grayson kelly for the daily trojan usc annenberg 11/21
“I cannot conceive any work of art as having a separate existence from life itself” - Artaud
Artists are intimidating. If truth be told, the entire notion of high art and that which constitutes it has always seemed somewhat inaccessible to me. “Real” artists always seemed more serious, more passionate, more dedicated, more intelligent, and more talented than I, a lowly chef. To make matters worse, self-described artists had always, at least in my experience, shared a certain propensity for pomposity.
Welsh writer and academic Raymond Williams defined high culture and by extension, high art, as “great works embodied by the skills of organized thought, writing, visual arts, music, and architecture.” If you have pieces in a gallery or are fortunate enough to make your living exploring things like juxtapositional liminality or organic praxis, the chances in my mind of you being a normal person have gone straight out of the window.
So, when I was tasked with interviewing a member of USC Roski’s MFA cohort, I knew that I would have to challenge my own preconceived notions. After meeting Jarred Cairns, I have to admit: I’ve been dead wrong about artists all along. How many times am I going to have to remind myself that I don’t know everything?
From the second I walk into his studio in downtown Los Angeles on an uncharacteristically rainy autumn night, Cairns is warmly disarming and unpretentious. He is dressed casually, in a flannel shirt, paint splattered jeans, and a trucker hat – far from the ankle-length Marina Abramović robes I’d expected. A southern California native, Cairns’ path to USC, while short in distance, has been dotted with detours and threaded together by a singular constant: his willingness to push himself outside of his comfort zone.
That doesn’t come without a cost. Cairns is exhausted; it’s not uncommon for him to be at his studio until the wee hours of the morning, he tells me, as we sit down in his tiny, cubicle-like space.
“Well, I guess it comes with the job, right? Speaking of,” I asked. “Have you always considered yourself an artist?”
“Yes,” he begins, before catching himself, and pausing to rephrase. “Well, I’ve always tinkered with shit,” Cairns continues.
Cairns was raised in an uber Christian and extremely conservative household, an upbringing that he says “left [him] with scars.” Then, one day, he went to a thrift store, which swiftly lit a fire inside of him, one that defined his passion. “I was buying and selling vintage Levi's—anything pre-60’s or before. I had a permanent space out of the Rose Bowl for 12+ years. I was buying and selling even outside of my job.” His work is an idiosyncratic fusion of curation and creation, and he can find inspiration anywhere, even in dumpsters. “I like the idea of being ‘the picker,’ the one that goes around and is like, ‘Let’s dig through that!’ I’m constantly curating—thrift stores, yard sales, flea markets, dumpster diving… that kind of shit.” This propensity for finding beauty in one man’s trash is evidenced by one of his latest pieces, one that he points to in the corner. “The other day I was driving home from work and saw this pile of posters on the street. Well, you know, a lot of people don't work with that. But I dragged them in here anyway. And as you can see, I started putting them up on the wall, and I had it draped all over that entire side there. And then I actually painted a portrait of a face on it.”
Cairns’ passion for clothing led him to get a job at the Melrose Ave. mainstay Decades, a consignment store famous for its exceptional window displays, created and designed by Cairns’ himself. It’s a job that doesn’t always feel like work, which is probably why he’s chosen to keep the gig throughout graduate school—one more obligation piled onto his workload. The job allows Cairns to exercise his creativity using tangible objects, something he didn’t even realize was a form of art until his 30’s. “I guess art wasn’t in my face. I mean, I guess it was in my face—it was just a matter of how I responded to it. That’s how this all came about,” he says, gesturing to the studio around us.
Cairns peers over my shoulder at one of his pieces, many of which are scattered around the studio. Until then, I hadn’t really noticed the surrounding art: behind me, a mounted coat hanger donning various pairs of jeans (of which Cairns would later tell me, “it's just my personal jeans that were just hanging up in my apartment. I had them on this little rack. And I just wanted to see it in a space that wasn't my apartment or my so called closet.”) To my right, an amalgam of extension cords snaking through a panel of electric outlets affixed to a wooden board (“I just wanted to create a board with, obviously, electrical plugs, and just start getting all different colored extension cords. And plugging in then with no, like, with no real reason. It just, it's almost like the plugs represent the color of us or the color of just, whatever, and how it sort of looks together.”) Finally, in the corner, the aforementioned poster project.
The back wall of Cairns’ studio was originally just a cement block wall, which meant that Cairns only had two walls of white space to work with. So, like a true artist, he took it upon himself during the second week of school to frame out and erect a handmade wall to place on top of it, giving himself another flat white canvas to work with. It’s quite impressive; handily assembled using drywall and metal, a sort-of DIY experiment turned art project that he’s rightly proud of.
I didn’t realize it at the time—the sign of a good artist—but Cairns’ work isn’t your typical run-of-the-mill art. His pieces don’t always involve things like a canvas or sheet music or a block of clay. Instead, Cairns utilizes an amalgamation of modalities in his art—performance, painting, construction, fashion, interior design, curation, drawing, and multimedia.
In the summer of 2009, as the story goes, Cairns was at a friend's bookstore in the Bay Area. “He told me to take whatever I wanted, so I grabbed a few books. One happened to be the Artaud Anthology.” I nodded, acting like I knew who Artaud was. I soon learned that Antonin Artaud was a French surrealist artist, whose work Cairns says revolved around obscurity and gestures, intertwined with improv and what he calls “everyday movement.” He would also ultimately become an inspirational figure for Cairns.
“Artaud’s work was all kind of related to… real life, in that sense. Just everyday movement – being there in the moment. You know?”Around the same time, Cairns attended a lecture at The Hammer Museum by famed art director Elizabeth LeCompte. “She’d said: ‘to be an artist, you have to do the things that you don’t want to do, and you’re not good at.’” His face brightened and his eyes lit up as his mouth broke into a smile. “And then, funnily enough, my friend said, ‘you know, there’s a woman in Los Angeles who actually teaches Artaud’s theories.’ And that’s how I met Rachel Rosenthal.”
“Kismet,” I reply. Cairns smiles.
Rosenthal was an L.A. based French interdisciplinary artist, teacher, actress and activist, best known for her full-length performance art pieces. When doing my research for this profile, I was struck at how eerily reminiscent Cairns and Rosenthal’s artistic origin stories are. In an interview from 1989 by Moira Roth for the Smithsonian Archive of American Art, Rosenthal spoke of an epiphany she had after she unwittingly picked up a book by the absurdist Arnaud, attributing her discovery of his theories as a catalyst for her artistic motivation. “It’s only when I read Antonin Artaud’s Le Théatre at Son Double – I think it was 1947,” she told Roth, “that suddenly it came to me… I came to my senses, and I realized that the kind of theater that he envisaged was an integration of all the things that I loved, and that art can be done through the medium of theater.” She recounted her Arnaud epiphany as “a tremendous liberation and a tremendous opening up” that would eventually lead to her famous performance art pieces, the same pieces that Cairns would later study under her mentorship.
Not long after beginning to work with Rosenthal, Cairns began to get a nagging feeling that he couldn’t shake. He soon realized that he wanted to finish what he’d started more than 20 years earlier—college. The idea of going back to school was terrifying and thrilling.
“Going to therapy didn’t help the cause. Because my therapist was very, like, persistent. He was pushing me in a way that I wasn’t even familiar with. It was between Rachel and my therapist that really kind of kicked me in the ass in that sense.” The two eventually pushed him to go back to school to finish his undergrad. He received his diploma from U.C. Irvine right before his 44th birthday.
“It was very interesting to start taking ballet at like, 40-something. Being in your forties, at Santa Monica City College, taking ballet,” he says, with a wry smile. Like a true artist, Cairns embraced the discomfort that came with going back to school, and he soon graduated from the studio art program at U.C. Irvine in 2011.
Cairns, now halfway through his first semester in the MFA Art program, is excited to have the opportunity to solely focus on his art for the next two years. Mentorship is an extremely important facet of his artistic career, and Cairns has found his relationships with his professors to be essential.
“I'm being guided or molded by some of these professors that are engaging with me and are encouraging me. That’s super helpful because I feel like you can get sort-of lost in the process without even realizing what you're doing. I'm trying to really force myself to stay in this space ‘til midnight, 1 A.M. One of the professors here gave me this—her ‘10 little rules.’ It talks about just being in the space, and allowing yourself to find trust in your space. And so that's what I've been doing.”
It’s not the first time Cairns has taken his mentor's advice to heart. “One of Rachel's key things she always said was ‘doing by doing.’ It’s just like, getting in there and doing it regardless, you know?”
In the aforementioned Smithsonian interview, Rosenthal reflected on the purpose of her art: “I was able to do in my performance work what I had never been able to do in my life, which is to reveal myself, to disclose, to air, to put out all this garbage and turn it around and make it into art, and in a sense reveal all the dark secrets that I had kept locked up all these years. It was redemption and exorcism.”
Cairns misses her greatly, and while Rosenthal will always be an important figure in his life and work, he feels fortunate that USC will provide him with the space to do by doing for the next two years. “All I’m trying to tell myself at my age is one thing: don’t get caught up in your fucking brain.” For Cairns, this means creating something every single day, no matter how trivial—and as an audience, we are luckier for it.