Blessed Be #8 with Zach Ozma
Zach Ozma received a BFA in Community Arts from California College of the Arts in 2015. His work engages in “pleasant homosociality” through installations, performances, objects, events, and writing that elicit touch, interaction, and intimacy from the viewer. His work has appeared in Vetch, Hold: A Journal, DATABLEED, IGNORE, the East Bay poetry anthology It’s night in San Francisco but It’s Sunny in Oakland, Macaroni Necklace and elsewhere. cargocollective.com/zachozma
BBF: Can you speak a bit about your artist origin story?
ZO: Oh Brittany! I wish I had a neat concise answer for this. My dad used to roll big sheets of white butcher paper across the tile kitchen floor and we would trace the grout in crayons to make frames, and crouch on the floor filling them in with drawings. Or my mother hung a open-mouth leopard mask on the front door and called her decorating style “early medieval hut” and I would sit on top of the fridge drinking ovaltine with my painted toes dangling down. Or my circle-skirt wearing high school graphic design teacher gave me extra credit to go to National Portfolio Day and I ended up in college. Or when I was three I said when I grew up I would be a singing cowpoke and this is kind of the same thing.
BBF: I know that you have many artistic mediums that you work within including ceramics, performance, essay, poetry, collage. What other mediums do you work with? What does being an interdisciplinary artist mean to you?
ZO: Over the past couple years, I’ve worked in drawings, book works, sculpture, performance, textiles, video, sound, writing, and ceramics.
For one thing being an interdisciplinary artist means I’m a pretty indecisive person. I’m thinking about my pottery teacher, Erik Scollon calling ceramics “a promiscuous medium” because it will get in bed with all kinds of disciplines. I’m a promiscuous artist. It worries me sometimes, because I feel that I’m not going deep enough with a particular medium, developing real mastery. But it also means I have a lot of options– if I’m thinking about something it doesn’t have to be an essay, it can be a cup or a gesture or tyvek covered in primer stretching from wall to wall. It also means I experiment a lot. Sometimes the first medium I try something in is all wrong. It’s all improvisation until it’s not.
My exhibition YOU ARE LIVING IN OTHER MEN’S THROATS had works on paper, jewelry, performance, video, audio, sculpture, social practice. But it started with me sitting in an empty studio and running to the art store across the street for a pad of 18x24 newsprint and a felt tip pen. I was making all these “signs” — sort of low budget Jenny Holzer Truisms, mixed with diagrams and quotations. So there are drawings (which is what I’m calling this type of writing/mark making) and then some become sculptures and some don’t. The distance between a sculpture and drawing isn’t that great to me. Does that make sense? It also allows me to mislabel things in a way I find pleasing, so that I’m calling something a sculpture, but the material is my mother’s voice. This is something I learned from working with Dario Robleto. The materials list for his sculptures are little poems or little essays unto themselves.
BBF: I am thinking about your installation, Poetic Glory Hole, which includes ceramics, performance and writing. Can you talk about the various parts of this installation and the relationship between these various mediums?
ZO: Poetic Glory Hole I think is a bit of a failure in this way, but I put it on my website because I still kind of like it. The idea is this: you arrive in the gallery and there is a big “wall” (it’s primed tyvek) obstructing part of the room. There are some instructions written on it. You can go to one side, and read into a gloryhole from a selected set of texts. Or you can go to the other side and listen. For your trouble, you get a souvenir mug that says POETIC GLORYHOLE (the design is based on the Heath studio mug, but with a more phallic handle). It makes sense to me how the mediums relate, but in this case are there just way too many elements. I strive to make elegant work, and this piece is clumsy. The gloryhole is certainly not functionally fuckable, which is too bad. I think the mugs are elegant, and I like the idea of a gift shop outside the public bathroom or bar or whatever with the gloryhole on a big, white, dripping wall. I think maybe what I should I have done would look more like two performers reading to each other through a simpler structure, putting the audience in a voyeur position. But maybe not. It’s so on the nose. Oh well. An experiment.
BBF: What else are you passionate about?
ZO: This question feels hard right now, because there are so many places that directly need passion. A lot of shit things have been happening lately, everywhere and also close to home in Oakland. I thought about listing those things, but that feels disingenuous. So I’m answering “what else am I passionate about?” with “where am I actually directing my passion, or where do I imagine that I will?” Keeping the ones I love in mullein and yarrow tea through the winter. Holding far-flung friends close. Keeping steam on the kitchen windows. Trying to understand my mother. Seeing that the laundry gets folded. Making it to art shows, and readings, and memorials. Safe- guarding my needs and wants. Making sure the dog is warm. Balancing my brain chemistry. Memorizing Frank O’Hara poems. Curing my acne. Doing the work of being in love. Wearing more blue. Preserving the seasoning on the skillets. Becoming a better appreciator of art and poetry.
I’ve become really passionate about the basic life things since finishing school. And it’s good, but it’s never quite enough. I’m passionate about figuring out how to do more and do it well.
BBF: Who/What are some of your inspirations?
ZO: Let’s see. I’ve already listed Erik Scollon and Dario Robleto, two artists I have been really lucky to study with. They have influenced me in that way, but also they are making art that is doing (in different ways) what I’d like my art to do. Lukaza Branfman-Verissmo is a big inspiration for me. Besides being one of the forces that makes my particular art community go, she’s always producing, always showing up, always pushing her friends and collaborators to work harder. She’s been doing these new text paintings lately that are beautiful, and challenging, and a big shift for her. Another friend whose text based work hugely influenced me is Sahara Johnson. We had studios across from each other for a semester, and this massive work she made on pink velvet got me going on the “signs” I mentioned earlier. It said something like “I’VE REACHED COMPLETE EUPHORIA AND A NEW SENSE OF SELF SINCE I STARTED WEARING MY VELVET SWEATPANTS OUT IN PUBLIC.” She’s a total genius! Hitting the funny and sad and the true buttons all at once.
As far as people I don’t actually know…Frank O’Hara, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Claude Cahun. These are some of the heavy hitters. I have a lot to say about them, but I’ve said it elsewhere.
As for the what? A really sterile gallery does it for me more than I want to admit. Office supplies. Archival materials. A thick glossy white ceramic glaze. The kind of ephemera you might find in a disused drawer in your mom’s vanity. The hardware store. A deserted karaoke bar. Vinyl stick on letters. That moment in the doctor’s office where they leave you alone for an indeterminate amount of time and you’re calculating how many gloves you can fit in your jacket pocket before they come back. I don’t know why I tend to be drawn to these really hard, clean, uninviting spaces. I think they make me want to make something warmer there.
BBF: Do you have a relationship with the magical? If so how is it present in your life, body and art?
ZO: It’s funny, I think this question as it applies to art would have been a lot easier for me to answer when we first met. I think in many way there is an aesthetic quality to the magical that becomes somewhat central, and I think we feel that if we talk about that superficial quality, the magic will lose that center. I don’t know if that makes sense. Five year ago, if you had looked at my work, the magical elements would have been evident on an aesthetic level. Bay leaves. Theban script. Tarot cards. Excess. Crystals. Ectoplasm. If you go into my apartment, it still more or less looks that way. But I stopped feeling like that particular visual representation of magic was serving the work. It actually felt obstructive to what I’m trying to create (which I’ll get to in a minute). Minimalism does that better. It’s a better container. What I am trying to create is almost always a feeling or an experience. I am trying to evoke…bodily possibilities, I guess? How does it feel to be here, how might I touch or be touched by other people, here or not, and who am I going home from this art opening with, and how long will we have to talk about the art before we get naked? Often I want people looking at or being with my work to feel the presence of someone past. For example, an installation I made (I have to think of us as separate people) recreated the set of Lou Sullivan’s interviews at the end of his life. There is a basic TV studio set (carpets, curtains, houseplants) and two orange chairs. Visitors are invited to sit. When you sit in the chairs, if you are alone, I want to you feel that you are sitting with Lou, or sitting with his doctor. When you are sitting there with another person, I want you to feel that you are Lou, or you are his doctor. A few years ago, I might not have spent time tracking down 1970s Steelcase Pollock chairs on craigslist, and had a séance for Lou instead. But how much less likely is one to have a real experience of presence if someone is sitting you down and saying “Look, I am turning the lights off and now you will have a real experience of presence,” than if someone leaves you alone in a room of meaningful objects? So yeah, there is magic there, maybe, if you want it. I want it. I don’t want to tell you what to want.
As for my home and body, oh yeah, there is anointing happening. There are candles being lit. I am spitting to ward off the evil eye. I like to think I have become more quiet in that relationship, because I think it works a bit better that way. I hope I don’t sound like I’m on my high horse, I think the first hour of The Craft is a great movie, and if that visual world serves you best you should absolutely black velvet your way to revenge town.
BBF: Can you tell me about Saint Lou: Our Father of Open Gates? What is significant about Lou Sullivan to your artistic practice, poetics? What is the significance of making him a saint?
ZO: The tl;dr on Lou Sullivan: he was a gay, transsexual man who became an activist because he couldn’t find the medical and/or social support he needed to actualize his transition as a “female to gay male.” He died of AIDS. He kept diaries for 30 years and donated them to the GLBT Historical Society, and you can go look at them for free.
What is significant to me about Lou is that we are roughly the same prototypical trans man. So there is a mirror there, and it’s more scarce than you might think, to have a figure who lived a similar sexual/gendered life to the one I am trying to live. He was also, I think, a good person, which is rare too. (This is an assumption, that I’m basing on his diaries). The simple answer is, I like him, and I am like him.
Saint Lou: Our Father of Open Gates is an edition of saint medals featuring his face. In Lou’s diaries, he describes an early experience (which I am choosing to read as homoerotic) of waiting for the bus with a young man. The two of them are talking, and the man leans over, and a Saint Christopher medal falls out of his shirt between the buttons. Lou describes having an unshakable urge to tug on the medal. He eventually does, and the boy swats his hand away. As it turns out, Lou’s jewelry fetish is pretty well documented in his diaries (in another vignette, he describes touching a lover’s chest while they are fucking in the dark. To his surprise, Lou’s fingers touch a thin gold chain around the man’s neck. He claims to have cum immediately). Lou was raised Irish Catholic. Queer histories often place him as a martyr figure, who sacrificed his privacy, and in many ways offered up his body, to change doctors’ thinking at a time when homosexuality was considered a contraindication for transsexuality. His eventual succumbing to “the gay man’s disease” was, in his words, dying as he had tried so hard to live. I decided to make Saint Lou medals for these reasons, and because it is good to have a talisman when you are going to the endocrinologist, or bathhouse. You asked me earlier about magic, and the medals are that too.
BBF: I am also curious about your Manifesto for a New Gay Aesthetic and how it might relate to the interests of this interview series around the investigation of a queer poetics. Can you speak a bit to this manifesto? Would you consider it a queer poetics or is it something else?
ZO: Sure, let’s see. The manifesto is trying to encapsulate a sort of present/ future aesthetic I was seeing emerging in my own work. Or, it is proposing a potential container for a slice of contemporary gay art–a contemporary gay art that is also trans, that is effeminate but not femme, that is minimal in appearance but excessive in emotion. The aesthetic tools I’m proposing are very much about relation, quotation. Even the phrase “New Gay Aesthetic” is lifted, from a truly wonderful zine: Gay Apathy by J. Bearhat (https://jbearhat.itch.io/gay-apathy). I suppose the manifesto is a bit bitter in some ways, or rather is trying to create new energy out of an exhaustion with tumblr-era queer aesthetics. For me, personally, that look (you know the one) wasn’t serving me anymore, as a gay transsexual man. I am asking: what do you really want, if you weren’t trying to be right?
So yes, it is a queer poetics in that it is contending with what “queer” is now, and what it has been, and what it will be. It is arguing that queer can contain variety, can contain contradictory elements, can be fucked up, can even be about two men with skin on skin. This internal variation may be generative instead of minimizing.
BBF: The manifesto includes reference to Frank O’Hara, Truman Capote, and Lou Sullivan. It even pulls some direct language from Frank. What is it this language is trying to illuminate in a “New Gay Aesthetic”? Is it a calling upon ancestors in a way, a gay lineage? What is your relationship to that lineage? Can you tell me the significance of these figures to your thinking?
ZO: Zoe Tuck (maybe you two know each other) described these three as my “personal pantheon.” It feels fair to say I am “calling upon ancestors” in this way. Another way to think of that is, what kind of gay man do I want to be in this world.
The first section of “Manifesto for a New Gay Aesthetic” is a line by line re-write of O’Hara’s “Personism: A Manifesto.” I chose to do this to illustrate the importance of quotation to the aesthetic I am defining. My manifesto is also in response to Frank’s, extending some of his ideas, altering others, to make his suggestions for poetry apply to visual art. I am also altering elements of a gay poetics to be a transsexual poetics as well. As much as we (I) try to disavow it, being a trans gay man is different than being a cis gay man. By putting Lou in with Frank and Truman, I am hoping to illuminate that difference. I also argue that despite their different gendered histories, the can live in the same canon. The manifesto is strongly about voice (thanks to the Wayne Kostenbaum I was reading at the time). We are lucky to have recordings of these three men, and I encourage everyone to go listen to them and think about aesthetics.
About the individual significance of these figures:
In my mother’s house when I was growing up, there was a door to the laundry room off of the kitchen. Resting on the molding above the door, was a framed postcard of Truman Capote. I didn’t pay much attention to it as a kid. I think I mentioned my mother’s eclectic decorating style earlier. Without every really thinking about it, I assumed this casually elegant man was a relative, maybe a great uncle. I’m not sure when I realized he was not a relative at all, but my fag-hag mother’s favorite author. We had this made-for-TV-movie version of “Children On Their Birthdays” on VHS that I used to watch. Much later, when I was on youtube looking for the “gestures of male effeminacy” I went right to Truman.
Lou, I talked about earlier, but I want to say a bit more about the relationship between his gender and sexuality. He gets credited sometimes with being the one to invent and/or popularize the concept of “sexuality” and “gender” as two different things. That is, the gender you are and the gender of the person you want to sleep with are two distinct and untouchably separate categories. So, just because Lou was a trans man didn’t mean he couldn’t also be a gay man. This is what he told everyone, especially the doctors. However, it is clear to me that in transitioning, Lou was specifically interested in being a gay man, and an effeminate one at that. That is why he didn’t simply lie to the docotors about his seuxality, get the hormones and surgery, and move on. If he couldn’t be a faggot, why be a man at all?
And last, Frank. Honestly, I just really really like him. I love his poetry to my core, almost without exception. I like that he was a poet in the art world, because I feel like an artist in the poetry world. I like how he dressed. I like how he spoke. I even like how he died. Frank is really dear to my heart.
BBF: These three figures also show up across your performances; for instance in Listening Party, you invite folks to listen to poetry and prose by Frank, Truman, and Lou. You describe the event this way, “We are going to lie on the floor and listen to poetry and prose and maybe brush fingertips.” I am interested in the tenderness and intimacy of the events intentions. Is this tenderness and intimacy significant to a new gay aesthetic or to a queer poetics?
ZO: Yes! Absolutely. “A New Gay Aesthetic” may be more about intimacy than tenderness because it is also very much about self-protection. The point of the listening party isn’t so much to hear the poetry and prose. I could just send out a syllabus for that. The point is more to experience hearing those words with and near other people. To see that physically happens to us when we do that. I was shaking sharing Lou’s interviews with a room full of people who have never heard them. It is so intimate. Maybe too intimate for a gallery. I didn’t expect to become so uncomfortable, but I’m glad I did. I also selfishly hope that some people go home together from an event I held and that gets to be the story of the first time they made out. That’s part of the aesthetic too: if it’s about intimacy and tenderness it should also always be about pleasure.
BBF: Your performances are often interactive and at times even in public. I am thinking about your 2015 Poem performance piece where you posted signs around Oakland, or maybe California College of the Arts instructing folks to text you if they want a Frank O’Hara poem read to them in person, by you. Can you talk a bit about this performance? Can you speak to the significance of encounter and public space in your work?
ZO: Truthfully I got this idea because I’d just checked out The Selected Poems from the CCA library and was bored in my studio , and wanted to share it with someone. I put up these signs on newsprint around campus (later iterations were slightly different) with the offer, and my phone number. When people texted me, I would arrange a time and meeting place. I tried hard to include very little other than logistics in my messages. When I met them, I would quickly chose from a list in my head the most appropriate poem for the person I was walking up to. I read the poem immediately upon walking up the them, and when it was over I left. This series of actions is supposed to mimic cruising. Sometimes it was more successful than others. I liked it when the audience member described what they looked like on text.
The encounter, as a format, is a good way to cause someone to have a pleasant and surprising experience. Whether it’s someone walking up to an object on a pedestal, or through the window of the gallery seeing everyone lying on blankets on the floor, I want people to be delighted and enticed and a little uneasy. I supposed I worked in public space because of my background in community arts (that’s what I studied). There is a lot of possibility there, and public space has a wider and more exciting audience than the gallery alone. I’m also influenced by work that blurs the line between art (especially performance) and real life–I’m thinking of Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s Touch Sanitation, Dario Robleto’s We’ll Dance Our Way Out Of The Womb, Amy Balkin’s Public Smog. I’m trying to learn how to make an artwork that feels like a present.
BBF: Any final thoughts? Anything I didn’t ask that you wish I had?
ZO: I wanted to add this into the question on magic, but I couldn’t think how it would fit. I’ve been writing and rewriting this poetry manuscript that may never get done, BLACK DOG DRINKING FROM AN OUTDOOR POOL. It’s about dads, and dogs, and what it means to be a boy or a man, and what it means to have been hurt by other dogs or boys, or men. In it, the narrator is transforming, back and forth, between a person who is a child and a person who is a man and a person who is a dog and a regular dog and a dog who is a person. When I was first writing it, this was not a literal transformation in the narrative. It was supposed to be a way to talk about trauma in a not-revelatory way, this “dog grammar” I am using. But after a couple rewrites I think this narrator is literally transforming within the world of the narrative. When we, the complicated systems that we are, experience a trauma, there is an alchemy happening, a transformation that is or feels (and what is the distinction between “is” and “feels”) physiological as well as emotional. I had to look up the distinction just now between physiological and physical. Physical tends to refer to “the body” and physiological tends to refer to “the functions of the body” or “what the body does.” Anyway, there is a magic in that transformation, and even if we don’t know how to harness it intentionally “what the body does” is harness that transformation. So maybe our adrenal systems are over-active (fight/flight/freeze). Or maybe we literally become big, black dogs. But things keep moving, and require us to come back to ourselves. So we flight our way through the work day. Or the dog puts on a linen suit.
Anyway, I didn’t realize it until now, but this manuscript is concretely about magic as well as dogs and dads and pools and men.
