“While Niki de Saint Phalle joyfully celebrated life, I wanted to joyfully celebrate death.”
Susanna Petrin: Claudia Hart, you are an American artist in New York City, how did Basel find you?
Claudia Hart: HEK Director Sabine Himmelsbach called me out of the blue and said: ‘You might think this is crazy because we don’t have much time, but I would like to invite you to create a virtual artwork for this app that I am curating together with Basel Tourism’. I think Sabine chose me very deliberately because I’m considered a pioneer of digital art. I’m known in these circles, but at the same time I’ve been marginalised from the narrative of digital art history for a long time because I’m older and a woman. My impression is that Sabine, who represents feminist positions herself, wants to bring me more into the contemporary discussion.
Sechs Figuren, 2024, Claudia Hart, for ARTour
SP: And how did you get your bearings in Basel, how did you choose the best place for your virtual sculpture?
CH: Sabine and Basel Tourism gave me an online tour of Basel. They showed me where other artists had already placed their works and where there were further potential locations. We eventually passed the Tinguely Fountain and I just thought: ‘Oh my God, of course it has to be this fountain!’ I think they were a bit shocked because the other tech artists hadn’t been interested in this almost cliché historical centre. But I did a fellowship at the American Centre in Paris many years ago. From its premises in the Centre Pompidou, I gazed daily at the iconic Stravinsky Fountain by Tinguely and Niki de Saint Phalle. Of course, I knew all about Niki, that she was this pop-feminist artist who celebrated new technologies with her own fantastic myths. I realised that there is also a Tinguely fountain here in Basel, but without Niki, so I could represent her – not as Niki, but as myself, in her spirit.
SP: How have you reinterpreted Niki de Saint Phalle in your own way?
CH: Niki used fibreglass for her female figures, which was a new technology at the time; I used virtual reality and 3D software for my own version of mythical women. In Niki’s time there was a lot of hope for the world to be reinvented, for new technologies that could solve all the world’s problems. I, on the other hand, live in a time where I recognise that these problems have not been solved. I am divided about new technologies, social media, big companies like Google or Apple. So while Niki joyfully celebrated life, I wanted to joyfully celebrate death. My figures are based on those ancient Greek female figures that support entire temples on their heads like columns – they are called caryatids and can be seen on the Acropolis, for example. I have six caryatids in the Tinguely Fountain, holding up vases. They grow flowers that soon wither, but they quickly regenerate and grow back. They soon regenerate, grow back and die again, again and again. They are brightly coloured, and playful. I see them as a parallel to Niki’s figures in the Stravinsky fountain, but they are totally me. I’m not copying Niki, I’m simply making Claudia in the spirit of Niki.
Sechs Figuren, 2024, Claudia Hart, für ARTour
SP: And then there’s the music, or rather a voice, what do we hear?
CH: This is Maya, the daughter of composer Edmund Campion, director of the Centre for New Music and Audio Technology at the University of California, Berkeley. When Maya was a child, we asked her to be a clock and count time. So she makes music with her voice. In my cut, she counts to seven over and over again, accompanying the growing and withering of the flowers. This is also about the passing of time, about transience and death.
SP: You are a woman and not that young anymore…
CH: I can say with pride that I am 69 years old.
SP: And that’s pretty old for an artist who works with the latest, technically sophisticated computer programmes. Does this make it any easier, as you are something unique in the art world, or, as already mentioned, does it make it more difficult to be recognised?
CH: When I started working with virtual reality in the mid-90s, this field was completely dominated by men: 3D programmes were mainly used for military purposes and for shooter games. One man won a prize at Ars Electronica for an image of a half-naked woman fused to a motorbike with an exhaust pipe sticking out of her private parts. That was unbelievable! Together with my co-author Claudia Herbst, I criticised this pornographic sexism, indeed this misogyny, in an academic paper that is apparently still being read today. The paper, entitled ‘Virtual Sex’, first appeared on porn sites, which generated a lot of clicks.
SP: That’s a very ironic misunderstanding.
CH: Yes, sexism and pornography were typical in that industry. I was teaching at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago at the time, where I started a programme called Experimental 3d, where I taught virtual reality in the context of the history of representation. In protest to the pornographic or military works of men, I programmed slow, erotic, female figures. The students squirmed in their seats and felt very uncomfortable. Unfortunately, there is still a lot of sexism and ageism in innovation culture today. Unconsciously, many younger people in this novelty-centred culture want to eradicate everything old, including older people.
SP: But can’t you also benefit from being a rarity in this digital art world as an older artist?
CH: I’m here, here I am. You’re interviewing me. Sabine got me this gig, which in turn drew other people’s attention to me because the HEK is so highly regarded. I am also indebted to Anika Meier, a curator and author who sits on the HEK advisory board, for her support. I currently have several interesting commissions: For the upcoming Armory Show, I am painting over my own paintings with digital flowers in the style of women artists who participated in the first Armory exhibition in New York in 1913, but who have been overlooked by art history. For Microscope Gallery in New York, I am curating an exhibition about other forgotten women artists, a first generation of pioneering women who were similarly erased. As I’ve gotten older, I’m not only advocating for other women, but I’ve also become a champion for older digital artists. I work in resistance to human obsolescence, which is unfortunately a central element of tech culture.
Footnotes/Links:
The ARTour app can be downloaded free of charge from the App Store.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228477156_Virtual_Sex_The_Female_Body_in_Digital_Art