Concluding our two-part interview with interdisciplinary artist Barbara Houghton …
Miracle Girl, 1987. Installation with video performance showing on monitor set on a stool, with large cut out photographs. For the performance, a young girl walks through the installation drying a dish, then sits down and looks through a scrapbook. The story is about Houghton’s mother, who was shot in the head when she was thirteen while drying dishes in her kitchen on the west side of Chicago in 1938. The girl in the performance is Houghton’s thirteen-year-old sister who looked a lot like her mother.
RJ: Around the late 1970s to early 80s, you began making video and installation work. What led you to adopt that interdisciplinary approach?
BH: I used to think that one photo could tell a story and then I started thinking that they didn’t. I was doing those multiple-image Lost in the Landscape pictures (1982–85), and I couldn’t get enough information in.
I wanted to tell a story, and video cameras were cheap enough, so I bought one. At first, we didn’t have any editing facilities of any sort, so we had to do all in-camera editing. I did an installation piece called I Always Cheat at Croquet (1986, below, at the Center for Idea Art in Denver)—the video was me moving the ball with my foot to a more favorable position by the wicket. It had real turf and big life-size photographs that I hand-colored. I did another one, Rain of Terror(1986), about recycling and the mountain of paper I got when I was acting department chair. I saved all the memos I’d received in a two-month period. They were installed in the Emmanuel Gallery [on campus], coming down on fishing lines like a tornado, into the top of the TV. On the TV was a tape of a recycling place, taking mounds of newspapers and putting them in shredding machines, scooping it up and moving it to another place. It was run on a loop.
For a show done on the anniversary of the founding of Amnesty International, I adopted a case about a guy who was disappeared by the government in Chile (When Someone Disappears It’s Like They Go Into a Black Hole, 1986). This was a sculptural installation where you walked across this big platform that rocked and had fake mountains leaning away from you. You looked down into this black form, and the video screen was down at the bottom. The platform rocked a bit because Chile had earthquakes all the time, the mountains leaned away from you so you couldn’t grab them to steady yourself.
When Someone Disappears It’s Like They Go Into a Black Hole, 1986
RJ: A lot of your work from the eighties is about sports, and a title like Illegal Use of Hands (1983) resonates in today’s #MeToo era. Were these pieces critiques of masculinity?
BH: I was dating a sportswriter then. They were critiques of the sex and violence in the sport that I noticed while watching, and that my reaction was very different from a sports fan. Again, this work points back to my experiences. In an image, I might notice that when in a big pile on the ground, the players hesitate getting up and then pat each other on the butt. In the football one, a living room rug turns into the AstroTurf football field. The living room is set up ready for watching the game, with sports pages strewn on the floor. The scene is set with snacks, sound, and a comfy lounge chair. As you move down into the field, the referees (me) are hung away from the wall so you need to move in and out to see the smaller prints. This was referencing a player “running a pattern,” where viewers move from each end of the field to pass each other in the pattern and play.
Unsportsmanlike Conduct (1983), installation with life-size self-portrait cut-outs, AstroTurf, 16 x 20 ins. Ektacolor photographs, sound, video, and debris. At the Sebastian-Moore Gallery in Denver. Below: enlargements from the installation (Illegal Use of Hands, center)
RJ: Fate or Fortune (1988–89) is largely an autobiographical piece that seems to merge computer processing with family images and Cornell-type boxes. How did that develop?
When You Were Born - Where You Were Born, from Fate or Fortune (1983).
BH: Fate or Fortune was made using an Amiga computer. Its structure was based on how you diagram sentences, so the main line of the exhibit was the noun and verb, and the modifiers were below and above. The work asked the question, “Was it fate or fortune that were you born to be who you are, and do what you do?” That’s a question I always asked coming from such a big family— how did I get lucky enough to be me? The quality of that early computer stuff was so terrible because the images were printed with this low-resolution HP printer on 8½ x 11 in. paper that had those little holes on the edge, not at all archival. Then you’d have to paste the print together. It was the first HP inkjet, I think.
RJ: It must have been a struggle to work with that very early computer equipment, given that the quality of its output was so bad.
BH: We didn’t think it was so bad because it was the best they had at that point. The students loved it. With the Amiga, we were making spinning stars because it had an animation chip and a whole 256 colors. It was pretty crude, but IBMs only had eight colors then. When Macintosh first came out, they had the little black and white SEs, and then they developed computers with separate screens and a computer box that looked like everybody else’s—those were color and that’s when we went to Macs. The color spectrum was broader. However, I was always wishing, “What if we could do something better?”
RJ: Terra Incognita (above) was technically a more sophisticated series made over three years, 1989–92. Was it made on the same equipment?
BH: By that time I had a Mac CI, which was high end at that point. I had a flatbed scanner, and whatever was the next generation printer—an Epson—was a bit better but still not great. I’d gotten video editing equipment by late 1986, so I was grabbing a video image on the computer, going back and forth. I would make a video image in my studio and then go in and grab it and put it as a picture in the image.
I was really into maps. Those were metaphors for how we find our way in life. I quoted The Discoverers by Daniel Boorstin: “The most promising words ever written on the map of human knowledge are terra incognita—unknown territory.” By then, I’d been divorced a while and was still trying to find out how to make my way, and so reading that inspired me. I would make myself into a planet and crawl to the edge of the flat earth, or being the blind leading the blind, that kind of stuff. No matter what, it felt like I never ever knew enough. So I needed to keep searching.
In Search of His Heart, 1987, from Terra Incognita, archival pigment Inkjet print on paper, 16 x 10.5 in.
RJ: You left Metro in 1992 and joined the faculty at Northern Kentucky University, where you stayed until you retired in 2015. Did your personal work continue along the same lines there? Are you still searching?
BH: My work still mostly uses repurposed images from other sources (mine and others) and combines them into new pieces. I have continued to do lots of narrative pieces about my own experiences in the world. I have mixed some more documentary images into the larger body of work that I have done. I work in my studio just about every day—that’s something I asked of my own students, and I’ve always done the same. When I retired, I just continued to do it. Every new body of artwork searches for some resolution of a question or problem. I have done quite a few artist books and self-published books on Blurb. I have done mostly installation exhibitions with photographs and objects that are site-specific. After I got to NKU, I did a solo exhibition called Journey, which was about the journey of life in which I finally used images from Terra Incognita combined with new images and objects.
These days, my favorite works are from dancing with galileo in an artist book and installation exhibition form with large prints, text, video, projection, and sound. The installation was based on walking into a book. It’s about my love affair with Galileo and sort of a love letter to him. In the projected video, I dance with Galileo to the music of his father. Another of my favorites is Power & Protection, in which I examine symbols of religion and superstition and how my Catholic schooling brainwashed me. In this one I used both photographs and installed objects like an altar.
I think when an artist stops searching, they’re done.
Note: This interview was compiled and edited from phone interviews conducted in April and May 2017. It was revised and updated with Barbara Houghton February 2020. All images by Barbara Houghton unless otherwise noted. All images are courtesy of the artist.
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