Barbara Koenen is a Chicago-based artist and curator whose War Rug Prints are currently on display at the Thomas Robertello Gallery. Her exhibitions include Muse (2008), Outlaw A (2006), Buddha at the Hotdog Stand (1999), and her ongoing Afghan War Rug project; her work has been exhibited at galleries and art centers in the U.S. and Europe. Recently I spoke with Barbara about her influences, her studio practice, how she developed a site-specific installation that brought together elements as seeming disparate as hand grenades and water balloons, curating Consuming War, and her other ongoing projects. 

DG: How did you first get interested in the arts?

BK: I have always liked drawing and making art since I was a child. I had some very good teachers, and my mother was very supportive -- taking me to classes and such. A neighbor down the street was very creative, a teacher and a collector of many curious things, and she inspired me to make art and was my first sale!

DG: Who are some of your influences?

BK: I have many, many influences -- I'm a cheap date!  Nancy Graves, Wolfgang Laib, Yayoi Kusama, houdou...

DG: What is an early memory you have of doing something in the arts? 

BK: When I was around 2 years old I "painted" the guest room at my grandparents with my own poop! I was inspired by the oriental wallpaper, very calligraphic, and just decided to use the closest material at hand. Fortunately, my grandfather was delightful and just went downstairs to get a bucket and a brush.

DG: What are some interesting things that you like about creating art installations? 

BK: I like the immersion, spending long time concentrating on one thing, mulling over all the nuances of the subject, the material, the space, etc. I like working in different environments and feeling how they resonate over time. I like being public about an artistic practice and talking to people about what I'm doing.

DG: I really enjoyed going to the “Power/Style x 0.5 = War” installation in the Fine Arts Building. How long did it take you to collect the grenades you used in the installation, such as the hand grenade water balloons? 

BK: I've been collecting grenades and related material since 2002. The water balloons were from a carnival supply store. Very celebratory, don't you think? I also have a couple of fruit juice bottles that are shaped like hand grenades and the caps are like the pins you pull out. Haven't tried it, but I guess that juice packs a wallop.

DG: How did first become interested in hand grenades, and how did you come up with the ideas of covering hand grenades with cozies and other things like sprinkles? 

BK: It first sprang from specific deliberations as I sought to identify a distinctly American craft practice that could manifest war or occupation in the way the war rugs did in Afghanistan. What American crafts are as ubiquitious as carpets are in Persia? I thought about quilting, furniture-making, and scrap-booking, and I remembered my grandmother's hobby of crocheting cosies for "unmentionables" like toilet paper rolls or Kleenex boxes. I decided to crochet cosies for grenades. Then I began riffing on cosies, including using candy sprinkles, and also investigated the history of grenades, which led to the whole pomegranate project.

DG: The confluence of elements is fascinating -- in terms of how you describe your curiosity about cultural analogies between American and Afghani culture (knitting, sewing, fiber art). Would you say those elements came together deliberately or organically and subconsciously?

BK: I'd say both -- some aspects are deliberate, and many are just allowing for subconscious association. 

DG: How did you decide how to combine found objects with those altered objects -- such as the grenades covered with cozies? 

BK: My art frequently is very similar to my studio and my home -- filled with things that are of interest for one reason or another.  Often it is interesting to alter an object, or to juxtapose it with something else, or to group it with other things, related in a variety of ways. Food for thought, leading to associations and sometimes surprising conclusions.

DG: How did you decide how to combine the objects with the chalked writings, in “Power/Style x 0.5 = War”? Would you say there are there some ways by which that approach resonates with works by other artists who use something that evokes pedagogy? (For instance, I was reminded of some of Joseph Beuys’ installations that use writings on chalkboards.)  

BK: There were so many ways that pomegranates related to grenades, and so many other relationships that I wanted to record, that I had to write stuff down in addition to creating objects and presenting them in relation to other curious found objects.  My goal with "Power/Style" which I renamed "Muse" was to provoke thought.  For example, the whole chronology of the launch of POM Wonderful as a cure-all elixir at the same time as the Bush adminstration's launch of the "War on Terror."  Most of us Americans bought both of those marketing campaigns hook, line and sinker, and both were later disproven, to much less awareness.  And, the coincidental connection of Lynda Resnick, the founder and creator of POM Wonderful, with Daniel Ellsberg, who used her xerox machine to make a copy of what became the Pentagon Papers 30 years ago. There was too much to convey to just use objects. There is certainly an aspect of pedagogy involved. It was very apparent in the closing text of my e-invitations: "Conclusions will not be drawn... mistakes will not be made."

DG: How did you come up with the idea for “Consuming War”?

BK: Alison Quinn at the Hyde Park Art Center came up with it initially, and asked me to curate it. I loved the title and riffing on the ideas behind it with the work of all the artists. I was also grateful to HPAC for supporting my desire to involved other arenas beyond the gallery space, like using CTA buses and trains and newspaper supplements as locations for artwork. They really helped get the artwork deeper into the consumer world.

DG: What are some challenges you have encountered, regarding creating work or curating shows that deal with politics and war? For instance, there’s the pitfall of being too heavy-handed (There’s plenty of bad political poetry, visual art, etc. that is too obviously polemical or proselytizing, not allowing the audience to approach the work without being hit with obvious messages). 

BK: I try not to be too didactic. I want to appeal to a range of viewers/participants, not just people who agree with me. And I realize how complex many issues are, so I appreciate work that acknowledges the complexity and spins it around for deeper contemplation. While curating, I try to have a mix of approaches, with some more direct and others more obtuse in their approach. That adds up to a richer and more resonant overall experience. 

DG: I enjoyed reading background behind your concepts behind your War Rug project, which has been ongoing for a decade. Would you mention a few ways by which the concept of your project has evolved over these years? 

BK: The War Rug project has really evolved, at least my thinking about it has. I made my first spice war rug At first I just made one because it fit within my existing practice in which I'd been making temporary abstract installations using spices and other powders it because

DG: What are some things that you find fascinating about Tibetan sand mandalas? I really like how the mandalas are made, and then how they are fragile, temporal creations that are gone almost as soon as they are created.

BK: Me too. And, I am acutely aware that pretty much everything we do is really very temporary, and even art, which is supposed to last forever, is really fleeting except for very very few examples. The transitory nature of being has been an important theme throughout my practice.

DG: How did you come up with the idea of combining the concept of Afghani war rugs with that of sand mandalas? 

BK: I was already doing transitory work, as paintings, installations and actions using materials that would deterioriate or be swept away. But when 9/11 happened, I thought about the war rugs and it just made sense as a practice that could begin to respond to the horror of the attack, and bring in some historical context about why it might have happened. The war rugs were a response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1970s. America backed the resistance fighters, supplying weapons and making promises of other support. But the US pulled out after the Soviets left, and the Taliban took over and turned the country into a despotic place. So our betrayal was in some ways responsible for the later attack.  It is important for us to understand this, and to work for peace. So, combining the war rug imagery with the Tibetan meditative practice felt like as appropriate a response as I could think of at the time.

DG: What are some things that you find interesting about combining things that don’t appear together until you bring them together in your artworks (spices in war rugs, candy sprinkles on hand grenades)?

BK: I don't think any of this stuff is as distant as it might seem.  Like the fruit juice containers shaped like grenades.  That's not an artist, that's a marketer/product designer. Ain't nothing new there.

DG: Would you like to comment on the contrast between layers of temporality / duration, with your War Rug project? For instance, each war rug is temporal and is gone, yet the ongoing project, with its different revisitations / iterations create a longer temporal arc. Also, documentation of the projects (in digital form or as prints) gives the project a different kind of life and duration.

BK: I had mixed feelings about my decision to start pulling prints of the war rug installations, instead of sweeping them up in their entirety as the monks do. I called myself a "failed Buddhist." But at the same time, I wasn't happy with simply substituting the war rug imagery for the Tibetan designs that have such specific meaning of a highly spiritual nature. This was a very crude juxtaposition, actually, and I feared somewhat disrespectful. So, when I started pulling prints, I explained it by saying I spent too much time making the installations and wanted to document them. That was actually rather flip. It was only after several years that I realized that the action of pulling a series of prints destroys the images of weapons, and you can witness that in the prints.  It took a while for me to understand this conceptually, it was working more in my subconscious I think. 

DG: You are an artist, curator, and arts administrator. How do you balance those three sides of your involvement with the arts? Would you say that those different roles / sides of who you are influence / affect each other?

BK: I think art is a crucial aspect of humanity, and I want to do whatever I can to make it vital. I like being able to approach it from vastly different perspectives -- from a bureaucrat to a creator. 

DG: What other ongoing projects have you been working on?

BK: I'm working with an initiative that is trying to create a traveling exhibition about Afghan women in peace and war that will travel throughout the world to foster dialogue about their situation.    And, at my day job at the Chicago Dept of Cultural Affairs, we are launching the Creative Chicago Survey from Feb 4 - 25, which is an amazing effort to invite any and all "creatives" in Chicago to tell us who they are and what they need to thrive.  It is circling back to a survey we did in 2000, that led to the creation of the Chicago Artists Resource (CAR) website, and I hope we get amazing participation so that the next mayor's administration hears loud and clear from Chicago's artists.  www.creativechicagosurvey.com  

     Barbara Koenen's War Rug Prints will be on display at the Thomas Robertello Gallery through Saturday, January 29. 

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