Belle Pontus interviewed. from Belle and the Making of Her Mode
SD: Why have you rejected “new technologies” as a realm for your most recent work?
BP: Yes…. I spent some years wandering ‘round technology, the realm. It intrigued me, consumed me. However I remembered and yearned for the certainty of hand-making, whether it be energizing paint to image on the flat surface, or tying string into a knot that can bear an enormous stress of load , yet can be so easily released. When I gather materials and intimately engage them in rhythms of alternating coercion and surrender, I quite certainly arrive at conclusion; and if I concede aesthetic discriminations, and, in the case of the knotted string, abandon the obsequious assessments of outcome, then the conclusion is neither blissful nor dangerously failed; but gainfully satisfying. The Muses are more gently beckoned into service. The Technologies tend to rape, you know.
SD: Can you define conclusion a bit more vividly?
BP: O, I guess…yes…..mmmm….Accomplishment perhaps, in the sense of surviving a task addressed, time passed in the nourishment of labor. And the arrival of an object that is easily released, either into the mind, or back into an enormously mere configuration of its simple self. This is the substance of my suddenly grave posture that does not allow me anymore to conjure in the materials of the New Technologies. This contrariness, as some have deemed my current mode of life and work, is the phantom that flew beside me in the making of The Apprehension of Knots, and Go Home, Orpheus, Go Home. These were my transitions back to painting and sculpting. I am settled now, blissfully engaging a culturally wrecked career, minding the hens, so to speak. This new “art hip” disdain for the object is so troubling, so puzzling, especially in this society we have resurrected.
SD: Resurrected?
BP: Yes, you heard me. Resurrected.
SD: C’mon now. Doesn’t sound like the Belle Pontus of the outrageously raw video project, Eden Pillow, which you destroyed during its premier, or the pay per view interactive internet performance, Dyeing The Vine Red, which simply vanished after you refunded all the subscribers. These were the ignitions of your success.
BP: All now rotting in the garden. Let’s leave it at that.
SD: You know I’m not going to let you wave it all away so simply.
BP: (long pause) Go home, Orpheus, go home.