Darin Klein: Your novel Together took the form of a solo exhibition, and your novella Budget Decadence is the basis for your Hammer Project. How did you arrive at merging writing with object making to create all-encompassing environments?
Christopher Russell: While completing my MFA, Amy Gerstler and Benjamin Weissman became very supportive of my writing. When my thesis committee refused me the option of creating books for my thesis show, I had to figure out another way to deal with text. This opened up a line of questioning about how to use the space of a room the way one uses the pages of a 'zine, but without relying the easy signifiers of that trope.
You've incorporated labored, intricate scratching of your photographic surfaces which seem at aesthetic odds with your unstaged, straightforward imagery. What do you feel the balance is within these works?
I think there is a dramatic imbalance. Photography is anti-romantic, detached recording. I find that extremely sexy, the raw distance of anonymous sex. After a decade of straight photography, I didn't think I was conveying the specific thoughts I was interested in. This violent, romantic gesture of scratching drawings into the photos gave me a new level of conceptual control.
Do you take pictures with specific storylines in mind, or is it the other way around?
It's like a switchback; the road that curves around and almost touches itself before winding back in the other direction. I start with the text, so I have a sense of narrative content and a first line. Once I figure it out the first line, it seldom changes, even though other sentences might be labored for hours. That's the anchor. Responding to an image will always change the direction of the text, which is why there are so many diversions in my writing.
How did books, pamphlets and zines come to play a significant role in your practice?
Zines started alongside my academic projects as a mode of production that wasn't worthy of academic criticism. I had more freedom to experiment without fearing academic failure. When other people became involved in the projects it allowed me to tighten thoughts I had about contexts for art. This might be the basis for the show I curated at LACE over the summer. It was like making a large zine that reflected ideas I was considering, but without being focused on me, and with the help of an extraordinary staff.
Your work defers to the Arts and Crafts movement on different levels, though your wallpaper and books are designed and printed digitally, you execute every aspect of their production yourself. Do you ever long for analog techniques?
William Morris would have hated my using his patterns. He was entirely committed to the human connection of labor, while my interest in Arts and Crafts is that it offers generosity as a failed model. I want to believe in the myth of the happy laborer, that individuals should always be surrounded by beauty. I'm not pretending that the world was better in the 19th century, just that those failed ideas constitute my greatest hopes.
The texts of both Together and Budget Decadence are being published as commercially printed books. Have you relinquished control over the aesthetic outcome, or will they also function as visual objects?
I don't think I am very good at giving up control. While my original vision for Together cannot be realized, I'm only compromising with my self over economic realities. Since it's part of a series of books I'm curating for LACE, I'll remain in control from idea to distribution. With Second Cannons Publications, Brian encourages the artists he works with to take control of the book form. That's why he's such an interesting publisher.