Jonah Freeman’s architectural aggregations are zones of grotesque and elaborate fantasy that draw on themes of decay and post-industrial ruin. Imagined worlds comprised of cultural by-product, the works speak to the secondary realm of the modern world and consider the multiple interiorities that shape the texture of daily lives, real and imaginary. The Franklin Abraham is a 150-year-old endlessly expanding building which houses two million people. This imagined urban amalgam is based on the process of architectural accumulation that defines the modern city, and in Freeman’s vision, it takes the form of photographic collages as well as a film exploring the interior lives of the building’s inhabitants. As the building continues to expand in a series of retrofits and renovations, its exterior façade is progressively modernized, until it comes to resemble a mass of interweaving skyways and towers, not unlike Fritz Lang’s vision in Metropolis. Hello Meth Lab is a re-creation of a methamphetamine lab in the Texas desert. In addition to the requisite still life of boxes of pseudoephedrine, flasks, and beakers, there are, in Freeman’s vision, rooms of obsessively stacked magazines, a dirty mattress thrown into the corner, and jars of meticulously collected detritus, speaking to a habitation that merges the intimacy of day-to-day life with the violence of addiction and crime. The meth lab is an interiorized zone of sub-public interaction, but also a dynamic space, in which money, drugs, and sex are openly exchanged. In Freeman’s work, decay becomes a generative process associated with the gestation and consumption of parallel societal relationships. The Franklin Abraham and Hello Meth Lab are incomplete fictions based on a collaged reality, spaces which provide for the contemplation of that quality called intimate immensity by philosopher Gaston Bachelard.

Filip Tejchman: What does the word “interior” mean to you and your work?

Jonah Freeman: Interior architectural space is fundamentally theatrical in the sense that you can shape it into any world that you want—into a certain fantasy that goes on inside. I was interested in big urban interiors like casinos, airports, and art fairs, which seem to be displaced from the outside world. You go in, and you could kind of be anywhere. Compounded with that was my interest in film sets—how light is used in them as a transformative device, so that you could be in the winter in 1890 or something. My early sculptures looked a lot like Minimalist sculpture, but I was using light, in a way, to shape the volumes of space, the times of day, and specific places, so that the interior was a kind of fantasy.

 

 

Jonah Freman, The Franklin Abraham, 2004, film still

 

 

 

FT: Your project The Franklin Abraham has two parts, right? There’s the film, which blends public and private spaces and deals with constant domestic interchange—that’s like the interior, and then in counterpoint, there’s the series of collages, an exterior. How does that interior begin to inform the exterior?

JF: The Franklin Abraham came out of thinking about interior space, but I wanted scale to be something ridiculous. One beginning for the piece was the idea that in New York, you’re always inside. Even when you’re outside, it’s always like a big interior. It was a goofy idea: what if we smooshed all the buildings together? What if the Upper West Side was compressed into one building? What would be the most extreme and stupidest place to take this? A building for one million people to live in. And then I thought, well, let’s just make it two million, if it’s going to go into the realm of the ridiculous. It becomes immediately unbelievable, but it’s also rich and thick with intimate interior spaces because of that scale. The camera is a sort of roving eye. You get the sense that the camera is almost a character, moving through the building, stopping on these observations, and through that, you get a sense of the scale of the building. The collages grew organically because I imagined this world, and there were necessities to articulate it. I don’t draw, but I am a photographer, so I could take photographs and collage them together. I pieced the photographs together and connected all the buildings. This process of making the images was similar to the way the building [would have been] built—added on to and added on to over years. They’re in a mishmash of styles.

 

 

 

Jonah Freeman, The Franklin Abraham - The End of The Pale Blue Epoch, 1/5, 2004

 

 

FT: For the collages, you’re photographing not canonical or monumental buildings, but instead, a sort of secondary architecture. What drove that?

JF: I wanted the work to seem parallel in nature. I didn’t want the building to seem like a work of art. It was supposed to have been built by many developers, non-architects. It was really about real estate expansion as opposed to nice environments.

FT: The aesthetic of The Franklin Abraham seems Reagan-era, which resonates with the idea of a War on Drugs implied in your installation, Hello Meth Lab. The interior of that piece is not really about a meth lab as much as it’s about the people that live there.

 

 

 

Jonah Freeman, 1983, 2006, digital c-print

 

 

JF: Definitely. My collaborators on that work—Justin Lowe and Alexandre Singh—and I had this joke that if Hello Meth Lab were a graduate seminar, it would be called “Community, Ritual, and Psychosis” because it wasn’t just a meth lab, although that was the title. It was also a hippie commune, and also suggested various sites of industrial power and production with all the objects and material that go into production—Sudafed, hydriodic acid, and industrial products that are used in DIY Production.

FT: Hello Meth Lab has a theatrical vision, but also a documentary vision.

JF: We wanted it to feel documentary, but we didn’t go to great lengths to make it accurate. We thought of the construction of the meth lab more in sculptural terms than in terms of how it would actually function as a lab. We looked at a lot of pictures of chemistry sets, but in the end, it was more about working spatially and visually.

 

Jonah Freeman, Justin Lowe, Alexandre Singh, Hello Meth Lab in the Sun, 2008, mixed media installation, Ballroom Marfa

 

 

FT: There seems to be a forensic understanding of narrative. You’re supposed to walk through it and discover the potentials for all the ways it can be inhabited.

JF: Definitely. And Hello Meth Lab is not as literal as Franklin Abraham, which really got into a parallel world and parallel history with its necessity to create names for things and brand a history and characters.

FT:When you use the term parallel, are you suggesting that the viewers become displaced from their own reality such that reality then becomes strange?

JF: I consider the Franklin Abraham to be a sort of bizarro New York. It’s all filmed here, and the images are all taken here. So, it has this familiarity. I spend a lot of time researching sculptures by walking around environments, taking pictures. I’ve spent a lot of time walking through Chinatown, especially on Grand Street. I’ve always enjoyed walking through abandoned buildings, and I want the sculpture to be a similar kind of thing, where you keep moving through a space. You’re voyeuristic, you’re spying.

FT: Visiting abandoned buildings suggests fascination with decay. To what extent is decay embodied in The Franklin Abraham and Hello Meth Lab?

 

 

The Complex, Drop City, c. 1967, car parts, building materials

 

 

JF: In Hello Meth Lab, it’s pretty clear. It’s manifested as something that’s been abandoned. In some cases, the rooms have been burned. The hippie commune that we built was based upon Drop City, the commune in Colorado that was abandoned. This sort of utopia was tried, and it failed. In The Franklin Abraham, there wasn’t necessarily a utopian vision for the building. It was a privatized society and one that’s decaying. That, in the end, is more literal because if you’re trying to imagine an entire city as one building, you’re going to have a very wealthy area like the Upper East Side, and you’re also going to have a floor area, an outer borough like Queens. So, the lower floors have parts that are decaying. It’s articulated in the film in the newscast when a woman says that no one is supposed to go below the twentieth floor because the riots are going on.

FT: Even though the society’s in decay, it’s still productive. It’s going to continue to grow and be built upon. It’s not necessarily a destructive process.

JF: It’s not wholly entropic at all, but in the case ofThe Franklin Abraham, you definitely wanted to feel the destruction, in the film especially, because it travels between all the classes. You have the people that run the show somewhere in the building and then the street gang that sells drugs in the bathroom.

FT:Decay is at a sort of confrontation with the architecture in these works.

JF: Architecture almost became a kind of vessel or bracketing system, through which we could talk about all the things that are contained by it—a framing device. In The Franklin Abraham, it involved all the social aspects, the social power structures that are contained in one environment.

FT: But when Hello Meth Lab looks like it’s erupting into the gallery, there seems to be a more direct confrontation with the hermetic architecture of the gallery, a rupture of two conflicting ideological spaces.

 

Jonah Freeman, Justin Lowe, Alexandre Singh, Hello Meth Lab in the Sun, 2008, mixed media installation, Ballroom Marfa

 

 

JF: I wouldn’t say that it was about specifically confronting architecture - more about what goes on in those spaces. It’s also about vernacular architecture. I was influenced by Robert Venturi’s Learning From Las Vegas, Rem Koolhaas’s Delirious New York, and the process of addition. Those were my jumping-off points for thinking about architecture, and both of these books are about how places evolved. 

FT: Meanwhile, you’ve chosen to work with Reno rather than Las Vegas. In your sculpture The Experience of Reno, you isolate the material effects of tinted glass, which reminds me of the malaise you encounter when walking through American cities that appear to be hiding something. Reno is a close approximation, a sort of second city in comparison to the splendor of Vegas. Why do you choose to work with Reno in lieu of Las Vegas? 

JF: Las Vegas is about the icon. Reno can be seen as a more vernacular city; it’s something that’s not talked about as much. It seemed much riper for the banality of its architecture, the strip malls, and I don’t want to say soullessness, but it’s close to that. Avoiding Las Vegas is similar to why there’s no image of the Statue of Liberty in The Franklin Abraham images. I’m deliberately taking these icons away. 

 

Jonah Freeman, The Experience of Reno, 1998, plexiglass, carpet, aluminum frame, theatrical light

 

 

FT: One could say that your work, particularly Hello Meth Lab, has a certain political activity in it, a criticism through exposure. Do you align yourself with that agenda, or is the meth lab something that you just have a sculptural fascination with?

JF: The politics are there, but they're sort of implicit. I’m not making the kind of work that proposes a certain viewpoint, but you definitely want to think about the political situation. Earlier we wrote a narrative for how the three spaces in Hello Meth Lab were connected — the hippie commune, the clandestine meth lab, and the industrial power site. How did they all interact in this political system that we grew up in? What did the hippie commune symbolize? It was about the drug revolution but also about a sort of awakening and about rejecting the industrial power structure. You could link that to the contemporary meth lab, which is, in some ways, a product of this sixties counter-cultural revolution. But now, there’s no longer any idealism or any kind of spiritual journey or awakening. It’s about escapism. And while the hippie commune involved a rejection of industrial society, the meth lab is reliant on industrial society to make its product. All of these products are produced by factories. So, I’m trying to get this web going on between things, not making moral judgments about good or bad.

FT: How would you describe the quality of “hiddenness” in the community of Hello Meth Lab? What kind of exchanges do they have?

JF: I think that what’s implied is that it’s a ritualistic society. I thought about alchemy as something that rang through all of the spaces. I wanted to make that the linkage, and there’s this fetish of materials, as the work tries to transform them into some kind of spiritual objects, like drugs—the idea of drug production as some sort of alchemy—and then, to the idea of the hippie kitchen as a sort of holistic experience of material. So, there are certain things that are set up to imply a fetish and worship of certain materials. Cactuses and crystals were a running theme through the piece because most cactuses have some sort of psychotropic properties to them, and crystals, of course, embody spiritual energy; people use them to change the nature of their spiritual environments, and they put them on their bodies. So, we planted those throughout the installation, and we had black and white party photos that portray people with crystals and cactuses all over their faces and bodies. They’re supposed to represent some sort of cult fetish for worshipping these objects. In the hippie commune, we had collages of crystals and cactuses, and then in the meth lab, there’s a terrarium of cactuses. There are other things like astrological charts and alchemical drawings, sort of like things in Aleister Crowley’s books that imply ritual or worship going on in some sort of cultish way. 

 

Jonah Freeman, Justin Lowe, Alexandre Singh, Hello Meth Lab in the Sun, 2008, mixed media installation, Ballroom Marfa

 

 

FT: Suggesting the idea of alchemy through consumption?

JF: Yes. 

FT: In some ways shopping is a form of alchemical consumption because we often buy goods with the explicit purpose of transforming ourselves. 

JF: Absolutely. And through advertising, these goods are embedded with the promise that they will make lives better. 

FT: How would you define a word like “atmosphere” in relation to your work?

JF: I want it to feel like a room, not just a display of objects or furniture. I go to great lengths to make it aged, and it has the right wear and tear in order to produce an atmosphere of being used and inhabited.

FT: It’s about experience design? 

JF: Definitely. 

FT: Do you conceive of these spaces as rooms for five or ten people or as rooms that need to be experienced alone? 

JF: In most cases, people are not going alone. There was another aspect to the meth lab that does not come across in the images: we wanted there to be an aspect of surveillance. So, we set up a series of recording devices, and the rooms were mic’d, so that as you moved through and said something, it would be recorded and played back on a delay. So if you were there with a friend and said something like “wow, this is scary,” you might be recorded and played back later in the installation. In that sense, it was important that there was a social interaction. 

FT: What about a word like “weakness”? When Ed Keller wrote about your work in Praxis, he referred to weak architecture, which is a non-monumental, non-canonical aggregation of secondary characteristics. How does that play out in your work?

 

 

Jonah Freeman, Justin Lowe, Alexandre Singh, Hello Meth Lab in the Sun, 2008, mixed media installation, Ballroom Marfa

 

 

JH: In Hello Meth Lab, there’s a sense of entropy and failure. The hippie commune, for example, is an example of an ambition to create a utopian society that failed. And in the meth lab itself, it’s clear that these are not sustainable communities, with evidence such as the burnt kitchen. In that sense, weakness can be looked at as something of a spectrum. We wanted to show a powerful society, juxtaposed with an underclass. Similarly, in The Franklin Abraham, there was the juxtaposition of weakness and failure with strength and production. 

FT: How are you continuing to develop these themes?

JF: The project that I’m doing now is called In the Kaleidoscopic Room. It’s sort of an expanded version of The Franklin Abraham, where we put the entire city into a metroplex. And it builds on this idea of urban corridors, where instead of buildings growing together, entire towns grow. It contains The Franklin Abraham, and it’s based on this fictional book that I’m writing for this fictitious exhibit called “The Kaleidoscopic Room.” The premise is that it’s an exhibit started around the time of something like the Crystal Palace, and it relates to the idea of conventions, world’s fairs, and art and technology displays, which have amalgamated into a giant meaningless super-convention that has no theme whatsoever and is simultaneously about everything and nothing. It goes on indefinitely as a twenty-four-hour, seven-day convention spectacle. The works are about what happens in this fantastic world, but it’s also more specifically about display as a medium or material: the mode of display versus the content. 

FT: What’s the medium for this project? 

JH: I’ve conceived of it as a performance-lecture, a history lesson with slides, in which I talk about visiting this exhibition. What are its customs and rituals? It’s parallel in nature like The Franklin Abraham. There’s going to be an accompanying film that tells the story through objects, but with no actors. It’s going to be a series of displays done in a single shot around a series of tables and rooms or sets, each with an object. And the theme of each object or room would lead to another. You might see a pile of socks that leads to a picture of a shoe, which would lead to a picture of a woman’s leg, which would lead to a picture of a woman drinking water, and then, there might be a bottle of water, and then there might be some misting. And we would use these techniques which they use to sell, for example, a bowl of cereal, with a really slow-motion pour of milk going into the corn flakes, and the strawberry jumps up. It would be shot in a very lush style. And as you move from set to set, you'd also see the mechanism of the set, behind the set. You would see the lights, but not the people—you might see hands. It would represent, you could say, the politics of display or representation. 

FT: So, In the Kaleidoscopic Room is another example of failed ambition. 

JF: Certainly some aspects of it. 

FT: But the failed ambition is actually fundamentally productive: it produces a ruin, which can actually be inhabited.

JF: Yeah, I’d say that it’s still functioning. There's the idea of the scale getting so big that it nullifies the content. It’s not a fair about watches, for example. It’s about everything and nothing, and in the end, the theme and meaning disappear. This is not necessarily a condition of failure. But there is a story behind this exhibit: when the fair is done, the things that go unsold or unconsumed are thrown away because their value is meaningless outside the fair. The perimeter of the city is inhabited by this underclass, and they come in and take all of these discarded elements back to their high-rise ghettos and make new uses out of them. 

FT: Any other new projects about alchemical or spiritual value that you’ve been thinking about but haven’t had a chance to work with yet?

JF: What we’re expanding into now, Black Acid Coop, is a room that’s like a universal library. Knowledge is power, and power is a form of alchemy. Black Acid Coop is a continuation of Hello Meth Lab, and it will focus on the linkage between the academic world and counterculture—like acid culture coming out of Harvard—and between academia and sites of major industry—like the Manhattan Project, where the university was building weapons of mass destruction.