Interview: Mrs. Deane

Third up: Mrs. Deane (a.k.a. Norman Beierle and Hester Keijser).

Liz: According to your site, “Mrs. Deane is a blog run by Beierle + Keijser, visual artists from, respectively, Germany and Holland. It is named . . . after a spiritistic medium from the beginning of the twentieth century. For us, Mrs. Deane stands for the ambiguous and the undecidable that one finds oneself confronted with near the borders of the perceptible and the probable. Here, every man has to decide for himself what he holds to be true and what not.” I get all that, but how do you run this operation? Do you both do the writing? Will the real Mrs. Deane please stand up?

Hester: I didn’t realize you believed in resurrection. If the “real” Mrs. Deane decided to answer your call I would be quite shaken. But seriously, “Mrs. Deane-the-Blog” is pretty much a joint venture, with both of us contributing in our own way. I do all the actual writing, but that’s merely a matter of convenience. I studied for two years in the States at a dreadful, posh, all-girls finishing school college in Virginia, making me a bit more comfortable with the language than Norman. Content (raw text) is contributed by both of us. Norman will give me a rough draft, which I then tame into something readable. Finding new stuff is something we both spend considerable time on, somewhere between one and three hours a day. Sometimes we discuss our findings between ourselves before deciding to post about it or not (yet). All this intertwining makes it impossible to say who is “writing” Mrs. Deane, which is why we prefer to keep it open and let Mrs. Deane be our mouthpiece.

L: One of the things I’m most impressed about when reading your blog—and this probably says more about me than anything I’ll ask you about—is how often you’re on vacation/holiday. What’s a day, a week, or a month in your lives like? Are you working artists? Do you support yourself with any kind of day job(s)? How do you make a go of it?

H: That’s hilarious! Of all things, I’d never imagined people would be the most impressed about our periods of absence. How impressed will you be if we’d take a permanent vacation? It’s true we were away a lot last year, but not all these absences were real vacations and often involved working very hard in a place with no (fast) Internet access or good computers.

Norman: We are not the typical holiday-type people. Roasting in the sun on a beach isn’t an “activity” both of us would enjoy. Traveling through Europe is often connected with (art) business. We feel comfortable to bring business and personal things together, so when we visited my brother in Berlin, we also took photographs of exhibition spaces in that city. It’s a common practice for full-time artists to combine business and private matters.

H: Like most full-time self-employed visual artists, we’re overworked and underpaid with the one luxury: that no one tells us when to work and when not. If we feel like skipping a day or two, that’s fine. We’ll make up for it later by working sixteen hours a day or more if need be.

What a month looks like depends very much on the projects we have on the go at the time. It can be quite hectic, like last January and February when we worked nonstop on a commission, three exhibitions, a catalog, and preparing for our guest lectures in Rotterdam, but there have been more quiet times, allowing us to develop work and try new things with the financial backup of a stipend. We’ve always supported ourselves with public commissions, sales, lectures, and stipends, but there’s a serious financial dip looming in the not-so-distant future we need to start worrying about pretty soon, apart from buying lottery tickets.

Copyright © Beierle + Keijser

L: Your blog has really become an authority of sorts. You’re linked out the wazoo, read around the world, celebrities in the photoblogosphere. Knowing what I know about the two of you, you’re probably already blushing in embarrassment if you’ve even read this far. Why did you start your blog, and what do you get out of the blogging experience as artists?

H: I don’t feel that way at all, like a celebrity or an authority. That’s what other people make of it, like the assistant photographer we met last winter in Budapest who almost fell out of his chair when he learned we were “the” Mrs. Deane. I was very embarrassed and told him to get off it, which he luckily did. I feel admiration or a wrongly attributed sense of authority gets in the way of having a normal conversation with another. At the same time, having a blog out there that people read has taken away previously existing barriers as well. In that sense, it’s an excellent business card. But whatever we may think, we’re all pretty much nobodies in this world, especially in the art world, which often forgets how tiny it really is compared to the world of politics or billion-dollar multinationals. What also prevents any hubris to grow, is that in Holland this whole photoblogging thing doesn’t have the same status it seems to have acquired in the States. Honestly, I’m always a bit flabbergasted with the importance attributed to blogs and bloggers in the States, or with the disappointment of bloggers who don’t get the following they hoped for.

To tell you the truth, I really can't remember why we started this blog, which was first published in Dutch only and initially covered a wider range of topics than just photography. Let’s say it just happened one day and move on to the next question.

Copyright © Beierle + Keijser

L: What do you get out of the blogging experience as artists? Do you have a love/hate relationship with your blog? I see that all over the place . . . people taking breaks from their blogs, people starting over with new blogs, people calling it quits and returning to the “real” world. Do you have any of that angst, or does all that vacationing you do pretty much take care of whatever blog-related angst you might be plagued with otherwise?

H: Blogging is a natural extension of our art practice, I don’t see it as something I do on the side. Looking at and discussing the merits of other people’s work and photography in general is something Norman and I did a lot even before blogging. We hardly ever get to do this with Dutch colleagues, who somehow shun such discussions about art. With the blog, we tap into a community with whom we can share this need for an exchange of thoughts. The relative popularity of the blog has made me feel less like the odd one out and more confident about my work.

Also, externalizing thoughts on a daily basis in a format intended for publication is like casting a ruthless light on creatures otherwise kept in the comfortable darkness of one’s private opinion. It helps to expose weaknesses and inconsistencies, it shows where you might be too harsh and where greater sharpness in vision is needed. Writing daily also makes it easier to formulate such odious things as press releases or motivations for one’s work. Discipline is as important in the arts as it is in music or theater, and being able to express yourself in words as a visual artist has (some would say unfortunately) become vital for survival in the current landscape of contemporary art.

None of that love/hate stuff. Of course, there are always times when it’s hard to find stuff to write about or when you feel you’re not exploring the right avenues. Then I have to push myself to reinvent or relocate my initial enthusiasm for blogging about photography. Making up silly projects like the fashion week helps to break any rut I’m in. I still feel Mrs. Deane can be a whole lot better than it is and I am far from satisfied with the scope of my writing. As long I have this vague notion of where it is I ought to be heading with the blog, I don’t think I’ll call it quits. Not yet anyway, but ask us again in a year or two.

L: Your Web site has an incredible variety of work, and I find your work as hard to categorize as Mrs. Deane herself. Talk to me a little about your photography, in particular, and what projects you're working on or care about right now.

H+N: I suppose a lot of our work, both photographic and non-photographic, can be called “site specific” in the sense that, when making work for a show or a presentation, we incorporate in our plans the specific site where everything is to take place. We will take into consideration such variables as the size of the space, the size and number of the images it allows, the kind of light available, what the physical experience of standing in the space and viewing the images will feel like, the demographics of the visitors to be expected, the occasion for which we were invited, the specific prestige (or lack thereof) of the venue and sometimes even the amount of press to be expected. These variables are like pieces of a large puzzle that all need to fall into place. About 80 percent of our shows and presentations, including the publicity, are orchestrated by us from A to Z, even though the public is not always aware of having been part of the plan.

Coming from a background in site-specific installations and public art projects, we apply the same approach to our photographic work, which draws on our passion for (the history of) photography and the context in which photographs appear. Our interest in photography certainly doesn’t stop with taking pictures and making prints of the work. Curators can’t come shopping in our studio for work they’d like to exhibit in whatever venue they have in mind. When invited for a show, we will often make work geared toward the occasion. When making work, we—and especially Norman—always have a very clear idea how the presentation will be in its entirety. Perhaps you could say that the individual objects on display are actualized or come to life by being presented to the public.

The drawback of working with photo-based site-specific presentations (I wouldn’t quite call them installations) is obvious: You can’t simply transplant work from one presentation space to the next. Presenting the same photographs in different places often means finding a new context for the work that is as viable as the original one, and I can imagine going so far as to reprint works in a different size if the space asks for it. When viewing our online portfolio, you miss out on this site specificness of the work. We consider the Web site as a kind of documentation of our work rather than as a presentation in some sort of virtual gallery.

Currently, we’re making tests for an upcoming show in Hamburg with prints developed in a bath of instant coffee, washing soda, and water. The final prints, which have coffee-table decoration as their subject, will be mounted on a piece of wood covered with typical tablecloth material matching the prints. This project was fueled by something we saw at a photo fair: an unusual Belgian frame, which used folded art nouveau decorated wallpaper as a background for presenting rows of small photographs that were stuck in the folds of the wallpaper. We liked the strange combination of the wildly decorated background and the fact that the photographs retained their distinct materiality and their character as “objects for use,” something which contemporary framing methods using Dibond or borderless mounting on aluminum tries to conceal as much as possible.

L: I just got a US$37.50 store credit from photo-eye. What one photo book should I put that money toward buying? And why?

H: If I were you, I’d try to get a refund on that credit or else sell the voucher to someone. Use the money instead on books with photos that can be had for anything between one dollar and five dollars at thrift stores, charity shops, or second-hand book shops. We often get more inspiration out of books with old product photography or ancient color reproductions of gardens and flowers; illustrated user manuals; obscure catalogs of forgotten exhibitions about Gothic cathedrals; scientific publications on crop research, ocean-bed vegetation, or something as odd as paranormal photography (although the latter tend to be expensive). In short, anything in which the photographer wasn’t consciously trying to make “art,” yet which we find striking or intriguing. Fine-art photo books are made by artists, but not necessarily for artists. That’s not to say we haven’t any art photo books in our collections, but the ones we most frequently consult are not those. Having said this, probably the best thing we scored last year was the publication by the Albertina in Vienna, The Eye and the Camera: A History of Photography from the Collections of the Albertina.

N: I think I would get The Thornton-Pickard Story by Douglas Rendell . . . also not available from photo-eye. I’m very fond of my T&P Junior Special Reflex camera. Apart from our “modern” Pecoflex, it’s the first (and also oldest) 6 x 9 SLR we bought without the “usual” shutter-curtain damage. It’s my task to keep the technical gear running, so it was a pleasant surprise to get a full working (tilt-and-shift) camera with original and supple curtain shutter and sufficiently accurate speeds. I feel the Thornton-Pickard reflex cameras are underestimated and that’s why there is hardly any coherent information about them. Ideal would be an exhaustive pictorial chronology about Thornton-Pickard reflex cameras, like you get with Leica cameras listing every single little difference between the models. I haven’t seen the book inside, but I would give it a try.