“I like thinking about the cut in film as a kiss. It brings things together.”
I met Martine Syms at a microscopic art gallery in Los Angeles’s Chinatown in 2012. We’d both been invited to give presentations to an audience so small we were essentially performing for each other, and although I can’t remember what either of our talks was about, Martine’s slides had a deep purple background—her signature color—and featured an elegant font I’d never seen before (a year later, the font, Lydian, was everywhere). At the time, she was calling herself “a conceptual entrepreneur.” Thinking about it now, I’m not sure if she meant she was an entrepreneur only conceptually, or that she sold ideas. Both might have been true, but neither quite encompasses the artist she was then, and has since become.
Martine was born in Altadena, California, in 1988. She was homeschooled off and on by her parents and spent her teen years in Los Angeles’s DIY art and music scene, volunteering at all-ages punk venues and experimental cinemas and shilling zines before going to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. After graduating, she ran a speakeasy project space called Golden Age there for five years. When she came back to LA, she founded Dominica Publishing, dedicated to exploring Blackness in visual culture. In 2017, she had her first solo show at MoMA; she was barely thirty. Since then, it’s been a whirlwind: solo shows at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London; a Creative Capital Award, a Tiffany Foundation Biennial Competition Award, a Future Generation Art Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship; teaching at CalArts and earning an MFA from Bard College; commercial work for high-end fashion houses; and, in 2022, her feature directorial debut, The African Desperate, a witty, scathing, formally audacious send-up of art-school delusions.
In her work, Martine moves through mediums and ideas like a freeway moves through neighborhoods. That is to say, directly, easily, without much regard for the old world. For a long time, she had a show on NTS Radio called Ccartalk LA, on which she interviewed people as they drove through the city together. In Los Angeles, car routes are currency, and how you drive, she figured, reflects who you are. Martine drives a black two-seat convertible with a vanity license plate; on the road, as in her work, it’s very clear who is behind the wheel. She draws heavily from her own life, merging selfie videos, personal notes, and clothing in nonlinear, stylish installations. She has a facility with both archival and new media, easily mixing virtual avatars, machine-learning-driven conversational bots, and augmented-reality overlays with home movies and amateur photography culled from personal and institutional archives.
This formal boundlessness has always reflected a cinematic vision—the product, perhaps, of growing up in a city where any place can become a location, and can cross the boundary between reality and fantasy. In the last few years, however, Martine has made that vision more explicit. Although she’s created lots of video work and even a feature-length film, Incense, Sweaters and Ice (2017), intended for gallery exhibition, The African Desperate is her first movie for theaters. In the film, cowritten with poet Rocket Caleshu, she mines her own grad-school memories to satirize art education in America, which operates under a false premise of equality, which, as she told Artnet in 2022, “every single person knows [is] bullshit.”
In the film, Martine’s friend and longtime collaborator Diamond Stingily stars as Palace Bryant, a Black artist on the final day of her MFA program at an Upstate New York art school (the film was shot, mostly, at Bard College). The opening scene, of a loaded and cringey critique session with Palace’s thesis advisers, sets the tone, and the film pulls no punches about just how exasperating the creative class can be. But like everything else Martine makes, it leaves open the possibility of transcendence. The African Desperate takes place over the course of a single long day, a convention that reflects Martine’s fascination with time, which she has called her medium. If she’s managed to make so much with the time she’s had, it’s because Martine knows something that nobody else does: that time isn’t real.
—Claire L. Evans
I. “Does the process know I’m trusting it?”
THE BELIEVER: You’re big on cycles. You work harder than anyone I know, and then you have these periods of release afterward. Where are you in the cycle now?
MARTINE SYMS: Where am I in the cycle? I’m working on much larger projects than I ever have. And I’m not used to this kind of timescale, where I’m spending nine, ten months on just one part of something—there’s gonna be much, much more to come. I think I have to figure out how to take breaks. I like to work in bursts, but it’s just not possible on a project that’s going to take me three years. I would die.
BLVR: Working on something you know is not going to see the light of day for that long, you have to have a speculative mindset. What is the world going to be like in three years?
MS: I’m having a hard time with it, honestly.
BLVR: Think about how much has happened in the past three years.
MS: Yeah. But creatively, I have to have periods when I’m just taking stuff in, because otherwise I’d get really stale. I have to sit with things. I used to work for the photographer Barbara Kasten. I was really young, and she was in her seventies. At that time, everybody my age was like: You make something, you put it on the internet immediately. I remember being very enamored by the way she would shoot something, put it up in her studio, and look at it for a while. And I’d be like, “Oh, is that one going in the show?” And she’d say, “No, I’m still thinking about it.” [The artist and filmmaker] Lynn Hershman Leeson said to me once that after she had a kid, as a single parent, certain things just took longer than she wanted them to take. But she accepted it at a certain point, because she felt like time made everything better. I don’t think time necessarily makes everything better, but I know what she means: you come back to something, and you’re like, This part of it was cool. What I’m writing right now, I started writing last year. I’ve come back to a lot of stuff I wrote last year that I thought was shit at the time. And it probably was, but now it’s been recontextualized, and I’m like, Oh, actually, the idea was there.
BLVR: When you start something new, do you have a sense of the shape you want it to take?
MS: For a long time, I would have a very, very, very clear idea of what I wanted to make and what I was trying to achieve. A couple years ago, that stopped being that interesting to me, and it just became more fun to go in blind, even with shows. The show I did last summer [Loser Back Home] at [the Los Angeles art gallery] Sprüth Magers, I was like: I don’t know what this thing is going to be. I’m just going to let it become something. Certain things you have to plan, because there are other people involved. But to a degree, the unknowns are fun for me. Honestly, in art, I love an unknown; it’s great. That’s the whole point to me: I don’t know what it’s gonna look like, I don’t know what it’s gonna be, I just have this weird idea in my head: let’s see where it takes me.
BLVR: I think about this with writing books—you can’t let yourself imagine the cover or where it will sit, on which shelf. Because if you start thinking that way, it constrains you so much. Later, there’s a transition that has to happen between “the document,” which you and I talk about a lot, and the final form, which other people consume.
MS: Do you show people your doc, ever?
BLVR: My doc has never been messier. I’m trying to trust the process, but it is hard sometimes.
MS: Yeah, that’s been one of my mantras this year, even though at times I’m like, Does the process know I’m trusting it? I’m trusting it so hard.
BLVR: When there’s only one set of footsteps in the sand, that’s when the process is trusting you. I always come away from hanging out with you with a new sense of what’s possible. I feel like I can do anything, because you’re so in control of what you do, and you really make things happen. I wouldn’t call it manifesting, because that makes it sound like there’s no effort involved. In your artist bio, you use the word grit.
MS: I didn’t write that, but yes. I use it. I identify with it, I suppose.
BLVR: You’re really good at seeing things through.
MS: It’s hard for me not to talk about astrology with regard to this. But you know I am a Taurus, and I’m a Capricorn moon, two signs that are like, We’re just gonna stick with this. We’re just gonna climb this mountain. Better be the right mountain, because we’re not getting off it. I don’t mind the word manifest. One of my friends says align, which I’ve also adopted. I’m aligning with the thing that I want. It’s already there. I’ve already done it—I’m just aligning with it. And I get excited about projects too. That’s what’s hard about this long project: I’m finding myself losing enthusiasm for it. This acting teacher I once had, she was like, “I don’t require myself to be excited.” Take excitement off the table. If you decide you’re going to do something, you’re going to do it. You don’t have to be inspired, and you don’t have to be excited, and some days it’s going to suck, but if you just take that requirement off the table, then you can show up and do it. And that’s my thing with writing. At a certain point you just have to sit your ass down.
I’ve been describing myself as a “descending” kind of writer. I’m putting so much material in, and all the ideas are in that first draft. Some stuff works, some stuff doesn’t, but it’s gonna be too much, and I’m going to whittle it down. Whereas in screenwriting, there are some people who build it up. I don’t think one’s better than the other—ascending is maybe more efficient.
BLVR: Efficiency is totally overrated. You get to where you get to, however you get there.
MS: Did I need to write those pages? No, but I did, and they’ll find their way.