Statement Magazine 2007
Cal State Los Angeles
"We Create Because We Must"
An Interview with Mendi and Keith Obadike
by lanla gist
Mendi and Keith Obadike are mavericks extending
the boundaries of artistic expression
into the digital age. The interdisciplinary
artists and husband and wife creative team
have remained on the forefront since they
decidedly ventured onto the Internet in
1996 as a groundbreaking medium for their art.
Mendi Obadike once remarked that
“every medium has its charm.” Since then, the
Obadikes’ art comes coupled with
computer monitors, keyboards, streaming video,
hypertext, links, rollovers, interactivity
and other technology components. Their work
involves music, poetry, sound art, live art
and Internet artworks that encompass concepts
centering on race, sex, gender identity
and other critiques on culture. They garnered the
greatest attention and controversy
when Keith Obadike auctioned off his “Blackness”
as a performance on eBay for four
days in 2001. Mendi Obadike shares on creativity,
being a part of a creative couple, and
exploring the Internet as an artistic medium:
Lanla Gist: What process do you go through as you
prepare to share yourselves
artistically before a live audience?
Mendi Obadike: It is extremely different for each
piece and venue. Our performances
range from theatrical performances with other
performers to intimate performances
with just music and vocals. Some of the works include
a series of private performances
or studies based around a theme before launching a
public performance. For instance,
before we launched the online work Blackness for Sale we performed a number of
private “resistance studies” which we documented on
videotape. We later decided to
exhibit one part of the study – Pushing White Walls. We worked with other
performers
while developing an early version our work Four Electric Ghosts. Four Electric Ghosts
combines themes from the novel My Life in the Bush of
Ghosts and
the video game
Pac Man. We developed a few private performance studies for
that work in order
to develop the songs and stories. Most recently, we’ve
decided that since we value
the humor in our work, we needed to practice being
funny, so as an exercise we are
creating jokes related to our concerns. They may or
may not make it to the projects
themselves.
With your work being as diverse as it is, do you
have a target-audience?
We are our own ideal audience in many ways. The works
first have to be engaging
to us. We try to entertain, encourage change in, and
move ourselves. We come to
being artists from first having recognized ourselves
as the target audience for other
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artists’ beautiful and strange work, so we know and
trust that ideal others are out
there. Still, when they identify themselves to us, the
confirmation feels wonderfully
unexpected.
Do you create for your audience, or do you create
for yourself and the sake of
art, hoping that your work might attract a
following?
The writer Chinua Achebe famously said, “Art for art’s
sake is just another piece of
deodorized dog shit.” But perhaps these ideas about
purpose (art’s sake vs. the
community’s sake) are not mutually exclusive. Like
many artists, we create because
we must. And since we must, we ultimately hope to
complement the continuum. We
create for ourselves, our audience, and for art itself
and by making work that we hope
is of use to our local and global community and adds
to the practice of art making.
When and where do you create?
We work wherever we are. This tends to mean that we
work in our home studio.
We work at a drafting table where Mendi normally
writes next to a desk, a laptop,
a scanner, and cameras for visual work. Across from
these workspaces we have a
recording studio, which includes a number of software
synthesizers, banjos, guitars,
and recording software. Since our work requires that
we talk through new (and old)
ideas constantly, we also work on planes, in trains,
in diners, in bed, over email, and
out of town.
How do you collaborate on work?
There are patterns to our work and to the practices we
each enjoy, but our process
varies from project to project. Sometimes one brings a
fully developed idea to the
other. At other times, we talk out a work until we are
ready to start building it. More
recently, we’ve been writing, drawing, and recording
drafts and then going out and
workshopping the ideas with collaborators. Sometimes
someone approaches us with
an opportunity that makes us look at an old idea in a
new way. We’d known we wanted
to work with house music for several years, for
example, but when Northwestern
University commissioned us to do a project we realized
that a project about slavery’s
architecture and the way it haunts present-day Chicago
would provide the perfect
opportunity to make house music.
What do you enjoy about the collaboration process?
What do you find the most
challenging?
We like being together and we enjoy making our
conversations available to the
public, to other possible like minds, and to different
minds, too. The best part of
collaborating is when the process is working so well
that we don’t need to verbalize
all of the ideas. The most challenging part is knowing
when to take a break. We
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work constantly and we work at home, so it is
difficult to know when to turn it off.
Collaboration is also a challenge because we have
different working styles. Mendi
likes to write a lot before talking about her ideas.
Keith is the other way around. We
have had to adjust to what the other needs to do his
or her best work in this and
other ways. Over the years, we have come to realize
that there will perhaps always be
differences in our work styles and we will always have
to attend to those differences
in approach. Though attending to those differences is
sometimes challenging to do,
we believe that the fissures between our methods are
often places where the most
magic resides in our work.
How has your work evolved as you have evolved as a
couple and as individuals?
Our work changes from project to project as much as it
does from year to year, so
it’s hard to tell the extent to which our works’
changes are a result of our changes
as people. Since we grew up together, sometimes it’s
also hard to distinguish our
individual evolution from our group evolution. Still,
there are some ideas we feel
ourselves moving through together. We are from the
same generation and the same
town and we went to school together as
pre-adolescents. When one of us wants to
reflect on something from our childhood in our work,
the other one was there and
can often remember that time and/or identify with the
way in which that desire
manifested. As we have grown to understand the
relation of our life to our work, we
have tried to use our shared experiences to shape some
of the formal and conceptual
elements of our projects. You can see this in the
nature of the online games we
create and narrative explorations based on early video
games.
What are you working on now or over the next year?
We are working on a few projects right now. Most
immediately, we are producing
an album of text-sound compositions. This album
includes tracks from poet Tracie
Morris, drummer Guillermo Brown, DJ Spooky,
trombonist/composer George Lewis and
composer Paul Lansky. At the same time, we are
creating a new work commissioned
by Northwestern University. The project is called Big
House / Disclosure. This project
includes a 200-hour interactive house song, graphic
and text-based performance
scores, and oral history interviews about Chicago’s
Slavery Era Disclosure Ordinance.
As technology is ever changing, what might the
future hold for your work in this
particular medium?
We work across media. As much as some of the projects
might have been identified
by the tools with which they were constructed, the
tools do not lead the process.
The concerns remain the same. The projects in the
future will most likely continue
to explore beauty, agency, invisible worlds, justice,
storytelling, humor, and the
boundaries of funk.
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What are the benefits and challenges of creating
work in this medium?
Working with new technologies can sometimes be
exciting because of the immediacy
of the work. It can be exciting to find new ways to
engage an audience. But it is
very easy for the technology to be a distraction from
the substance in the work.
We’ve found it very necessary to study how other
artists have negotiated these
challenges.
Is there a medium for your art that you have not
explored yet as artists that
you hope to?
Although we are always thinking of new elements we
might like to incorporate into
our work, much of our thinking about media has to do
with the challenges presented
by the nature of specific projects. Still, there are
some, we’ve made a few short video
works. We will probably work on a narrative film
project after the next album. Long-
range interests include architecture and product
design. And of course our project
commemorating the abolition of the British slave trade
naturally leads us to the new
terrain of downloadable new wave abolitionist
ringtones.
By your own admission in past interviews, you have
referred to yourself as a
“Cultural Critic.” Is there a particular issue happening
right now that fuels you?
How might this factor into future pieces you plan to
create?
It’s important to note that we don’t separate our
cultural criticism from our other
culture work. Right now we’re thinking a great deal
about the deaths of Sakia Gunn
and Michael Sandy and feeling the need to respond
publicly. At the moment, we
are working on a song, but in the end our public
response may take other forms as
well.
For more information about Mendi and Keith
Obadike, please visit their
web site at http://www.blacknetart.com/
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