I Made a Tofutti Cuties Commercial: Jerstin Crosby on Bricolage, Cultural Appropriation, and The Idea of Landscape

Here comes Jerstin Crosby, boppin’ up the street. He sees big-box stores, community gardens, thrift stores, gutter trash, billboards, parking lots, TVs, bike racks, pet parks, factory farms, more billboards; he sees everything. Crosby is an interdisciplinary artist whose poignant and darkly humorous work links a stunning array of cultural contexts. In the last few years, his activities have been so varied and multiple that it’s easy to wonder if there might be two of him (picture two identical Jerstins tooling away in tandem in their Pittsburgh studio, intently giggling). But, alas, there is only one Jerstin Crosby, the one who teaches part-time at Carnegie Mellon University and Chatham University and who exhibits all over the land, nationally and internationally. His work has been reviewed in Artforum, Art Papers, and Time Out London. He also produces and curates Acid Rain Production, a televised experimental video series that currently broadcasts on cable access channels in New York and North Carolina. This week Precipitate had the pleasure of asking Crosby a few questions about his recent work and where he’s going with it.

JOSH COLLINS: Your multimedia installation, On the Inside, is now up at the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh. The work makes use of a wide range of source material, including Magic 8 Balls, Alf, Eminem, the classic-rock hit “Smoke on the Water,” and a KFC-bucket-wearing guitarist, Buckethead. In conceptual terms, what holds that installation together for you? What themes does On the Inside share with your other projects?

JERSTIN CROSBY: The references do seem to stray, but for me, I see them bound together through bricolage, a form of subcultural language built from pre-existing symbols and cultural icons. This exhibition, On the Inside, is the third in a trilogy of multimedia installations that I began in 2009 at Lump Gallery with If You Build It We Will Burn It, which led to the second in 2010 at Good Citizen gallery in St. Louis, titled In the Manner of Smoke. In all three instances, I combine research and free association to create a new type of dialogue about environmental activism and animal rights.

COLLINS: It seems that dialogue has something to do with appropriation.

CROSBY: Yes, there is an element to the work that deals with how activist movements eventually find themselves “incorporated” into a larger cultural context. The green movement, for instance, grew out of a very grassroots, do-it-yourself community and was subsequently embraced by corporations into the mainstream. Obviously, the spread of environmental concerns is positive, but many believe that the incorporation of grassroots activities into the mainstream acts as an eventual dissipation or self-correction mechanism embedded within capitalism. Subcultural movements may get incorporated as new marketing strategies, or trends, but trends get replaced eventually. On the first bulletin board I made, there was a flyer advertising “green jobs,” something like “travel all summer long on a giant bus and spread the word about the green movement.” It’s not so much about how I appropriate material into my work but how to trace the ways in which these movements get appropriated into culture.

Also, some of my work is a real advertisement for the things I like. For example, I made a Tofutti Cuties commercial for a video project. You never see Tofutti Cutie commercials on television, so it was an attempt to give them some exposure, however weird or transcendental that representation may have been. In my new video, The Power of You: 10 Step Program, I appropriate the packages of vegetarian food products into a self-healing guide. Some steps are missing, and it isn’t clear exactly what the ten steps build up to, but the final step is “Let the darkness take you there,” followed by a slice of veggie lovers pizza and a box of Franzia floating through a psychedelic mush. Drew Robertson from Team Lump made the audio for that piece.

COLLINS: One of my favorite sites to visit is your blog, _recent_landscapes_. Could you talk about what’s going on there? What’s your take on contemporary notions of landscape?

CROSBY: _recent_landscapes_ is an attempt to redefine the term, which is frequently used as a generic title for an exhibition of landscape art. I purchased that domain name as an initial attempt to control the meaning of the phrase, and then began posting images that are either snapshots that I take in my daily life or images found on the web, scans from books, collages, etc. I personally don’t see a difference between photographing a piece of trash on the street and finding an image in a thrift store book that embodies something that I want to express… So I allow them to become blurred online. My own definition of _recent_landscapes_ is a combination of the John Berger (Ways of Seeing) perspective, the romanticist J. M. W Turner approach, and a general assumption that any idealized representation of nature is false, at best.

John Berger links the history of landscape art to its roots in oil painting, where the representation of land was tied directly to land ownership. Romanticists used the landscape as a metaphor that personified human emotions and vulnerability. In all images of nature, there is an embedded image of humans. For instance, the medium itself (camera, paint, etc.) is a form of human technology that filters the representation. You can find examples of that by looking up different images of the eruption of Vesuvius. There is the J. M. W Turner painted version from the 1820s, a photograph of Vesuvius erupting in 1872, a Warhol version, and a logo for a steel company named Vesuvius. Any aesthetic decisions or use of technology embed human interests into representations of nature, so representations of “pure” nature are impossible. _recent_landscapes_ is a place where I can generate images that to me are somehow more realistic.

COLLINS: One could also consider your Community News and Events pieces in terms of realism. Plus they’re a serious laugh riot. Why?

CROSBY: I think because there is something truthful about them, or at least that’s what I’m attempting. Like many people, I’ve been inspired by the creativity and genuine WYSIWYG design aesthetics of desktop publishing. It is, for sure, the new folk art. Because the Community News and Events work is meant to seem as if it’s accumulated over time by a community of people attaching flyers to a bulletin board, I have to try and think about each flyer in a new way, which affects how I hang a flyer in the composition. I’m thinking, “What would the person who made this flyer do? Where would they hang this?”

COLLINS: Can you characterize how you gather source material for your work? Is your process focused, defocused, magical?

CROSBY: I’m always open to new source material. I have a folder on my computer called “Sources,” and within that there is “Random,” along with a few other subcategories depending on what projects are happening. For installations I usually dedicate a box to any items that might get incorporated into the final project. The best images come from a habit of keeping a digital Canon in my bag as much as possible. I used to buy a lot of old books and knickknacks at thrift stores, but then I just started bringing my camera into the store and photographing the images that I once would have purchased. I’ll still buy a “gem,” but usually I only purchase VHS tapes because I can’t photograph the contents. I scan the tapes, though, and digitize them for use in videos like the Shine On You Crzy Diamond video I made with Thad Kellstadt, who created the audio. The tape that most of those particular appropriated images come from is called “The Ozone Zone.” The stickered casings of those tapes were scanned and posted on _recent_landscapes_.

COLLINS: So what’s on the horizon? The one in front of you, that is.

CROSBY: I’m currently working on a two person show with Jesse Hulcher that will open at Space 1026, in Philadelphia, on June 3rd. The show is called My Name Is URL / My Name Is IRL and will be a continuation of the “new media folk art” series, which involves the Community News and Events piece, plus a lot of websites and images I’ve never exhibited. A few days later, Orvokki and I will be heading to a collaborative art residency in Greece!

Josh Collins, Fiction Editor