Q&A with Monika Weiss

What is your favorite tool, material, and/or process?
When I was about five, my mother began to teach me piano, before I entered the school of music at the age of seven. I recall her seated on a chair beside me in out tiny soviet apartment in Warsaw. She was turned away from the piano, but pressing her fingers into my arm with great heaviness, as if her entire body were resting on each finger, as if my skin were her keyboard. I can still picture the purple marks left on my skin; each tone temporarily engraved on my body. She said we couldn’t make a relevant sound, sound that reaches hearts, if we don’t use the entire body. And not just the body; the entire soul, she told me, must inhabit every pressed key. Today I believe she wanted me to feel how each sound is born and must contain the entire universe. It has to be all, or music has nothing to offer. This notion inspires me still today. I work with time as my material, my canvas, and as my content. It’s a moment now, performed in real time or in cinematic and acoustic time. It’s also a moment from the past, often traumatic and forgotten, that my projects try to unforget – a term I have coined to describe my public projects especially. I choreograph my own body or bodies of other women, performing silent and very slow gestures in front of my camera. I also often film scenes from an overhead camera suspended from roofs, rooftops or small airplanes. I compose sound digitally, but always based on real acoustic recordings, of sites and of voices, and of my own piano improvisations. I have been also always making drawings, and at times, the drawings appear in my films, or are part of large-scale performances. My ongoing series of sculptural works made from fiberglass or stone filled with water are often public and technically complex productions in which I work with architects or other technicians. Part of that body of works is Nirbhaya, my first permanent outdoor monument, forthcoming next year in my native Poland and the year after in the US.

What is the best advice you’ve ever received about your work?
When I was invited in 2015 to propose a project in response to the city of New Delhi, I was concerned with not being “from there” and I asked my dear friend, the celebrated late poet Meena Alexander, originally from India: “do I have the right?” She answered “yes, you do and you have to do it”. She encouraged me to go forward with my project. Today, I wish she was here to celebrate the fact that the project outgrew its original scope and has become my first permanent outdoor sculpture/monument. At the time, we sat down and recorded our conversation about this idea of ‘having a right’ to make the work, whether in poetry or in visual arts, in response to sites or events that are not our own. I will always cherish this complex and challenging advice she gave me, as a form of endorsement and permission to make work that is trans-historical and trans-national. I believe, like her, that empathy and beauty have no boundaries or borders. Meena Alexander’s poem Moksha appears in my film Canto 4, as part of Two Laments (19 Cantos), 2015-2020. We recorded several conversations between 2015-2018, one of them moderated by Buzz Spector, of which a fragment will appear in a new monograph, Monika Weiss - Nirbhaya, forthcoming later this year from the Centre for Polish Sculpture in Orońsko Press.

What is the best advice you’ve ever given to someone about their work?
I think it would have to be the advice that I myself received from my friend and mentor, composer and filmmaker Phill Niblock. Regarding my trepidations towards learning sound software we both like to work with, ProTools, Phill told me: “you don’t have to know everything; in fact, as an artist, you will never know everything about any technology, because you are not a technology specialist, you are, indeed, an artist.” – and he added – “With every project we make, we move somewhere else in the universe, often somewhere new. So, learn only what you need for your art now”. I try to share this wisdom with my students whenever I can, so that younger artists are not afraid of technology or media, which are really, just tools, instruments, not so different than paper and charcoal or the piano.

Where do you make work?
It would have to be my studio, even though a lot of my works are site-specific or public projects. The studio is where I develop my concepts, where my drawings dry lying down on the floor, where I compose my sound, often with the help of a piano, and I film. When I am invited to create new work in response to a site, I begin by preparing the concept of the project, and researching the events. Very often the first part of a project is made by composing sound, sometimes by writing new melodies for voice or instrument. I have to venture out of the studio when I record vocalists in a professional recording place, because I need perfect acoustics. But I often film performance by myself or others in my studio. I also travel to locations and work with volunteers – movement and vocal performers - on the sites of projects, where I often film from ab overhead camera, and at times theses are live performances that later become video pieces of their own right. Upon returning, I edit and recompose all the elements together into a new whole, again needing the privacy that studio offers. With larger sculptural works, I tend to work with production places, often with architects. I also venture out of the studio to output the end results of my film and audio editing into a desired format, which greatly depends on the venue where the project is shown. I also enjoy going to artist residencies, but it usually takes me a good week or more to get used to the new environment, so I try to take on longer term residencies, rather than short ones.

What do you listen to/watch while you work?
When I work, I need complete silence and solitude. But when I don’t work in my studio or on location, I tend to listen obsessively to the same music for about a year, on my headphones, especially when commuting. For about a year now I have been listening to Julius Eastman, an African American classical contemporary composer, whose brilliant music is at the same time conceptual and minimalist, but also full of emotion. Something I strive to achieve in my art as well.

What’s your top studio jam?
My top studio jam (akin to jazz jam) would be when I choreograph and film a performer in the studio; she is moving in response to my words, and I am peering through the camera lens and something amazing happens, and it’s all captured. When I improvise on the piano, I also love those moments when something unexpected happens and then is preserved via a recording. In the past, I have been part of several experimental music ensembles and so the improvisation (in musical terms) was always and continues to be my favorite form of “studio jam”.

Best studio hack OR the skill you’d be most lost without?
I was originally trained as a classical musician and later, as a painter. In the late 1990s I moved to making installation art, with video and sound. At first, I was trying to hire video and sound editors. That ended really badly, since everything I wanted them to do with my recordings, was highly intuitive. The editing was like the pulsation of my blood. It was about tempo and about feeling. I decided that I had to teach myself everything from scratch. Over the years, ProTools and Final Cut Pro became like my second skin. Strangely the software became very much like graphite or paper I work with in my drawings. I am still someone who much prefers the “real” rather than the “virtual”. I always work with actual events, choreographed by me in real time. That way my sounds and images always come from acoustic and embodied situations. I later work in postproduction to achieve a desired emotion and a sense of suspended time, but I want the materiality of the scene or sound to feel real, tangible, even though I try to make it into some kind of poetry. But, I don’t know what I would do without sound and film editing technology. I guess I would just draw. Which means I also can’t live without paper….

What food can be used to bribe you?
I am a vegetarian and often vegan. Just offering something that takes this into consideration, makes me grateful and appreciative. But if you really want to bribe me, it would be a combination of a bar of pure chocolate and a glass of deep, red wine.

Do you have a studio uniform? Please describe.
When I draw or edit sound and film, I just try to wear comfortable jeans and blouses. But when I perform for my camera or in public, I often wear one of my black, long dresses and a black scarf. I have had these for 15 years now, and I give them to my performers to wear as well in my films.

It’s the 11th hour before your opening. What are you doing?
I’ve been known to desperately look for an available piano to improvise on it, in solitude, which always calms my nerves and cleans the space in me and around me. Often, I found the piano within the institution that mounted my show and would negotiate, to be alone with it, sometimes during night hours, before the day of the opening, and that would become, part of a contract, informal or formalized.

Who or what has had the biggest influence on your work?
Ah, this is such a great question and so difficult to answer shortly. If I were to choose just a few things or people, I would have to be first my mother, the great late pianist and piano professor, Gabriela Weiss. Seeing the belly of the piano from under, as she was practicing, I seated underneath and basically immersed inside music. Then my professor and mentor Ryszard Winiarski, the great late Polish conceptualist who was the first to believe in my work. Then my mentors and friends Phill Niblock and Krzysztof Wodiczko… the latter I loved the work and read his writing long before we met. Then I think the music of Bach, from whom I learn something new, every day. Then it would have to be the films of Andrei Tarkovsky and choreography of Pina Baush. And then it would have to be everyone I love and everyone who loves me and my work…. This is such a hard question. So, I will stop here.

A book you’ve read more than twice is..
Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus and Julia Kristeva’s Black Sun.

How do you stay motivated?
I never stop. I don’t think I ever felt not motivated. Sometimes I feel scared that there is not enough time in my life to make all the work that is waiting to be “released”. I feel impatient and tired when I don’t work on my art. I guess for me it’s not the question of motivation but rather, organization.

How do you procrastinate?
I think sometimes it’s good to procrastinate, to breathe, to listen. To just stay still for a moment.

Early Bird or Night Owl?
I used to think that I was a Night Owl. Years ago, when I was still in the school of art, I loved making art after midnight, feeling like I was the only person on earth that was up. I still do most of my film and sound editing in the evenings. But despite the fact that I think that biologically I am stronger and more awake at night, my art needs me to suffer through and make drawings and film in the early mornings, when I find the light is most beautiful and most metaphysical. I guess my art takes priority over my life, that’s for sure.

Do you have pets? If so, what are their species and names?
I miss having them. I travel too much these days to have a pet. Well, at least before the pandemic. When I was still in Warsaw, Poland, I had a beautiful female cat. She was all black. I named her Gagatek, which in Polish means “Hooligan”. She was an amazing companion and I miss her greatly to this day.

Biggest pet peeve?
I had to look that one up (English is not my first, nor my second language, as you may have guessed). I think, it would have to be loud speaking (and yelling). Conversely, I also dislike when people don’t listen, whether in conversation, in life, or in history… Listening to the world and to other beings and the environment, is perhaps the most important thing you can do in life. That, and making art, of course.

What is your favorite thing about St. Louis?
Definitely Missouri Botanical Garden. I know it’s more a site than a quality, but I think it’s both. My former grad student took me there for first time, and ever since, I love to return there.

Epoxy, mineral spirits, or Command-Z?
As much as I spend so much of my living and breathing time editing, I still much rather use my resin and graphite in my drawings (of course wearing a mask), rather than seat in front of my editing screen. What I love about epoxy or raisin-based glue is that when you mix it with water – a medium I work a lot with, including in my sculptures – it becomes this very slowly drying matter, like slow lava. Sometimes I lay alongside the drying “lava” in my large-scale drawings, just waiting to see what will happen when they finally dry. I guess the process is not entirely unlike waiting for an edit to render, and waking up in the middle of the night to check on it. But I have to say, playing through my studio speakers for the first time, the sound I just composed, trumps all the above, so yes, pressing a key is part of it.

Tell us something we forgot to ask:
I think maybe it would be about teaching. I find teaching an important part of my life as an artist. Maybe because I grew up in a country where being an artist meant you had an obligation to give back to younger generations of up and coming artists. Maybe because I am interested in the ethical, and there is something very beautiful and ethical in helping younger creators. It also becomes a reciprocal relationship, and some of those precious encounters last for the lifetime.