What goes on at Amant? This fall and winter, the steel-and-concrete art campus tucked into a liminal zone between a meat wholesaler and a strip club on the Williamsburg-Bushwick border is hosting three exhibitions: Loretta Fahrenholz’s A Coin from Thin Air, Dietmar Busse’s Fairytales 1991–1999, and Jenna Bliss’s Basic Cable. Since the project started about a decade ago, Amant has brought heretofore unheard-of sums of art institution capital to the North Brooklyn Industrial Business Zone. Its founder, Lonti Ebers, is a trustee of the Museum of Modern Art and the spouse of Bruce Flatt, a global investment firm CEO with a net worth of over $4 billion. The residency and exhibition spaces themselves cost about $40 million to build.
In this context, Jenna Bliss’s very personal, intuitive, and understated video and eight-millimeter film works, which were mostly self-financed and made with a deliberately cheap—not in a derogatory sense—aesthetic, will stand out like a freegan stowaway at the Metropolitan Opera. I sat down with her at Greenpoint’s still surprisingly affordable Three Decker Restaurant to chat about art fairs, 9/11, and reality TV.
Cosmo Bjorkenheim: I want to know a little bit about this show and some of the work in it. It's at Amant—how did it come together?
Jenna Bliss: It's funny doing an interview that's being recorded because I feel like I say things I'm not supposed to say all the time.
CB: Just preface it with “Off the record.” Then I can't include it.
JB: The museum has gone through several different directors, and I'd only been there once. But a friend of mine, Loretta Fahrenholz, who's also opening a show—this is on record—she was invited to do a show and then suggested [that the curators look at my work.] She's a filmmaker and an artist. She was living in New York for a long time, but is now in Germany. Anyway, that was it. I've had a series of studio visits with Patti and Tobi, who are the curators there.
CB: Where's your studio?
JB: In the financial district.
CB: Oh, that's right. At the top of the Freedom Tower.
JB: I wish. No, it's on Fulton Street. But I have a view of the Freedom Tower. There's a lot of boxing gyms in my building. Sometimes people know it for that. There's a place called Bout.
CB: So they did a bunch of studio visits. What was the process of putting the show together? Did you have complete carte blanche in choosing what work to put in, or did they commission a new body of work for the exhibition?
JB: No, it was all work I had already made. It came together sort of quickly, so there wasn't really time to make a new work because I work slowly. Especially on the longer videos. That really silly, meant-to-be-funny, 30-minute film took me so long to make.
CB: True Entertainment [2023]?
JB: Yeah, it took me so long to make. A lot of it has to do with funding. But they wanted to show that. They wanted it to respond to some of the things that Loretta was working on in her film. And then there's another exhibition by this photographer, Dietmar Busse, and it's older works of his that are fashion New York, very New York '90s Polaroids.
CB: I can see how your work resonates with that.
JB: Yeah. I mean, the New York thing.
CB: And the retro aesthetic a little bit, with the eight-millimeter loops.
JB: Yeah. I think it's funny, though, because I think that there's probably more overlap with how I work and how Loretta works, making these longer-format films. I've tried to break into the film world, but it's not working—as an artist, making these long-format films.
CB: So would you rather see yourself in the future exhibiting more in a film context than in an art context?
JB: I really want to make a feature film. I really want to adapt a book a friend wrote. And I'm not going to say what because it's just so unlikely that it'll happen.
CB: And there would be a mad dash to option it.
JB: Oh, yeah, exactly. I really would like to make a feature film, but right now I'm trying to get True Entertainment into festivals. Well, I’ve applied to like 20 festivals, so we'll see.
CB: What is the process of funding your narrative projects?
JB: You wrote about The People's Detox [2018]—that, I just self-funded. It took me years and years because I work as a video editor by trade. I used to work on reality shows and stuff. So that's how I was funding some of the earlier stuff. But now, I was like, “I can't keep doing this if I'm spending my own money on it.” So with True Entertainment, it was my dealer, the gallery I work with in Vienna [Felix Gaudlitz]. It was through sales and fundraising editions, and things like that—and a commission from Haus am Waldsee in Berlin. And I won an award from an art fair, stuff like that. So it was cobbled together.
CB: Which is ironic, considering the tenor of the piece, maybe.
JB: I know, but—I feel like maybe I shouldn't say this—but I feel like it's almost like a failure.
CB: Off the record?
JB: No, it doesn't have to be off the record.
CB: On the record?
JB: On the record. I premiered an earlier version of it at an art fair in Paris. An award from a different fair before I made it helped to fund the film, but then I premiered it at this art fair in Paris, which is a part of the Basel—
CB: Ecosystem.
JB: Yeah, there we go. It’s one of the Basel fairs, Paris Plus. And people there, like Art News, were like “top breakout stars,” and I was listed. And I was like, maybe it didn't work, you know? All these collectors watching it and laughing and thinking it's funny. Can it work critically if people are also laughing at it and themselves?
CB: Is there any resonance with Ruben Östlund? Did you ever see The Square [2017]?
JB: Oh, yes. I hate it.
CB: Uh oh—off the record? Just as an art world satire, I mean.
JB: I feel like I was trying to do something different from that, but I'm not sure if I can articulate how. But I feel like The Square, and mostly Triangle of Sadness [2022], went into caricature. And I was trying to keep it as specific as possible. It felt very personal because it's set in 2007, which is when I started working in reality television. And that was the form that I was using, this reality TV style. I wasn't working specifically on scripted reality, but my very manipulative boyfriend at the time was a producer in reality TV, and he was working on a scripted reality show, and he would fly to LA and write scripts, and he would direct it, even though it was a reality show. So, in the reality TV world, I was introduced to this scripted reality thing, and it was so weird and uncanny. That was the structure of the film, and I was trying to get at that uncanny quality. That was my goal. Also, I did one fair, and I was horrified. I felt like a very earnest David Foster Wallace. I felt both very naïve and very upset. That was why I made the film.
CB: Which prestigious art fair was that?
JB: That was Liste. That was a small fair, but it was in Basel so then I also went to the larger art fair, and they were happening at the same time. Basel is a crazy place. I never name it in the film, but all the footage is from Basel, so anyone that's been there would know. They had this drone footage of the art fair with the booth of the gallery that I work with, Felix Gaudlitz. I put that footage in the final version of the film.
CB: The period setting is basically just because it's based on your experiences at that time.
JB: It's that and it's right before the economy crashes. This is the second, longer film in a series that I'm making about Wall Street. The first iteration was about 9/11, which is not in the Amant show, but was in a previous exhibition of this work where I have scripted firsthand accounts of 9/11 based on real accounts. It's called Professional witnesses [2021]. That's based off of an Errol Morris ad for Apple. Their “switch” campaign. There's a jingle that was a version of the jingle they use. Anyway, it's using these forms of the time to tell a story of a certain moment. True Entertainment is the next in that, even though it's not set in the US or on Wall Street. The art market didn’t crash at the same time as the real estate market and the global market—all of that crashed, but then the art market was okay for a while. So it’s more of an allegory.
CB: Having been imbricated in the art world through that period, what was the effect of the 2008 crash in your experience, on the art world?
JB: I don't personally know because I was not really in the art world at that point. I was just editing reality TV and trying to get into art school. I don't have any personal anecdotes. But there's Dick Fuld [who was CEO of Lehman Brothers]. As Lehman Brothers is crashing and falling apart, he's at an art auction. He has this amazing art collection. In 2007, it was a very bullish market. The New York Times had an article about how people at Basel—collectors—were running, foaming at the mouth at the gates of the fair, and things were selling out. Mary Boone really did sell out in five minutes. All that was real. I get the sense that it had an effect, but people were still buying art. And then the crash happened more like in 2009 or a little bit later.
CB: I've gotten the impression, too, from being peripherally involved in the art world, that it's somewhat more resistant than many other sectors to fluctuations in the market, or to crises. As far as I understand it, Covid, for example, had a counterintuitive effect on the art market. It didn't maybe slow it down so much.
JB: I tried to learn some basic economics while making this, but it didn't really land. I read some books, but it didn't go very far. I wanted to set a film about finance in the art world, basically. Because I read this anthropological study of Wall Street and all the players.
CB: From what era?
JB: From the 2000s. [Liquidated, by Karen Ho] I think it went through the crash. She is an anthropologist. You have the back-of-house people and then you have the front-of-house people. With these front-of-house people it's more social. You have all these other factors that create value or make someone successful in these worlds that are less quantifiable.
CB: Something ineffable, like personal magnetism or something?
JB: Yeah, or being good at golf, which I feel like is the art world.
CB: These social capital things.
JB: Yeah. And then also how precarious finance is, and it's similar to the art world in the sense that people are getting fired constantly. So this idea of job security doesn't exist there because people are moving constantly from one hedge fund or one bank or whatever. It's constant movement. And I feel like that's the fluid speculative stuff. It's very similar to the art world. When Damien Hirst’s market bubble was about to burst, his dealer bought all of his stuff off auction. These prices are inflated. The value of art is completely fake. There's all these people just propping it up, which I think is partially why it's not affected in the same way as other sectors of the market when there is fluctuation because it's so artificial. I think that they thought that high finance was so sophisticated that it wouldn't be affected by something like a housing market crash. They thought they were immune to that. And then we learned that was not true. And we probably haven't seen the bottom of that. I think it's just band-aids over it.
CB: I wonder what it would look like for the art market to bottom out in the same way that the real estate market or financial markets did. What would it take and what would it look like?
JB: I have no idea. I want to make a sequel to this film. I'll try and imagine what it would look like. I think it's what people find so alienating about the art world because when someone's like, Oh, my kid can do that, that's a reaction to, Why is this worth so much money? And no one really knows the answer to that, except that everyone decided it was.
CB: Right. It's one of the purest forms of the arbitrariness of exchange value. I work in an art warehouse, a fine art services company. Everyone who works on this very nuts and bolts level with artworks—crating it or packing it or moving it—all have an incredibly derisive view of art because it's just like any other thing that is stored in a warehouse and moved with a forklift. But then it has this mystique that is so obviously a house of cards when you're handling it as if it's just fruit or beer or sausages or something.
JB: That's interesting. I never worked for a gallery. I never had any job in the art world. Except artist.
CB: That's a job.
JB: Yeah, I guess so. But not for lack of trying. I just never could even get an internship. I just couldn't get in there somehow. But I talk to a lot of people, so they fill in the gaps in my knowledge of how these slightly larger galleries run because I only work with galleries that are very small teams. It's the dealers installing the works and doing everything, basically.
CB: Back to the work. You were saying that you find more thematic and aesthetic commonalities with Loretta’s work than with Dietmar’s?
JB: I'm just not as familiar with Dietmar’s work. I think these Polaroids have never been shown before. I became friendly with Loretta because I really loved a film she made and I wanted to show it. She works as a filmmaker in the art world and she also makes objects, and she makes photographs and sculptures, installation, sculptural works. It's a mode of working that I maybe even emulated. She had a practice and was working and showing when I first met her, and I was not. She's not that much older than me, but I feel like I learned a lot from her. I think that she approaches subjects very sensitively. And she has an anarchic approach, where she has a subject and lets things unfold and lets other people take control. The sensitivity that's behind that, that freeness, I really respond to.
CB: Are there other artists of filmmakers that you would place at the top of your pantheon? Either currently practicing or not?
JB: I think someone like Yvonne Rainer and her films. When I was much younger, I used to dance, too. I don’t dance in my art practice, but I think there's some sort of affinity with the trajectory of her career and her films. Yeah, I mean, the greats: Harun Farocki and all that.
CB: Were you aware of the controversy with the Harun Farocki event at Greene Naftali?
JB: Yeah, I was there. I was not aware of it until I showed up, and I left because I didn't know what to do. I'm not loud. I'm not good at protests and stuff like that because I'm like, “Ugh.” So I just left because it was fucking weird.
CB: You left before the cops showed up.
JB: The cops showed up? I think I saw them outside, actually. I was waiting around the corner for some friends that had stayed. But yeah, we weren't sure that the cops were there for that.
CB: I also wasn't there, and maybe this is a game of telephone, but I heard that Greene Naftali called the cops on the people who disrupted the event. In the spirit of Harun Farocki, of course.
JB: Oh my God. It was really frustrating. It was also frustrating because it was Nora Alter, who was one of the tutors on the Whitney ISP. She’s this expert on Harun Farocki. It's not her fault, though, because I think it was the gallery. She had nothing to do with the exhibition. She wrote this book and showed up to talk about it. It was a little confusing because I guess those T-shirt works were not a work. It was his T-shirts that his partner turned into a work. Which is weird in and of itself. But then to edit it for the show so it didn't have the Palestine T-shirt. It's one thing to just not show the work.
CB: It's like they were really baiting this kind of reaction. And if they thought they weren't, then what were they thinking?
JB: I know. It was just crazy how everyone was ignoring the protesters and not acknowledging it. I wouldn't say I walked out in protest exactly because that sounds self-aggrandizing. I wanted to see a Harun Farocki show, and I wanted to hear about the book. I mean, Greene Naftali—if they wanted to do a video show, they could have done a Hito Steyerl show, and she's like 100% Zionist. It's weird that they would want to show the Harun Farocki and then censor him.
CB: Does it just come from some disconnectedness from the context of the work that’s endemic with gallerists? Is there a tendency to divorce the work from its context when you're designing exhibitions?
JB: I don't know what was going on there. I had a show in Berlin right before, when there was this Strike Germany thing happening. I don't know if you followed it? Because Germany—it sucks, what's going on there. If you're Palestinian, they're like, “You can't have a book award.” It's crazy there. So there was this strike called Strike Germany and my show was supposed to open in two weeks when they called this strike. I knew something like that was going to happen because it was so bad. It was a mess, but I did the show.
CB: Was there any fallout?
JB: No, because I ended up talking to the organizers of Strike Germany. It was very, very complicated. We had gotten funding from the state, it was a publicly funded institution. Then when they were going to release the funds, they were like, “Oh, and you have to pledge your allegiance to Israel, by the way.” This is a condition of getting the money. The institution I was working with, they were working with a cohort of other organizations to push back against that. We wrote letters and they got rid of this clause as a result of all the pushback by the institutions and artists. So it worked. Then the contracts didn't have that, but it was very weird.
CB: You were talking about Professional witnesses before and how it was aesthetically informed by this Errol Morris Apple campaign. I also thought of—probably because I just watched it recently—Public Hearing [2012], James M. Kienitz-Wilkins’s film. Do you know that one?
He took a transcript from a public hearing at a town hall about this proposed Walmart expansion. It was just a bunch of citizens, pro- and anti-, talking about whether to allow a Walmart to expand. He took this transcript of this incredibly dry proceeding and then had it dramatically reenacted. I just formally thought of it.
JB: I'm very critical of my contemporaries, but I'm a fan [of his]. I know that film and I like what he's doing. I hadn't thought of it as a reference, but there's some formal overlap.
CB: Have you ever done that gesture before, where you've used a transcript as a script?
JB: Well, I wrote those. That's the thing. I was taking some transcripts and I fictionalized everything. Some are more fictionalized than others.
CB: But nothing is lifted wholesale from the transcript?
JB: No. I mean, some are quite close, maybe weirdly close to some first-hand accounts, but all of them have been changed. Some of them are quite fictionalized. They're all at least amalgamations of different people. In terms of the scripted nature, that's why it's called Professional witnesses, because there's this artifice to it. All the scripted accounts are from between 2002 to early 2003 before the war in Iraq is declared. It's this nebulous moment of uncertainty, but after the attacks.
CB: I want to know more about why you decided to explore 9/11. Some of the short films, like Conspiracy [2021], Connecting the Dots [2019]—I feel like you're flirting with this conspiracy angle. This is an anecdote: I was at an ice cream parlor down the street, and these 20-year-old zoomer employees were talking. I overheard them say: “I was in class yesterday and our professor asked, ‘What's something that people in your parents' generation care about that you don't?’ The first thing that somebody said was 9/11.’”
JB: That's amazing. That's so cool.
CB: In light of that, what's bringing you to this theme now?
JB: I knew I wanted to make a series of art projects or whatever about the recent history of Wall Street. I was a senior in high school during 9/11. I took my high school yearbook photos on 9/11. So I have this weird document of it. It was like 9:20 on September 11th, the photographer came out sobbing.
CB: What's your expression like in your yearbook?
JB: It's weird. And it's very underexposed compared to everyone else's in the yearbook because she was clearly upset. I think there's something about that moment. I think it was a global shift. It’s the new millennium, it’s the beginning of something new. I was actually trying to make a film about climate change in early 2020, late 2019. And I was going to Extinction Rebellion meet-ups. And then the pandemic happened, and everything became super conspiratorial. I had people that I knew from the People's Detox film sending me Plandemic [2020 - 2023] because they were fighting the medical establishment in the '70s, and they still are.
The right-wing conspiracies during the pandemic led me back to the left-wing conspiracies of 9/11. The fear felt similar in a way because it was acute, there was something more urgent about it than climate change, which is harder to see, more gradual. It felt like a real rupture. And so I was just listening to first-person accounts of 9/11 for a long time during the early days of the pandemic. And I found it weirdly comforting. So that's really how it happened. And then I got really deep into all the conspiracies.
CB: Are you also looking at existing media about 9/11? Like Loose Change [2005]?
JB: Yeah, I watched all of that. Like The New Pearl Harbor [2013]. I read the books, like Disconnecting the Dots. There's so many of these books. Some of them I couldn't finish.
CB: What about other things that came out of that moment, like United 93 [2006] or Oliver Stone's World Trade Center [2006]?
JB: I actually didn't watch the Oliver Stone. But there's a great book by Retort about 9/11 [Afflicted Powers]. It's more like theory. It’s a collective. T. J. Clark's in the group, that art historian.
CB: Well, it'll be interesting during the next major rupture, whatever it is, 12 years from now, when you become fascinated with first-hand accounts of the Covid pandemic.
JB: I know, now I feel like the pandemic will probably be a part of this series. Before the pandemic, I was like, this Wall Street series is going to be 9/11, 2008, Occupy will somehow be a part of it. Super Storm Sandy. And that was as far as I got. And then the pandemic happened.
CB: You're deeply invested in these early 2000 aesthetics, but then you also have this 8mm aesthetic. Why did you decide to go that route and mix these time period references with the media?
JB: I started using Super-8 as a way of thinking about digital media and kinda going backwards in a way to think about digital media. Thinking about conspiracy and thinking about things that feel so web-like or Deleuzian or rhizomatic or whatever. Filming the city in a really analog way was very intuitive. That was the impulse behind it because it was a way of thinking through our digital life.
CB: Representations of the city that maybe don't feel so hyperreal and feel more tactile?
JB: I feel like the city has become a digital space, not just because there's screens everywhere but because everything is so mediated through our phones and all these other connections that are organizing our lives beyond the city grid. A way of making sense of that was to walk around and film it. It's also a cliché: the artist walking around New York and filming. I think it's funny to be enacting the cliché, but I think people think I'm really serious about it.
CB: People seem to have a chronic issue with seeing your intentions behind the work because of its ambiguity, its thematic multivalence. True Entertainment getting these accolades being a case in point.
JB: Nobody's ever said to me, “Oh, that was great, I really liked that,” except for True Entertainment. So I don't know what that means.
CB: Well, it's truly entertaining for one thing.
JB: The name comes from the company that I worked for in 2007. It's called True Entertainment, and it was a reality TV company. Now they merged with another company that was called Original Media, and now they're called Truly Original.
CB: Are there any shows that you worked on that really stuck with you back then?
JB: I did three seasons of Real Housewives of Atlanta [2008 - ]. Then I did tattoo shows. I did a lot of TV shows.
CB: Have you seen Time Bomb Y2K [2023]?
JB: No. What's that?
CB: It's a found footage archival doc that came out last year. It's home video footage from the turn of the millennium. As a Y2K-era found-footage archival doc it might be interesting.
JB: I spend a lot of time indulging in Y2K aesthetics. I mean, it's funny because I think there is this cyclical thing. So it was an accident everyone's dressing like they did when 9/11 happened. The Hills [2006] was the main influence for True Entertainment. And the fact that people are dressing like that now was a weird coincidence of how this project came about. I almost feel like it's a little too fashionable. It was a lucky coincidence because I wasn't thinking about fashion trends or something, but it definitely linked up in a way that I hadn't expected.
CB: Do you like Bernadette Corporation's work?
JB: I feel you can't be an artist in New York without having been really influenced by them, whether you like it or not. I feel like when I was in grad school, in London, I was writing about Get Rid of Yourself and Occupy somehow.
CB: Have you read or heard about Rachel Kushner's new novel, Creation Lake? It's definitely very much a part of this moment, too. Historical fiction about radical milieux is her thing. So this new one is about Tarnac and the Invisible Committee and the Tarnac Nine and being charged with eco-terrorism in 2008 or '09 or whenever it was. I'm inclined to hate read it.
JB: Yeah. I'll check it out. She feels like a phony or something. Off the record.
CB: Well, you're not trying to option her novel, so who cares if she knows you think she's a phony.
JB: I maybe haven't read enough to really say that. I don't know, maybe she's okay. I should probably read more of it.
CB: You don't have to be super familiar with something to categorically condemn it.
JB: That’s true.
Jenna Bliss’s Basic Cable is on view September 19 - February 16 at Amant.
