Margaret Haines

Emerging Artist of the Week

Margaret Haines is our Emerging Artist of the Week — a series in collaboration with the Art Platform Unavailable.org. Through photography and filmmaking, the American artist gives her own take on the traditional way of film making. We sat down with Margaret Haines and talked her about her numerous projects.

Wertical: How do you describe your art to somebody who has never seen one of your work?
Margaret Haines: I work as a filmmaker, but because we are not in the era of film — we are in the era of virtual media, memes, apps, data-consciousness, surveillance, I approach the medium with a new contemporary perspective. It is reactionary and layered. I love the process of what could be called traditional filmmaking, but its critical and radical contextual peak occurs in the early 1970s, or the later re-interpretation of this in the late 1980s and early 1990s. My work feels like a response to this crisis, and so considers film narrative, but instead acts as: video, installation, writing, clothing, Netflix, celebrity casting, interviews.

WE: Where did you study?
MH: CalArts – California Institute of the Arts.

WE: What did University and your professors give to you?
MH: Institutional critique.

WE: What are you currently working on?
MH: Advertisement for my clothing company X FILLES, which I registered in 2012. The X FILLES collection accompanies the 2014 film COCO, a bildungsroman about delusion, commercial girlhood and sexuality. The ads reimagine Kate Millett’s seminal 1970 book Sexual Politics (the call to arms of the Women’s Movement in 1970s America), institutionalized power within sexual relationships, and Millett’s consideration of Jean Genet’s play The Balcony. X FILLES is named after X Girl and X Files. In a way, the ads will be about micro-utopias and failed revolutions. The research and interviews for this project will be organized into the Beckettt magazine with artist and writer Becket Flannery, who lives with me in Amsterdam.
I am also finishing a project for my latest film The Stars Down To Earth with designers Kevin Bray and Lou Buche. The website and the film are about the politics of astrology and the internet as a divination system. The project and film trailer is at sexwithoutthreat.eu.

This site includes the text Sex Without Threat, which is like a script for the film and compares Adorno’s read of astrology as fascist in LA in 1952/1953, with an experience of LA and the EU in 2015/2016. Adorno critiques the same astrologer I studied under for five years, and I was interested in this serendipitous overlap in research. The text also includes a short interview with Athenian artist and activist Paola Revenioti (who acts in the film) about her filmmaking in Lesbos, since she has worked there as a volunteer. Later this summer, I plan to write a feature film with screenwriter and poet Orlando Tirado. When I go back to LA in July, I will continue writing about (artist and occultist) Cameron’s poetry and work, which I have studied since 2008. I am on the board of her foundation.

WE: What are your three artists to watch?
MH: Alexandra Cassaniti, Kate Millett and Andy Roberts.

WE: What will your artist career look like in five years?
MH: Cover of Vogue. Cover of E-Flux. Cover of Seventeen. Cover of Beckettt.

Margaret Haines, 2014, chromogenic print on di-bond, COCO

Margaret Haines, 2016, video still, The Stars Down To Earth, 23 minute film

Unavailable

Margaret Haines