Lauren O'Neill-Butler

Fall 2005: I’m a graduate student in Constance DeJong’s class on early video art, an intimate Thursday night seminar for MA and MFA students, and a crash course in putting together an exhibition for the spring. Every week CDJ brings in electrifying clips, tapes, magazines, books, ephemera, and guest speakers, including Liza Béar and Carlota Schoolman. For the show, I’m tasked with assembling a timeline of the relevant publications, exhibitions, performances, employments, and events from 1964–1979. I nervously accompany CDJ to an interview with William Wegman in his Chelsea studio, and then I edit the transcript into an artists’ statement for the show’s accompanying catalogue. I run over to Martha Rosler’s to pick up some work. The “maverick excitement” of early video art that Holland Cotter later mentions in his New York Times review of our show echoes the thrill that goes into producing the exhibition—from the creative solutions we devised, given our small budget, to the deep group think carrying into late nights.

At some point, later on, CDJ becomes more than a professor. We meet up for semi-regular dinners, lunches, drinks. There’s never a specific haunt for these, but more of a rotating set of backdrops that support an ongoing conversation that has meant the world to me. I follow her work avidly, attending as many breathtaking performances as possible, always happy to see my early video cohorts there, our devoted fan club for one of the greats.

It turns out that the piece with Wegman foreshadows the obscene number of interviews I’ll go on to do in the same format, including one with CDJ about a 2018 show at the Renaissance Society. Her words that day (as ever) cut to the core. Since these are some of the most inspiring lines about writing that I know of, I want to quote them in full:

As a young person I discarded chronological and alphabetical order, in addition to various other systems we force language into when composing fiction and narrative. At first, this was with a not very clear awareness in response to writing conventions. But as time went on, I became increasingly aware of the movement of thought. It’s something we’re all familiar with: for example, you’re waiting for the bus, but you’re thinking about ten years ago, and also, did you turn off the gas? It goes on and on—we’re always in many different time frames, for a lot of waking life. I suppose I’ve paid attention to that, and it’s a source of structuring. I don’t have to use language as a delivery system for any manipulative, controlling binaries or chronological clock time. Rather, I use associative thinking as a basis for how I put language together in my work, and it eliminates whole subjects that don’t interest me. It focuses me.

There are pages more I want to write about CDJ and her brilliant associative thinking but, unfortunately, I’ve run out of space. Stay tuned for more at a later date.

—Lauren O’Neill-Butler, April 2020.

Lauren O’Neill Butler
MA ‘07
www.lo-b.com

© the artist

Gabriela Vainsencher

Here It Comes, 2014
HD video with sound
41 seconds

I made "Here It Comes" during my first year at Hunter's MFA program, while taking Constance DeJong's "Sound" class. Constance's classes were extremely popular and notoriously hard to get into, a feat which in my case required patience, tenacity, and a little bit of begging. She later became my thesis advisor, and a year after graduating from the program I included her in "I Can't Tell You Because I Can't Tell You", a group show about the treachery of narrative which I curated at 601 Artspace in the LES.

DeJong is one of those teachers whose voices stay in the back of your head forever after, helping you along when you're stuck in the studio, whether you're being too much of a perfectionist to actually get a piece finished or too lazy to do what it takes to make it right. She taught me to think about the sound in a video as a protagonist equal to the moving image, and one that can completely change the way a piece is interpreted by a viewer. She taught me to be free and wild in the early stages of a new creation, and also how to hone it in the final stages. Everyone should have a teacher like Constance. I'm not alone in thinking this. Whenever she has a performance or a show in the city, you can count on meeting multiple generations of her students, many of them like me are women making video, sculpture, sound, and everything in between. We're her supporters and fans, grateful students and collaborators.

This piece started as a simple exercise for class, which simply asked to replace a video's original sound with something else. I picked a short video of gentle waves which I shot a couple of years before on the shallow end of a beach in Le Havre, France. I replaced the sounds of the ocean with a soundtrack I made by recording my own voice whispering two overlapping sentences, repeated many times: "Here it comes" and "It's coming". I was trying to make a replica of the ocean's sounds with my voice, but also going for something between anticipation and anxiety. It's a ridiculous thing to feel in front of such a calm sea, but isn't the internal landscape always more powerful than the external one?

Gabriela Vainsencher
MFA ‘16
www.gabrielavainsencher.com/
www.vimeo.com/gabrielav
@gabriela_vainsencher

© the artist