This past Sunday, the Baltimore Curators Series, in conjunction with Hopkins’s own Digital Media Center and the venerated Transmodern Festival, brings contemporary artists Jim Drain, Joe DeNardo and Kari Altmann to speak in Mattin’s Second Decade Society Room, right here on the Homewood campus.
The News-Letter sat down with Jimmy Joe Roche, Baltimore artist, Wham Citizen, DMC employee and mastermind behind the event, to discuss his past, present and future in Baltimore and beyond. Here’s our conversation, if a bit chopped and screwed.
News-Letter (N-L): Explain what you do.
Jimmy Joe Roche (JJR): Well, I’m a video artist and also a sculptor. I also work in the Digital Media Center and occasionally I teach in the film department here at Hopkins.
We recently — I was working with Linda DeLibero — wrote some grants that got funded for the spring of 2012, so I’m excited because there’s some classes dealing with sound and cinema and local filmmakers as sort of teachers of filmmaking with a focus on locality. So I’m excited about that.
N-L: Thinking about local filmmakers, to what extent is there a Baltimore arts community and to what extent is there a Baltimore film community within that? And are you a part of that community?
JJR: Well, I know a lot of video artists, or a good deal of artists who are working in Baltimore or at least have a fairly, I don’t know, have a relationship with the city in some way.
I mean I know that there are also a lot of budding filmmakers and then, you know, people like John Waters, who’s obviously quite established internationally. So I think that there’s a lot of energy moving in that direction.
You know, as a video artist . . . for the last few years I’ve been working a lot basically by myself, kind of insular in my studio or my home, setting up these scenes which are very isolated, almost like video art horror movies in terms of the isolation.
I mean, I think I took the YouTube model of people just sitting in front of their webcam and sort of applied it philosophically to my work for the last few years, so it was always just me in front of the camera, and I felt that that was a way to connect with the medium of putting video art on the Internet, at least at first.
A lot of my work, I’ll put it on YouTube first. And then a year later it’ll be in a museum or a gallery.
But now I feel like I’m; I shot a film in the Netherlands with my friend Dan Deacon, and we just finished that film, and that’s a 17-minute film and a lot more sort of narrative than my other work I’ve been making recently.
So I feel like . . . my radar is turned on a little bit more to the film world of Baltimore, and I’m starting to pay attention to a lot more things that are happening that maybe I wasn’t as aware of in the last few years, which is cool.
N-L: You talk about how your work is isolated, but how does Wham City figure into that?
How much is it a collaborative group and how much is it just a collection of individual artists?
JJR: Well, recently I’d say, for sure, there’s been more of an emphasis, maybe in the last year-ish.
Okay, well for me, I think Wham City is a lot of my friends, and we all share art together and kind of have these strange, long dialogues about art and other things.
But I think I’m less involved in some of the group activities like the Comedy Tour or some of the plays they did a few years ago. And occasionally I’ll — especially with Dan — we’ll collaborate over the years on different projects.
And I have helped put on shows and helped to book part of Whartscape; the video portion that was, two years ago, at the BMA.
So I’ve been involved, but I think my tendency as an artist, especially in the last five years, has really been this kind of hermeticism and isolation to some degree in terms of my work — with my projects with Dan maybe being the exclusion from the rule, with Ultimate Reality and Hilvarenbeek. So what is Wham City?
I went to SUNY Purchase, and one time, a long time ago, I walked into this giant room they used to have there. I mean it was like a massive bunker; you could park a plane inside of it or something.
And Dan was booking shows there, but I had never met him . . . it was almost empty and all the lights were off, but there was this band, Arab on Radar, playing in the background and they had, like, strobe lights on.
And it sort of blew my mind a little bit. I had never seen music like that before. And then I met Dan through that, and we kind of became friends. We were sharing CDs with one another — I gave him some black metal, and he gave me, like, you know, Anal Cunt or something.
Over time we became sort of friends and then we started living together in this apartment on campus which we lived in for many years, and then Dina [Kelberman] was dating Dan at the time, so the three of us were all living together.
That was sort of the beginning of this enduring friendship that grew with a large cast of people . . . And my friend Robby, who lived in Florida at the time, would come visit me and [he] met all those guys and we would all hang out together.
So those guys all moved to Baltimore, and I stayed in New York and Florida for a little while, about a year and a half, before I moved to Baltimore.
At that time they were living in the first Wham City space, which was a house. It was in the Copycat, a big building where they would book shows and just get, you know, obliterated, and put on pretty awesome shows.
And there [were] a couple bands that started out of that, and Dan [Deacon] and Videohippos [were] around at that point and starting to play a lot more shows, and Blood Baby . . . So that was sort of the beginning of this thing called Wham City. It was a group of people living in a house.
And then we moved to another part of the Copycat, and continued it for another year. And I was living there and putting on more shows, and we had the first Whartscape there, which we booked in our house — or in our warehouse, I should say.
Eventually we got evicted, and sort of moved into little different module houses, and Whartscape became a big . . . I mean, Dan was the driving force behind the festival [but] of course many, many people helped to make it happen and many Wham City members worked extremely hard.
So I think it started with friendships, and people [who like] to put on shows and party together. And then those people eventually became artists, who were showing themselves and putting on larger shows, and working with other people outside of the collective.
But there’s a kind of thread of friendship, and I think some kind of aesthetic, but it’s hard to pin down. I don’t know what it is really.
N-L: Right, so I guess the next two questions: Why Baltimore, and is there a Wham City aesthetic, or maybe even a Baltimore aesthetic?
JJR: I think, you know . . . At the time we were all in New York at SUNY and we were all looking for a giant warehouse space in New York and it was really too expensive, and a little disheartening.
The New York scene at that point, felt to us — you know, that we knew of at that point, and in hindsight I was probably fairly naïve about a lot of things — seemed very hard to be a place where you were starting off.
And especially starting off where you were experimenting artistically in a way where maybe you failed as many times as you succeeded.
So there was a kind of experimental exuberance with a lot of the art that we were doing, that I think was rough around the edges, and sometimes really exciting, and sometimes probably caustic, annoying and unsuccessful.
And I think that for me, that’s still some of the most exciting art that I can be around. I think I still . . . probably work in a way where I fall on my ass as much as I succeed or make something that’s really great, great in the sense of successful or that I feel good about it.
So Baltimore felt like a place where there was space to be raw, to be young, to experiment, to pay cheap rent, really cheap rent. The rent for space ratio was completely flipped on its head.
We had a friend who was delivering pizzas once a week here, and that was how he supported himself, delivering pizza one day a week.
So that was like the mythology. Everybody was like, “Hey man, Mickey’s delivering pizzas once a week, man! Holy shit, that’s amazing, I can’t believe it!”
It seemed like a place where there was space for people to try something new. That there wasn’t this giant shroud of pressure.
For me, when I came here, what I found out pretty quickly within a year-ish is that, you know, you can still kind of get up to New York and do some stuff.
You can show your art or you can put on a show or whatever it is, and it’s not inaccessible from Baltimore. You can still get up to New York and do something, but then when you go home, you’re kind of in this whole other place.
And that, for me, when I began to live in Baltimore, became pretty liberating, I think. I felt like I could disappear.
I mean, when I was in New York, it’s hard to describe, but I felt like I was always kind of in the headlights or something . . . psychologically, obviously no one really gave a shit about me at all, but that’s what it felt like. And in Baltimore I remember having this feeling within the first year or two of living here; just feeling like I could disappear a little bit.
N-L: Yeah, Baltimore’s kind of weird in that — you know, at least a lot of students at Hopkins think of Baltimore as not-quite-New York. It’s not like, say, Chicago, where it’s its own thing, because it’s almost connected by virtue of being on the East Coast.
So how much is Baltimore an end-in-itself and how much do people wish they could use it as a springboard into New York?
JJR: Well, most of the people I know, who are artists here, would never live in New York. I think I know a lot of people who are pretty dead-set on staying here indefinitely, and really love and care about the city.
I think as a visual artist, it can be — it is — a difficult place to show art.
I think places like Nudashank Gallery are really exciting to me because I think those guys are really smart about how they’re representing themselves.
They’re starting to get the kind of rep and energy and just buzz around them as an entity for exhibiting artwork. That can be really useful and positive for young artists (and any artists) to show there.
And that is the kind of energy that more Baltimore art spaces need to keep artists here and to give them an outlet.
It’s hard for me to describe exactly what it is. Because on one level, we could be talking about purely money.
I could say, “Well, the reason that it’s hard to be a painter in Baltimore is because it’s difficult to sell paintings because there are no galleries,” and you know, there are a few, and they do sell, etc., but it’s a different world.
But that’s not really what I’m talking about.
I don’t sell any artwork, and I still feel this thing. So it’s more this kind of intangible, difficult-to-pin-down essence, of really just an energy that a contemporary art space can have that’s really exciting.
I feel like Nudashank is starting to get interconnected with a lot of [other] really interesting contemporary art spaces and a vein of contemporary art which I think is important. There needs to be more of that, and I think that that will help keep artists in Baltimore.
Obviously, I think that the Baker Artist Awards, just having become a new prize, so now there’s two $25,000 prizes — I was sad to see that they cut the individual artist grants that they used to give from the Baltimore Office Promotion of the Arts; Baker’s trying to pick up the slack on them.
On another level, I just really do think that there’s a lot of really exciting stuff happening here. There’s just a really good energy, and there’s a lot of really interesting experimental musicians and artists and spaces, and a really strong community of people who are pretty supportive and positive about everyone else.
A lot of people who are involved in that scene are musicians who tour, so there’s a kind of gateway from Baltimore to the rest of the United States and maybe to Europe and the world.
I think the music scene is a kind of entranceway for that kind of local eclecticism that opens a doorway to, say, travel.
Places like the Red Room, or even Floristree, which is a warehouse venue, bring people in from all over the world and the United States.
And then Nudashank’s bringing a lot of artists down from New York, and so there feels like there’s a kind of dialogue that’s happening, where Baltimore can be a place where not only all these local Baltimore artists can do great things, and show really interesting music and films and art in these wonderful DIY spaces, but then there’s this constant opportunity to meet really interesting people from other places . . .
So it’s not insulated in that way, but still feels very local and has its own flavor that’s very unique.
It’s kind of got this unique local DIY-venue experimental flavor, but there‘s a constant influx of people all over the place coming through and an opportunity to expand your own experience through that. Which I think is exciting for people.
A lot of people that I know are broke; it’s hard to find work here. Although I guess it’s tough like that all over the country, so I don’t know.
N-L: But are people saying this stuff about Cleveland? Does Baltimore have some sort of edge, or is it just lucky?
JJR: I don’t know. I haven’t toured enough to know that firsthand . . . I haven’t traveled the country extensively on the level that I know other people have, so I wouldn’t be the best person to answer that question.
I will say that people that I know who, say, tour 200 days out of the year and have done that for years, seem to still feel like Baltimore has a really unique energy.
I would just say from what has happened here in the last few years, just the energy and buzz and kind of focus on Baltimore that I’ve noticed manifest in the last five years . . . [that] I think Baltimore’s lucky that there was this amalgamation of all these interesting people and things and opportunities that just sort of happened at this moment; [that] seemed to really be propelling the city’s art environment forward in a really excellent way.
But I don’t know.
Cleveland could be, like, mind-blowing. I just don’t know.
N-L: Talk about Denardo et al.?
JJR: I think it’s exciting that Baltimore Curators is bringing local musicians to campus . . . I hope that the energy of [the shows] also carries over into, hopefully, at least a few visiting artists’ lectures throughout the next year.
That we can expand the palate of Homewood campus and of Hopkins — not to say that there’s not already a huge amount of interesting people and events that are coming through but I think there’s always room for more of this certain type of lecture and event, and I really hope that we can continue to do it, and I hope that people will come out for it. People who are interested in . . . art . . . f**k it . . .
