Vincent Ramos Natilee Harren ©2009 Hilary Crisp

2ND FLOOR | 33 WHITE CHURCH LANE | LONDON, E1 7QR | TEL. 020 7426 0346 | hilarycrisp.com
SOLO SOLO
Natilee Harren Vincent Ramos
26 September – 1 November 2008
After Party at the MANDRAKE CULVER CITY @9.30pm with a screening of
D. A. Pennebaker's film MONTEREY POP @10.00pm
Crisp London Los Angeles presents Solo Solo, an exhibition series presenting a singular artwork chosen by an
invited curator. For the third installment, Natilee Harren has selected Motown Took Us There and Motown Brought
Us Back (2005-2008) by Vincent Ramos.
For this version of the installation, Ramos will fill the gallery from floor to ceiling with sandbags, beginning
before the exhibition opens and continuing until the gallery is impenetrable or the artist becomes
insurmountably fatigued. Accompanying the installation will be a series of collages, preparatory drawings, and a
soundtrack of hundreds of songs remembered by the men who served in Vietnam with Ramos’s uncle, Forrest
Lee Ramos, killed in combat on June 19, 1967 before the artist was born. Since 2005, Ramos has been
interviewing veterans from his uncle’s division about the music they remember listening to during the war, in
addition to amassing an incredible collection of magazines, books, records, craft objects, and other cultural
artifacts from the period. Ramos has created a shifting archive of half-reliable memories and abandoned relics
that produce a dialogic constellation through which a sensibility of the world of his lost uncle emerges. Rather
than reactivating the objects and narratives through display (as he has done in the past), for this exhibition,
Ramos constructs an obdurate anti-monument whose construction recalls the interminably self-imposed task of
the collector, the metaphoric slipping away of the “sands of time,” the blockage of the artist’s memory in the face
of a profound loss he was not alive to experience, and the perpetual labor of working through such a trauma.
Placed in the bunker-like space of the Los Angeles gallery, Ramos’s sandbag structure also references the
important June 1967 issue of Artforum, in which a number of landmark essays on Minimalism appeared,
including Michael Fried’s “Art and Objecthood.” The cultures of art and war are brought into an uncomfortable
proximity, with the artist having no choice but, in the face of violence and trauma, sacrifice and loss, to continue
(to borrow from Walter de Maria) his “meaningless work.”
VINCENT RAMOS lives and works in Venice, California and received an MFA from CalArts in 2007. His work has appeared in Los Angeles at
Sixteen:One, 4 F Gallery, and the Mini Wrong Gallery at LA><ART; in New York at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise at Passerby; and in London at the
Bart Wells Institute. Earlier iterations of the current project appeared in 2007 at the CalArts Lime Gallery and the CalArts MFA group exhibition.
NATILEE HARREN is a doctoral student in modern and contemporary art history and critical theory at UCLA, working toward a dissertation that
will present a new theoretical model for Fluxus. In 2007, she organized DRIP EVENT (for George Brecht), an evening of Fluxus event score
performances at PawnShop in Los Angeles. Harren’s writing has appeared in Modern Painters, ArtUS, Athanor, and PART.
Installation view, September 2008; Crisp, Los Angeles.
2ND FLOOR | 33 WHITE CHURCH LANE | LONDON, E1 7QR | TEL. 020 7426 0346 | hilarycrisp.com
Installation view (detail), September 2008; Crisp, Los Angeles.
An Interview: Natilee Harren in conversation with Vincent Ramos
NATILEE HARREN: This project seems fundamentally to be about trying to connect with your uncle who you
never met.
VINCENT RAMOS: Right, I never met him. I was born in ’73. He was killed in ’67. But like most people of my
generation related to someone who was killed in Vietnam, he was always kind of around in “spirit” through, for
example, photographs of him on the living room mantel. He was always there in image, as well as in my family’s
constant recollections of him. As a kid I was able to place his death amidst this huge historical moment, this very
distinct American moment and it kind of made sense to me as that, a personal story encapsulated within a much
larger one.
NH: It was the impetus for your collection, which is now gigantic. A guiding force.
VR: A lot of small narratives and minor histories are the impetus for my collecting. Trying to find out, among other
things, how this physical material fits within my own history, and when it doesn’t fit, making it fit.
NH: But most of what I see in your collection is stuff you find at thrift stores that doesn’t come from your family. It
comes from a slice of time. It seems strange to look to mass culture to locate the more personal psychic space of
your uncle.
VR: I do that a lot. I’ll locate a specific time through objects because it relates to a certain personal narrative I’m
interested in. By basing my initial research on forms of mass media like popular music, print, or television, I am able
to enter that space, or at least attempt to, in a more straight-forward way. During my time at Cal Arts, I had a studio
visit with Carol Bove, who also does work related to this period. She told me that she never uses personal narratives
in constructing her work. She doesn’t really talk to anybody in a formal interview type of way because time has
ultimately affected that person’s memory. It becomes a futile attempt in constructing the past as opposed to, say, a
TIME magazine from the period, which has an account from that time, of that moment. That’s more “real.” Or at least
it is for someone who doesn’t have the first-hand experience like her or me. I understand that way of working, but I
tend to do both. This whole project was based on the interview, talking to people, sitting down with them and
gathering their recollections. In the beginning I thought I was on to something but in the end I was somewhat
deflated because I thought, what if none of this is true...in terms of their memories’ accuracy?
NH: So then it’s about the failing of memory. Even when you do have a documentary photograph, it seems like
you are more interested in slippages of memory because you’re not using photographs in the end; you do a lot of
drawings of photographs. Yet you have talked about looking for the “decisive moment,” which is initially a
photographic term from Cartier-Bresson. Is yours a different kind of decisive moment than that of photography?
2ND FLOOR | 33 WHITE CHURCH LANE | LONDON, E1 7QR | TEL. 020 7426 0346 | hilarycrisp.com
VR: It’s beyond photography. My uncle’s death, I believe, was a true turning point within my family. Just like how
they say, when President Kennedy died, you knew exactly where you were at when you heard the news. It’s that kind
of moment but the repercussions are much greater because the loss is so personal. I was searching for photographic
material that coincided with the day of his death. He was killed on Monday, June 19th in the early afternoon hours.
That’s when I stumbled on the Monterey Pop Festival, which took place June 16-18. I figured out, with the time
difference between the West Coast and Southeast Asia, that he probably died around the same time the festival was
ending--around the point where Jimi Hendrix and The Who were performing, doing those wild theatrics like Pete
Townsend smashing his guitar to pieces or Hendrix setting his on fire. Actions that ultimately and in retrospect
reflected the violence of that era. Or at least the violence that was to come. Remember this was “The Summer of
Love.” At the beginning of The Who’s set the first thing Townsend says is, “This is where it all ends.” Well he was
kinda right in that it did end there in a way. I like discovering these various layers where disparate situations collide.
Trying to locate those layers, as well as their meaning, became an important part of the project.
NH: Actually it’s more like an anti-decisive moment you’re seeking because the decisive moment is when you
click the shutter closed and you have the image stabilized and preserved. But here you are trying to get at the
moment of your uncle’s death, but you can never have it, and so it’s about finding all these things around it. It
becomes more about the relationships between the testimonies, the narratives, and the objects when you put
them all together. In all the iterations I’ve seen of this project, there is a montage-collision effect where you put
all these elements together and it produces an historical and cultural constellation, as if, in the gaps between
those objects, you could somehow circuitously arrive at the decisive moment or produce it through the
culmination of all these different fragments.
VR: The gaps, both the psychological and physical spaces in between, are just as important because they function as
points of departure within the overall scheme of the project.
NH: I was thinking about how appropriate it was that the way I met you was through this project, because it’s
similar to the way you have been trying to connect to a lost traumatic moment through your collecting. That’s the
same experience I had, encountering your work [at CalArts open studios] without you there, and thinking about
my dad having served in Vietnam, and then later on my sister ends up in Iraq. It’s a similar kind of desiring to
connect to something that you don’t really understand or couldn’t have understood because you weren’t there.
VR: War in and of itself is a total abstraction. Especially for those who do not experience it firsthand but who have
had loved ones in the midst of it, like you and me.
NH: But in the beginning you thought you would get to the truth, and now you’ve realized that’s an impossibility.
VR: In the beginning I was pretty optimistic. Because my research was primarily on music, I thought I was going to
find the truth in some weird way because of music’s ability to transcend its given era. I don’t know if I found the truth.
I took a stab at it and the veterans took a stab at it. But once it was all laid out and the fact-checking was completed,
there were songs that simply didn’t exist at that time that the vets swore came from their Vietnam experience. With
that said, those “wrong songs” were few and far between. Out of the 230 songs I collected from them, only a dozen
were inaccurate (in terms of the year of the song’s release and how that coincided with their individual tours).
NH: If only the objects would jog your own memory, your nonexistent memory... I’ve been thinking about your
project in relation to the work of artists like Jeremy Deller who go back to history and re-enact things, using
history as a score and just re-doing it. I think there’s a similar gesture in your work, but it’s not a literal
reenactment, it’s an activation. You take materials and reactivate them based on your inescapable present
moment and the kind of contemporary sensibilities you have. They’re brought together to make new connections
in the present that shed a different light on the past. So what about this new iteration of the project at PawnShop?
VR: It’s a way of answering the question, “What kind of space could I create for this music to exist in that is specific
to that experience?” With this show, and knowing the architecture of the gallery, and that I’ve always thought of it as
being extremely claustrophobic, like a bunker or a tomb, the sandbag as a material came up. It also came up as a
result of my being interested in various performance-related activities and actions from that period and beyond,
especially in California. I wanted to do something that was performance-driven and relied heavily on process. By
physically filling up the space, the action functions as a metaphor for the passage of time.
NH: The sandbags are also a surrogate for your collection, for the other objects that could be in the gallery
space.
2ND FLOOR | 33 WHITE CHURCH LANE | LONDON, E1 7QR | TEL. 020 7426 0346 | hilarycrisp.com
VR: It’s like an hourglass, the physical nature of it and of it being a marker for time. In a sense, it measures whatever
amount of “real” time it takes me to “fill up” the complete space—-top to bottom, floor to ceiling--where you won’t
be able to enter, you will only be able to look at it from its front. At least that’s my thinking at this point.
NH: It recalls Minimalist sculpture and Walter de Maria’s idea of “meaningless work.” And you’ve chosen not
just any material. Your installation has these art historical references but yet, like your collages, it forces art
history into confrontation with a traumatic event through the form of the sandbag. And then there’s the
overwhelming repetition of it...
VR: The act of doing it is what I’m interested in, and if I can do it. It could be a complete failure in terms of what I
envision now, but then what does it mean for it to be a failure? If there’s only 10 bags in the space, or 50 or a hundred
it ultimately carries the same meaning. These unknowns are what I’m really excited about. And then shit, what do
you do with it/them after the exhibition is over?
NH: It’s about the task, it’s about your relationship to doing the thing.
VR: And my relationship I think to the whole project in general, and where I am with it now some three years later.
Maybe I’m making a tomb, maybe I’m burying it, maybe that’s what it has come down to.
NH: But the continuing element is the music.
VR: Absolutely, that’s the thing that underlines it all. It has remained a constant throughout the whole project even
when there were no objects.
NH: Do you ever think that the visuality you give to the music creates for the viewer a new mental image to
accompany that music, so that perhaps the next time I hear such-and-such song it would make me think of your
work?
VR: Yeah, that’s a possibility; it would be great if that happened. Maybe it’s already happened. Maybe these guys
were filling sandbags and listening to this music and it’s just an extension of that action some 40 years later.
NH: That was probably one way to fill time.
VR: Exactly. A lot of guys told me that listening to music was a good way to kill time over there.
NH: Filling sandbags was a way to kill time too.
VR: Well, yeah, but I’d rather listen to music than fill sandbags. I’m assuming the act of filling sandbags over there
was an order given by some higher-up. Whereas listening to music, drinking beer, and just plain bull-shitting was
almost a type of privilege that in essence made you temporarily forget your situation.
NH: Now that’s the real meeting of the high and the low—-filling sandbags while listening to music and drinking
beer, which is exactly what you’ll be doing come fall.
Install
Wall Drawing by Natilee Harren
Wall Drawing by Vincent Ramos