{"id":839,"date":"2011-12-07T21:09:24","date_gmt":"2011-12-07T21:09:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thedorseypost.com\/?p=839"},"modified":"2012-06-17T12:59:14","modified_gmt":"2012-06-17T12:59:14","slug":"how-not-to-order-the-most-expensive-item","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thedorseypost.com\/?p=839","title":{"rendered":"How not to order the most expensive item"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Janet Bohman, Vernita N'Cognita, May Deviney at Viridian<\/p><\/div>\n

After helping her and a couple other fellow artists hang the new show at Viridian Artists this past weekend, I sat down with Vernita N\u2019Cognita at a little gourmet pizza place around the corner, just off 10th<\/sup> Avenue. She\u2019s been associated with the gallery for more than a decade and is now its director. I consider her the presiding spirit of compassion in that little gallery, someone who has a cool sense of humor and a warm heart. She changed her name from Vernita Nemec to Vernita N\u2019Cognita as an homage to the \u201cunknown artist,\u201d which is consistent with her vocation as director of exhibit space for those who aren\u2019t represented by more commercial galleries. As an artist, she\u2019s built a long-standing reputation in branches of art I know much less about than painting: performance, installations, collage. She was a part of the SoHo scene in the early 70s when it was just emerging, and has been a recognized figure ever since\u2014she’s still being invited to perform in spaces at various sites around the world, though she\u2019s never achieved fame or earned much for her work. She comes from a Catholic family in Ohio, raised by what sounds like a pair of caring, attentive parents, her mother a housewife and her father a tradesman, and this upbringing has been the subject of some of her most interesting and lyrical performances\u2014which are invariably about the way it feels to be a woman in contemporary America. She calls herself a feminist artist, yet when she describes her work, it sounds more subtle and literary than polemical. What I took away from our conversation was a sense, now more than ever, that an artist needs to define the nature of \u201csuccess\u201d and what it means in a personal way. In most cases, it can\u2019t be about money, nor even about the scope of one\u2019s audience: artistic integrity might ultimately depend on being able to make a living doing something else. And not ordering the tenderloin.<\/p>\n

Vernita:<\/strong>\u00a0 When I started out, I lived on 11th<\/sup>. Then on Christopher. Now on Canal St., where I\u2019ve lived for a thousand years. I was mostly painting and doing installations. My first gallery was SOHO20, one of the first feminist galleries. I\u2019m still on their board of directors. Actually, I\u2019m curating a 40-year retrospective for them. After I left SOHO 20, I showed in colleges and other alternative spaces. Then at Gallery 128 on the Lower East Side.\u00a0 Now, in addition to Viridian, I curate a restaurant in Queens. Restaurants make sense except for the fact that the work smells like food. (She laughs) I did a show there and I made my price list like a menu: appetizers, main course and dessert. I ran this arts organization called Artists Talk on Art, which was an historically important organization for ten years. You don\u2019t get money for any of these things, but it broadened my reputation. People think I\u2019m a helper for artists.<\/p>\n

As Lauren Purje pointed out, there isn\u2019t just one art world.<\/strong><\/p>\n

People forget that Mary Boone went to RISD and the guy who wears the bathrobe and makes films. . .<\/p>\n

Schnabel.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Julian. She went to school with him. So of course he shows in her gallery.<\/p>\n

You almost have to define what you mean by success.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Exactly.<\/p>\n

Some artists don\u2019t want a gallery to exert control over what they do. You have to figure out how to make money. How have you done it all these years?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I always tell my students, get a day job. I taught at Brooklyn College for nine years and I got grants. I adjuncted at a lot of colleges, Hunter, Jersey City State College. I taught at SVA for one year. I got screwed out of that job by a friend because I got into a car accident. I was able to get workman\u2019s comp. I was so panicked about money I wrote a hundred letters a day. I got Blue Cross to give me cash. I made the other driver pay. I had a few thousand to go on for a few months. I freelanced. I used to make soft sculpture for a lot of medical magazines. I did a heart made out of red fabric. I still have it some place. Then I worked for one of the artists who was in our recent photo show. He was a graphic designer and I was his studio assistant when we were still doing paste-ups and mechanicals. In \u201999, I started at Viridian.<\/p>\n

Feminism is still the focus.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yes. No matter whatever form, performance, installation or collage, it\u2019s either women in general or my personal life. For the last couple years, my performances are about being an older woman, how I\u2019ve become invisible. It\u2019s a psychological state. In 1999, I did a performance about things my mother told us. My mother would give me all this advice. Find a good man. Never let the heels of your shoes wear down. Always cross your legs. Never order the most expensive thing on the menu.<\/em> It had a whole litany of these things. I came from a pretty poor background and didn\u2019t have the exposure and training that someone who came from a wealthier background would have. So it all helped, this advice. I did. At least I was somewhat well behaved in public. My father was an appliance repairman, worked for a department store and when people would buy new appliances . . . well, refrigeration was his specialty. My mother was a housewife. \u00a0She had this wonderful collection of clippings, about this thick, and she would go through them every night, and they represented dreams, fantasies, wishes, a beautiful home, how to arrange your furniture, how to tie a scarf around your neck in a pretty way. I pored over them. I loved her clippings. I worked them into the performances. Before that, my first real<\/em> performance, was on the corner of Spring and Wooster. There was a building there. It was the beginning of SoHo in 1978. There was a wall with inset windows, but they were boarded up. You could climb into it and stand there. I would dress up in these long gowns with a long apron on, and I would sweep the street. My partner was in a painter suit. He was painting the wall. That was a performance. Housekeeping on the street corner. I got a Jerome Foundation grant for this piece I did called Private Thoughts, Private Places<\/em>. It was a performance about sexual fantasies of teenage girls. Lace curtains. It was based on these drawings I did of people making love, which my mother discovered in my underwear drawer. It was a beautiful performance. I did that at the L.A. Women\u2019s Building. I did it here at Franklin Furnace. I have another one called Mexican Memories where I wrote this whole song translated into Spanish and I was working with this musician at the time who was an architect, and he had this whole setup with samplers, and we worked with echoing.<\/p>\n

It sounds as if your approach to feminism is simply about what it feels like to be a woman. It isn\u2019t explicitly political.<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s personal politics. We all wonder about the meaning of life, the meaning of art, what is the value of what we do? That\u2019s really what they\u2019re about. We have to get a job to support this art habit that we have. We\u2019re all doing something else. Often people who don\u2019t<\/em> have that day job are making crappy art.<\/p>\n

After all these years you\u2019re still being invited to give performances in so many places.<\/strong><\/p>\n

And I\u2019m not famous. I don\u2019t have a dealer. It\u2019s so hard for anyone to get written about. It makes no sense.<\/p>\n

The Internet is the new reality. You don\u2019t have to be written up in a conventional way, in the print media. \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Our goal shouldn\u2019t be fame. It\u2019s all so distorted that we feel that need. With the Web, if you have a website, you\u2019re there. You\u2019re available. You don\u2019t need big bucks. Everything\u2019s changing. We\u2019re at a big shift in how people connect with art. It\u2019s a matter of adapting.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After helping her and a couple other fellow artists hang the new show at Viridian Artists this past weekend, I sat down with Vernita N\u2019Cognita at a little gourmet pizza place around the corner, just off 10th Avenue. She\u2019s been associated with the gallery for more than a decade and is now its director. I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-839","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-viridianartists"],"yoast_head":"\nHow not to order the most expensive item - represent<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/thedorseypost.com\/?p=839\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"How not to order the most expensive item - represent\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"After helping her and a couple other fellow artists hang the new show at Viridian Artists this past weekend, I sat down with Vernita N\u2019Cognita at a little gourmet pizza place around the corner, just off 10th Avenue. 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