Now, though, he’s using screens to come full circle, in order “to create a sense of self-awareness, rather than numbing one’s self-awareness,” he says, echoing Miller and Seitz. “Conventional screens are meant to suspend our self-awareness. And the degree to which they do is their success. I’m doing the opposite of that.”
During his teens the family moved to Santa Fe, and Peter entered Santa Fe Prep (before that he’d gone to all the alternative schools—Sun Mountain School, the Children’s Workshop, the Brunn School). Things crystallized for him at Prep, where the school’s photography teacher, Alex Traube, became his mentor. “He was incredibly influential to me,” recalls Sarkisian. Traube encouraged his students to be creative. When Sarkisian’s father brought home a Sony Betacam Camcorder one day, Peter and his buddies knew that film would be their calling. Most of them, Sarkisian and Mike Becker among them, went to film school and never looked back.
Becker and Sarkisian were especially industrious. By senior year they’d struck a deal with a Mr. Albright, manager of the Commonwealth Cinemas chain. They’d design his theater’s ads, and in return, he’d let them into The Lensic Theater at midnight twice a week to film their own version of Siskel & Ebert. “We got on the mailing lists of all the studios and they’d send us press kits and U-Matic three-and-a-quarter-inch tapes and we’d edit them at La Farge Library,” remembers Sarkisian, laughing. “We also had a newspaper, The Paper Screen. We got into every movie for free.”
Sarkisian then went to the California Institute of the Arts for film. After graduating, he returned to Santa Fe and made a film for admission to the American Film Institute and its directors program in Los Angeles. He was the youngest student they’d had. “I went there because David Lynch had gone there,” he says. But Lynchian it was not, and whereas “CalArts was all about discovering and finding your own answers,” he recalls, “AFI had all the answers.” Nevertheless, “It served a purpose with regard to Hollywood and L.A.”
After AFI, he again returned to Santa Fe, where he wrote films, made some award-winning avant-garde shorts, and went to festivals. In 1994 he did a show in Santa Fe with Zane Fischer, Michael Lujan, and Zoe Nauman, called Triskaidekaphobia. “I realized immediately—Wow!” says Sarkisian. “What I struggled with in L.A. was that predetermined structured narrative. You can’t veer from it, and it pulled toward this inevitable destination. Triskaidekaphobia showed me one of the ways to subvert that is spatial—get away from the frame, nothing’s predetermined.”
Linda Durham’s gallery snatched him up, and shortly afterward, SITE Santa Fe curator Louis Grachos discovered him while visiting his father’s studio, when he noticed one of Peter’s pieces in the corner. Since then, he’s been in demand, and only last year wound down a four-year international tour of his latest show, Video Works: 1996–2011. His work is represented in San Francisco’s Modernism, New Orleans’s Jonathan Ferrara Gallery, and New York’s Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery.
Yet he’s part of a limited number of artist-filmmakers, an eclectic group that consists of Nam June Paik, Godfrey Reggio (a fellow New Mexican), and Matthew Barney (aka the ex-Mr. Björk). Sarkisian largely works solo, calling on people like Becker and some other longtime film friends when he needs a crew. But because the medium is so technological, “I can’t be in a gridlike environment,” he says of his choice to do what he does here in New Mexico and not in L.A. “When I go outside, it all washes away. So there’s a nice tension.”
Still, he admits to being a frustrated filmmaker, having written a somewhat narrative feature that he hopes to make someday. “I wear two hats,” he explains. “One gets all the attention. One gets no attention. So on the one hand I love what I do, and on the other I miss the filmmaking process—the mix and jumble of ideas. But I’ve got so many irons in the art-installation world right now.”
Those art films allow him to make more of a statement, and even though he’s seemingly juggling just one ball in the air, “that doesn’t make it simpleminded,” he says. “If anything, it makes it more complex.”
Complex for him means complex for viewers. Which is partly why art films have such a tough time getting out of the galleries and museums—and even into galleries and museums.
“Museumgoers feel that a TV in the gallery is an abomination,” says Sarkisian. “When I started showing, I got a lot of antagonism from viewers. Why am I using this medium? What’s the difference between this and what I have at home? That’s a big question.”
In Ink Blot (2011, left) and Cup’a Joe (2011), Sarkisian uses found objects with steel, aluminum, video projection, and audio to reference the demise of print in one case and a 1950s middle-class idealism in the other.
It’s one that forced him to dig deeper, although truly, he considers the question unanswerable. Questions will and should always be asked, believes Sarkisian, and answers should always change. He references the ability of the screens we use to inform our sense of reality and even shape the logic we carry back into the world. “You get lost in some very carefully constructed narrative that somebody put together,” Sarkisian says. “So the last thing we do is snap out of it and say, ‘Whooo, I feel so alive.’ ”
Whereas with his work, “The fact that everyone wants to reach out and touch it says that it’s working on some level,” he stresses. “To see kids do that is very gratifying.”
It’s something some of his friends from CalArts, the ones now with Pixar, have been able to achieve as well, though in a very different way. “I’m using a medium,” says Sarkisian, “that is at the center of the topic we should all be talking about.” It’s one he’s using to make work that lures us, if not to talk, perhaps to touch, think, or feel.
From the Summer 2016 issue
