Short Circuit

For Camille Henrot, there’s always an existential consideration: a series of whys and whats that viewers must answer on their own while, indeed, learning about themselves along the way. Still, the artist’s open-ended concepts—whether multichannel information overloads or philosophical takes on intimate relationships—are backed up with binders full of research. She offers plenty of wry humor, too, a time-tested salve for existential angst. Henrot’s tool kit consists of nearly every major medium—drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, and, most of all, that gesamtkunstwerk of forms, film. When it came to honing her skills, she worked backwards from the latter. The Paris native, 46, studied animation and got her professional start in advertising and music video production before she forayed her persistent curiosity about social realities and far-flung cultural references into a versatile artistic practice. Take her 2018 show at Paris’ Palais de Tokyo, “Days are Dogs,” which she devised around the days of the week, with seven multimedia bodies of work corresponding to the general mood of each day. Her most resonant work to date arguably remains the 2013 video Grosse Fatigue, which takes place on a computer desktop and conveys the feeling of the rising tide of online life as tabs featuring a wide array of subject matter flick open and shut on an Internet browser. More than a decade on, it holds up.

Likewise, Amalia Ulman, 36, who was born in Argentina and raised in Spain, explores the human psyche through fiction, fantasy, and humor to scrutinize our darker, performative impulses. She originally shot to art-world fame for her guerilla Instagram-feed performance Excellences and Perfections, 2014, in which she parodied an aspiring influencer against a backdrop of cookie-cutter New York City conspicuous consumption, documenting life events from a devastating breakup to a plastic surgery glow-up. In 2021, Ulman debuted her first feature film at Sundance, El Planeta, which starred her and her real-life mother as a mother-daughter grifter duo, and this year she premiered Magic Farm, which stars Chloë Sevigny and follows a group of American documentary filmmakers who accidentally wind up in Argentina.

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Both artists have a preternatural sense of how to ascend through blitzes of social and cultural trends and emerge above the fray, oracle-like, bearing messages both pointed and universal. For Henrot’s current solo show, titled “A Number of Things,” at Hauser & Wirth in New York, the artist dives deep into domesticity and etiquette. As she reveals in conversation, it is the mundane performances of day-to-day life that feed the machine: who we are and how we see one another.

Amalia Ulman: So, your mom is a professional artist?

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Camille Henrot: Yes. She studied engraving with Stanley William Hayter in the 1970s.

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AU: Have you ever done engraving in your own practice?

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CH: I did one series called “Légendes dorées,” 2014, and it’s about the appropriation of yoga, featuring the poses performed by the martyrs of the Golden Legend [by Jacobus de Voragine, 13th century], which tells the stories of Christian martyrs and how they were killed.

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AU: It sounds like you grew up Catholic, or at least culturally Catholic.

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CH: Yes, culturally. One part of my family was very religious. They were more religious in a superstitious way, like pinning religious images inside of cabinets for protection against thieves. Or a bottle of holy water for healing arthritis.

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AU: What were you like in your teens?

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CH: I was three different people. I was nerdy, isolated, and bullied at school. But I was also, at some point, a real party animal—going out all night, dancing in gay clubs in Paris. Then, with the grunge movement, all of the things that people were making fun of me for suddenly became cool, like cutting my own hair and making D.I.Y. T-shirts and jackets with safety pins, beads, and vintage patches. Grunge did save my social life.

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AU: You have talked about how you didn’t want to be the irresponsible artist parent. How are you taking that into motherhood?

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CH: It’s complicated. It’s good to not dismiss that there’s a real conflict between being an artist and being a mother. I love your work [Privilege, 2016] where you were pretending to be pregnant. It was on my mind when I was first thinking about hiding my pregnancy, in fear of potential career setbacks. The idea of masking a pregnancy is appealing in a society where women are punished either way for having a child or being childless.

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AU: I’ve heard what scared other women the most about motherhood was the sudden vulnerability that it brings. Your brain shifts. I’ve heard stories of women who can’t watch horror movies anymore, at least while they’re pregnant.

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CH: I used to love horror movies. Now, I’ve noticed that any kind of injustice with a powerless being, like a child or animal, is almost unbearable. Even in a cartoon.

AU: The chemistry in your brain changes.

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CH: The tenderness is like a drug, as well. There’s a certain addiction to contact with babies, their smell, their flesh.

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AU: Thematically, this idea of professionalism is very strict about its topics. I feel like, for a young mother, you feel a bit out of place, or too soft.

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CH: You feel maladapted because motherhood is an institution that’s narrowly defined and has been built by patriarchy. It’s a costume built by men, and most of us don’t fit. I worked on a drawing series called “Don’t Fit,” 2018–2019, that illustrates this feeling.

AU: You’re currently based in New York?

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CH: Yes, we live in the same neighborhood, the Upper West Side. Do you like it?

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AU: I like it now. I have a dog, and I’m in between the two parks.

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CH: I have a dog, too. What kind do you have?

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AU: He’s a funny mix, 50 percent German Shepherd, 25 percent Great Dane, and then supermutt. He’s a rescue. He’s big, but not as big as he should be with those genetics. This past year, I shot a film in Argentina, my second feature film, and there were a lot of animals in it—not part of the script but just because they were in the area. I started riding horses, and I started training my dog. So I got really deep into animal communication, animal behavior, and human-animal relationships.

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CH: During my childhood, my mom was obsessed with animals. She was also a taxidermist of birds for the National Museum of Natural History in Paris. Her best friend worked there as an ornithologist. We would go with him to catch swallows at a sand quarry in Fontainebleau to identify them with tags and track their migration. At home, we had many animals—a cat, a dog, a guinea pig, six birds, two turtles, and four fish. My mom would rescue animals regularly. We grew up very close to the animal world. Later, I did rock climbing and horseback riding. I was not interested in any sport that was social, like football. I felt more comfortable in the company of animals than humans.

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AU: For artists, it’s a weird thing to have a hobby because it’s impossible to compartmentalize it and not connect it at all to the practice. Do you have any that have bled into your practice, maybe more than you imagine?

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CH: I have a problem with my bones, so my doctor recommended I do ARX [adaptive resistance exercise] training to build muscle. It was funny because I do not have the body type for that. When I arrived at the class, people were looking at me like, “Pilates is not this floor.” But now I’m very welcome. I also started to see how quickly I progressed in eight months, and it’s a bit addictive. It makes me feel a bit like G.I. Jane. I love being able to do pull-ups, you know? I wish somebody had told me to do it earlier because it’s exactly what I need in my everyday life. I have to carry stuff all the time—canvases, panels, clay, buckets of water, and books. But I find the weights quite ugly. I would like to design weights that could also be decorative objects on the side of your living room.

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AU: Do you have any enemies?

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CH: Yes. When I go to the gym, I think about my enemies. Maybe I watched too many ’90s American action movies as a child. I think about people I don’t like, and that gives me that extra rage energy to max out. Somebody was saying, “If you’re strong and at the top of your career, you shouldn’t have enemies.” I wish I was above having enemies. But, no.

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AU: I was reading this book [The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 To World War I, 1968] by Roger Shattuck. It’s about the turn-of-the-century Paris art scene. Erik Satie, Guillaume Apollinaire, and that crew. There is a lot of mention of duels—over fashion, things like that. It sounded... fun? I wish that could be done nowadays. Instead of talking shit behind people’s back, they would set up a duel. There was another duel of a dog against a human, because the dog’s owner had been wronged.

CH: Dogs do act on your own grudges. I had a very aggressive dog before. If she felt that I was angry, then she would start to spiral into aggression. I even made an artwork about it, in the [2015] show at Metro Pictures, “Bad Dad & Beyond.” There was a series of interactive telephone sculptures, and one of them [Dawg Shaming, 2015] had prompts about dog training and an abusive husband. To create the script, I looked at online forums for people who have aggressive dogs. It was fascinating because when you dig deep into it, the issue with the dog was always the tip of the iceberg for other problems: “My dog is biting, but he is actually the dog of my sister-in-law who is in jail, and my husband has cancer.”

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AU: My first cat had addiction and self-harming problems because there were issues in my house with violence and terrible stuff going on when I was a teenager. It sounds silly when I say it, but it was an actual diagnosis. The cat’s problems stopped as soon as she moved out, and then I had her for many years in LA. I think it was very clear that she was absorbing all of that and didn’t know what to do with it.

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CH: I think epigenetic trauma extends to domestic animals. In the end, I had to give my dog away to somebody because she had bitten so many people in New York that she had been reported to the police. It was bad. She had bitten my accountant, my bookkeeper, and my ex-boyfriend. Her father was a “Mr. Universe” Shiba Inu; he had won many dog beauty pageants. If she would have been able to go to beauty competitions, she would have won everything.

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AU: But she would have eaten everyone in the competition. Your show [“A Number of Things”] at Hauser & Wirth explores education and the concept of domestication. What kind of domestication?

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CH: Actually, exactly this topic. Near the entrance to the exhibition is a group of dogs tied to a pole, and some of them are wounded. They are like the many rescue dogs I see on the Upper West Side—one missing an eye, one missing a leg, or another so old he travels in a bag.

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AU: Or in a baby carriage.

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CH: Yes. I grew really fascinated with the way dogs are attached to doors at the entrances of buildings, and how Cerberus, the mythological guardian of Hell, was a dog with multiple heads. How much is love and care a mixture of both control and tenderness? There’s a dark side to “caring,” which is surveillance, control, and policing. My fascination started with the dual nature of etiquette, how it’s both well-intentioned and authoritarian. David Graeber talks about this—politeness, politics, and police all have the same etymological root.

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The show is about how much we, as individuals, are forced to integrate arbitrary rules in order to fit into society. Fitting into society comes with a certain violence, because what do you give up? You give up all the possibilities. You give up aberrant thinking. It’s exploring the things that we take for granted and the effect this has on us—these everyday politics that we don’t see as politics anymore. I’m not saying it’s negative. I love politeness. I think there’s something in etiquette that’s truly good from an ethical point of view.

AU: I’ve always been interested in the idea of etiquette because I’m Argentinian and part of my family is Indigenous. My mom’s side of the family is part Guarani. One of my great aunts became interested in etiquette as a way to hide her Indigenous past. Argentina is a colony—a lot of this “etiquette” is a way of erasing other kinds of “etiquettes” that are indigenous to the land there. Latin Americans are extremely polite, like beyond what’s normal. We use a lot of niceties all the time in our spoken language: “Have a good day, God bless you,” and it keeps going on and on. I know some Mandarin, and when I was in China I struggled not having those words because, culturally, they don’t exist. You’re not supposed to be saying niceties over and over again. It pisses people off. One of my Chinese friends was like, “Why are you saying ‘thank you’ all the time?” There, when you’re friends with somebody, it’s impolite to say thank you, and that was so hard for me.

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CH: The conflict between different etiquettes fascinates me. It started with a book I found at my mom’s place during Covid as I was cleaning. I threw it in the bin right away because it was called Manners for Women [by Mrs. Humphry, 1897]. It felt like all the things that I don’t want: A woman shouldn’t laugh too loud. You cannot spread your legs. It’s interesting looking at the presidential campaign in the U.S., all those traditional things re-emerging.

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AU: I’ve seen a lot of accounts on Instagram and TikTok about this. It’s like, “Your bag should be this way.” Or, “When you enter, you have to go behind the man.” Then there are all these things about posture. With the resurgence of the right wing, there are a lot of posts about “old money”—looks, butlers, etiquette, and things like that. It’s funny because a lot of them are very trashy.

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CH: The reference for French etiquette is rooted in working- class people wanting to share the code of the upper class, like Nadine de Rothschild explaining that she was able to marry a rich man because she had the manners of the upper class and that it doesn’t matter where you come from. But opposed to that, you have the [British archetype of] the Sloane Ranger, which is very rooted in the ’80s with Princess Diana.

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AU: Everyone from all over the world is commenting under the same thing, which creates fights because I don’t think people grasp how different their perspectives are.

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CH: We think of contemporary society’s obsession with data as a product of technology, when we are actually still under the influence of religion. When Mark Zuckerberg says, “If you don’t want people to know about something, maybe you shouldn’t do it,” about Facebook, this is a very Protestant way to look at sin.

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AU: Definitely not a very Catholic way! For a Catholic, it’d be like, “Do it! Hush-hush, maybe tell the priest, confess, and then not everyone needs to know about it.”