Vere Van Gool: What would you do if you could live forever?
Aria Dean: If I knew I would live forever, I would be way less interested in the world. I would become more aware of how much information I would have to take-in for an extended period of time, rather than the bound amount of time that is a human life. And probably, I’d read a lot more fiction.
VVG: What are you currently working on?
AD: I am examining the work of Robert Morris for DIA Art Foundation’s Artists On Artists Lecture series coming this May. It’s an in-depth dive into Morris’s body of minimalist work, which allows for a new way of seeing, which feels really exciting.
VVG: How does (his) minimalism correspond to current times?
AD: I see minimalism as incredibly relevant today, as it’s the last time that art thoroughly went ‘structural’ and made structures of the world a project to grapple with. Like structural racism and structural inequality. Minimalism is the materialisation and sculptural form of questions that structuralism is posing. A sort of intensive investigation of what being an American artist meant to American artists. And structurally asking, what is it that we are? What’s the history we’re part of, where we’re going? What does any of this mean?
VVG: You often speak of your work being influenced by the structuralism posed by Deleuze and Guattari, can you elaborate?
AD: Deleuze and Guattari’s two-volume work Capitalism and Schizophrenia is a primary source to me— the dissolution of subjectivities, or body-fed organs, feels like pure poetics. I’m interested in how that intersects with virtuality and the embodiment of what it feels to be real. Like how in Cinema 1: The Movement Image, Deleuze allows the image to sit or cut into reality. In my work, I remind viewers of their position in relation to an image, and increasingly destabilise that relationship by either fixing it, or breaking it apart.
VVG: Can you imagine a future of such virtuality?
AD: I don’t see the future of virtuality shifting. We are on a warpath of how thoroughly embedded we are in our virtual lives.
VVG: What about the structures that operate our virtual realities, how will they evolve our reality?
AD: I see the internet as something similar to the American westward expansion; where everyone is on the Oregon Trail, and some people drop off in Wyoming, others continue to California. While the Internet might seem this empty space, it does have a colonial mechanism to it, one where people are so convinced of their own reality. But it’s not real, it’s just how it seems to you – now technologically supported in one way or another.