Debra Frances Bean’s “Art Bags” are frozen moments of
consumption, of eating your cake and having it, too. A series of identical, crystal-clear handbags
contain a plethora of desirable objects—often the kind whose appeal is
short-lived. Take Yum for example: an
Art Bag full of colorful Gummy Bears. The Gummy Bears are suspended in the
clear resin, preserved forever in the belly of the handbag. They are consumed,
but not digested. Mummified in their chic resin coffin, they are satisfying in
a way that the actual experience of eating a handful of gummy bears cannot be.
Other Art Bags contain wads of cash, slick handguns, designer lipstick tubes—and
all manner of objects denoting a level of comfort, prestige, and style. In my
conversation with Bean, she sheds some light upon her artistic process, her often-humorous
relationships with collectors, and some of the autobiographical content of her
work. In addition, she discusses her position as an artist working in both the
commercial and fine art realms.
JENNI HIGGINBOTHAM: The first thing I’d like to talk about
is your basic process of making the Art Bags. How do you make them? How do you
try to perfect them?
DEBRA FRANCES BEAN: I’ve been making the Art Bags for over
10 years. Same thing, same signs, same bag, different contents. I stumbled upon
the handbag motif when I was at St. Martin’s, and we were asked to bring in an
object to class. I suppose, like most artists, that I an interested in the
psychological side—that sense of self-discovery. A very big part of my life is
my father, and he’s been in the handbag industry. So all my life I’ve been
given handbags, these receptacles for my dolls and toys. They were like my
grownup toy. They were just so intrinsic to the basic idea of carrying things,
whether it’s actual stuff or the “mental bits that you hang onto,” and they are
a rather obsessive object. I’ve been making the same bag shape this whole
time.
The very first handbag I made was created with
plaster, and the handle is covered in sharp pins. It’s called To Have and To Hold, and obviously if
you do hold it, it will be extremely painful, and your hand will get pricked.
When I made this I had just gotten married, and in some ways this was a
psychological comment on marriage. These bags have followed me through my every
move and path of life. They’re very intimate and autobiographical.
JH: That’s interesting because I was thinking of them in a
really conceptual mode. You clearly work conceptually as well, but I really
like the autobiographical aspects of the handbags. It’s also interesting to
think about artwork commodity-wise, creating a perfect product for your
intended audience or clientele.
DFB: The kind of people who respond to the work are
generally people with quite a lot of money, and by “respond to the work” I mean
“buy the work.” They just tend to be a certain type of person. It’s difficult in
some ways because I’m partly catering to them, and I’m partly just bobbing along
in the world being myself. It’s tricky because it’s become quite commercial. These
people want something that’s finessed and polished. The direction I’ve taken
the work in is very much that striving for perfection. You don’t ever really
achieve that, and it’s that constant failure to perfection that keeps me going.
It’s almost what the work is about.
My latest bag (not featured in the exhibition) is actually a
3D printout. It’s the same shape but a lot bigger. I scanned the handbag shape
and printed it, and it’s coming along, but I’m struggling with it at the
moment. With some other resin bags, I have been working with Chanel #5 bottles,
and every time I put the new pieces full of Chanel #5 perfume bottles they keep
exploding and turning into piles of goo. Making a mistake with these bags is
very expensive. I’m working through it now.
JH: So you have your mold, and you pour a little bit of
resin in. Then you place the objects into the mold and fill it up the rest of
the way?
DFB: Yes. Often there can be up to 6 layers with different
depths of objects in it. Then you seal it up, pour the last bit of resin in,
and there you have it.
JH: So at what point do the bottles explode? Is it the heat?
DFB: I’ve figured out that modern Chanel #5 bottles are not
the same quality as the vintage ones. Buying vintage ones, which I usually buy on
eBay, are so expensive that I started buying the modern ones. I’ve now gotten
to the point where I’m casting the Chanel bottle. I’m basically extracting now,
and they’re now even more removed from the real. They are becoming more complex
and ambitious.
JH: So instead of just plunking objects into the resin, you
are creating these entirely new objects based on the “real” ones to place in
the bags? That is definitely more complicated.
DFB: It is a labor of love, the way I see it. I look at the Art Bags as a life
project. They’re about my life, and they follow me. They go to places that I’d
like to be right now—like Palm Beach. They hang out with the rich and famous.
JH: Yes, and as a woman, handbags have often defined my different life stages.
Reading your artist statement, you partly describe your work
as a sort of mish-mash of immediate gratification and guilt. When you want
something you say, “Oh, I really want
this.” Then you have whatever it is, and suddenly it isn’t quite as good as you
thought it would be. For example, the Art Bag Yum is filled with gummy bears. They’re so pretty and sweet, and
you can’t help but want them. But after you stuff yourself with them, you feel
guilty. These grown up handbags contain almost childish contents. There are a lot of complex ideas and emotions
wrapped up in these Art Bags. Could you elaborate on that?
DFB: You think about being able to discreetly hide things in your purse, but these
bags are open to scrutiny from the viewer. They let you into the secret psyche
of this “person” who is really quite normal. But we don’t show all aspects of ourselves.
These bags are stripped back to show our basic instincts—like the desire to
have a gummy bear or a lollipop. And
there’s that funny feeling that you have when you’re a mother, and your son or
daughter sticks their unwrapped lollipop in your handbag. So you reach into your bag in some smart
store, and there’s this sticky lollipop in your bag. There’s definitely a
humorous aspect to the work. Also, the gummy bears are a very iconic shape, and
I was playing with iconic shapes. I decided the handbag was an iconic shape, and
being the artist, I wanted it to be my own iconic shape.
There’s a bit of a double entendre with the lollipop bag, Sucker, as well. There is a sexual
innuendo to this title for a woman or for a man who may be buying a purse for
his wife or lover. It plays with the notion of spending a lot on a designer bag
that will be out of fashion next season. It begs the question, “Who’s the
sucker here?” He’s the sucker, and she’s
the sucker. Even though it’s an innocent, little, childlike lollipop, it contains
a whole world of meanings. I don’t know if that comes across in the work
because I think people often take them at face value. “Oh, that’s pretty. That’s
a cool object.” But there’s quite dark subject matter being explored with them
as well.
JH: Absolutely—like with the one titled Apothecary
that contains chemo supplies. The other bags have gummy bears, lollipops and My
Little Ponies, but the chemo supplies are this grim reminder that a lot of the
products of our culture are poisonous. It’s such a personal piece with the
contents of your chemo cabinet. It hit me like a punch in the stomach.
DFB: Let me tell you, it does. Literally. We are all held together, whether we
like it or not, by our medical system and our dependence upon pills for our
survival.
Apothecary
pays homage to
that.
JH: It’s an incredibly moving piece. Then I look at the bag called
Gun with the Derringer. The point of
putting a gun in a handbag is to keep it hidden and secret. Here it’s
exposed.
I feel like women in particular
are often the targets of our culture, both commercially and violently. There’s
the idea of being protected by the gun, but there it is just out there for
everyone to see.
DFB: You know, you usually find mace in the handbag. The gun
is a little bit more extreme.
JH: Fair enough.
DFB: Gun is also a meta-narrative
about our fears of terrorism.
JH: They look a lot like bags as they go through the x-ray
machines at the airport. That is the very first thing I thought of when I saw
these pieces.
DFB: Yes. In fact, I just had a client who bought a gun bag,
a dollar bag, and the Flirt bag for
his wife. That’s the one with the perfume and the pretty, little, pink hearts.
It’s quite a sinister trio that he bought. The message is almost, “I love you,
but don’t fuck with me.” People often buy the bags in sets, and they create
their own narrative. I sold a piece with a watch, one with money, and the Apothecary piece. Those bags went
together well, because if you can afford the private help you can keep yourself
going with medical treatment and buy yourself some time. The combination of the
three becomes a comment on time and our longevity. I suppose I deal with our
mortality—my own mortality—quite predominantly in my work.
JH: Right, and all of these little objects in the bags—which aren’t necessarily
meant to last for very long—are preserved forever in this resin.
DFB: Yes, and it elevates those objects’ status into “artwork.” Especially in
that Duchampian Urinal way. I love Duchamp’s
audacity to make people accept the everyday as high art.
JH: Do you view him as a kind of father of Pop Art?
DFB: Yes, and I most definitely love Pop Art. I lived in New York for a time,
and I couldn’t get enough of it. Living
in New York was something that I’d wanted to do for a long time, and I would like
to get back there someday—or way out West. I love America, and I suppose that is
something that came to me as a child when I would visit the States with my
father. He is one of my references for the gun piece, and that is something people
would not know just by looking at the work.
As a child my father was obsessed with John
Wayne and his movies, so he took my sister and I on these fly/drive trips to
America. He would drag us around the O.K. Corral. Two girls—we didn’t have too much interest
in cowboys at the time, but we would go to the Grand Canyon or learn about the
Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Now this will tell you something about how much
the world has changed. He bought a holster with a load of bullets and some
replica guns, and we carried them back to the U.K. in our normal luggage. You
just couldn’t do that now.
JH: I really like NY-LON, the bag
with the watches, which are both stopped at the same time in London and New
York? Why did you stop them at the same time, and how did you pull that off?
Did you go through the trouble of having someone in New York and someone in
London with separate watches?
DFB: Oh, no. It’s about the tension and compression of time as
well as the simultaneous lives being lived in different time zones. I actually
made one that was stopped at 8:53 New York time, and it was a tribute to 9/11. It was a moment like when John F. Kennedy was
killed—everyone knows exactly where they were when they received that news. It
became a marker in time. For me this was
a big marker in time, and though I didn’t lose anyone directly connected to myself,
I felt a seismic shift in my life at that point. It was a very scary time, and
I wanted to mark that moment when time stopped.
JH: So you were in New York at that time?
DFB: No, I was in a quarry on the Isle of Portland, and I
was smashing away at this rock when my father called saying that this had
happened. There was a moment where my father actually said, “It’s Armageddon. I
don’t know what’s going to happen to us.” He said that because it was so
traumatic being in England and receiving that news. Everyone was glued to the TV
for hours. It was at that point where I decided to not go back to my office job
again ever. I was going to go on to art school. That was the turning point where
I said, “Who knows how long we’re here for?” It was then that I really
understood the brevity of our lives, and I just wanted to commemorate that in a
piece.
JH: That’s incredibly moving. I didn’t necessarily get that
from the piece. I feel silly saying it now, but I was still thinking about it
in terms of globalization and how our cultures are blending more and more as
technology advances. Getting to hear your story makes this piece far more
interesting and poignant than just that.
DFB: I think people underestimate the personal aspect of
art, but it doesn’t matter what my thought process is. We’re free to read what
we want into a piece. It matters in an interview because you have the
opportunity to find out where a particular thought came from. But once the
image goes out into the world, it becomes its own thing. That’s what I love
about these pieces. They’re very much my own personal histories, and they are
incredibly important things to me. I cherish making each piece about a
particular thing, and after that it doesn’t matter. Of course, I would like for
people to really understand everything about the work, but you can’t have that
kind of control unless you’re really famous.
JH: It’s interesting what people will come up to you and say
about your work. What is the most
surprising thing anyone has said about one of your pieces?
DFB: That’s a difficult question. One time somebody asked me
to make a bag with a Chihuahua’s castrated balls in it.
JH: How did that go?
DFB: Well, we didn’t end up doing it. There was a discrepancy
between what the husband wanted and what the wife wanted. It was quite funny,
the thought of having this Chihuahua’s castrated balls in the Art Bag.
JH: Didn’t work out so well for the Chihuahua, either, I
take it?
DFB: He lives a good life, the Chihuahua.
JH: You worked with Peter Gee. His work that I’ve seen is
primarily these beautiful, simple, screen prints of abstract geometric shapes.
What did you take away from working with him?
DFB: Color. He was amazing. It was an exceptionally fantastic
point in my artistic discovery. It was a summer in between going to St.
Martins, and I had just gotten married. I said to my husband, “Look, I want to
go and intern for this master.” He was part of the Factory. He was there with
Andy Warhol, and he was a phenomenal colorist. I mixed colors for hours and
hours and hours with him. He loved Matisse, and he did these beautiful
Matisse-like paintings. That’s where I was coming from, too. I actually stayed
in Provincetown for a couple of months that summer. It was a very Bohemian
time. He was extremely Bohemian, and he taught me what it was to be an artist
and live an artist’s life. I got together with him and this group of Bohemians
while I was down there. We even met Arthur Miller. It was quite the time. There were about 4 of
us, and we would go off at 4 a.m. and paint sunrises and sunsets. We would bike
out with easels strapped to our backs. We thought we were the new
Impressionists. I was totally about the color and paint, and I still do paint.
JH: Yes, I looked at your paintings on your website. They
are reminiscent of Matisse, especially that first one on your site with the
armchair and that little girl. It is called Peekaboo.
I really like that piece.
DFB: Yes. That’s actually my favorite, too. I said to my web
designer, I really want to take the rest off the site because that’s the
direction my work is going in now. I
have another one. It’s a bikini girl. It’s like a combination of Matisse and Pop
painting.
JH: It’s interesting. The aesthetic seems a bit different
than your Art Bags. No pun intended, but the bags are so crystal clear,
perfect, clean, and bright. The paintings are so brushy, gushy and lush in a
very expressive way.
DFB: Yes, and I am in them, literally. Peekaboo—that’s me behind the sofa. Splash—that’s me behind the pool. That’s where I’m going with the
paintings now. I’m stepping out from behind the handbag a little bit, and I’m
featuring in my own paintings. But it’s me and it’s not me. I’d like to be that
skinny, for one thing. It’s vain. It’s an “if I could, I would” sort of thing.
Speaking a little bit about vanity, there’s another handbag
that’s full of these designer lipsticks. It’s about consumerism, and also so
much of it is about moodiness and the subtle differences that we only notice as
individuals. “I just have to have the latest shade of red. I just have to!”
JH: I’m a little bit of a lipstick fiend myself. A sort of
bright, retro, glam red. That’s the one.
DFB: What kind of brands do you buy?
JH: I have a great Lancome lipstick, and then my other
favorite is this cheap L’oreal or Revlon lipstick called British Red.
DFB: How cheeky—British
Red. Many people send their empty lipstick containers to me. That’s another
thing about the work. There is often such a personal connection to where some
of the objects came from. I feel in terms of art and life that art is what marks
moments of time in my life. With a painting or an Art Bag I can see where my
time has gone. There’s some evidence that I’ve been here. I think it is very
important to make work. I’m happiest when I’m making work.
JH: Going back to the people who purchase your work, you’ve
mentioned that men are often buying these bags for their wives. There seems to
be this masculine/feminine conflict with the people who are buying your work. I
wouldn’t be surprised if men and women take away very different meanings.
DFB: Yes, the men feel comfortable with the bag with the gun in it. They’ll
humor the wife, “You can have the handbag, and I’ll have the gun.”
JH: Yes, the “badass” one.
DFB: Or the bags with money. Occasionally they will buy one
with the watch. These bags are very much items that couples will buy together
as a sort of compromise. That is what relationships and marriage are about as
well: compromise.
JH: I imagine that most of the purchasers of your work are fairly
well-to-do married couples.
DFB: Absolutely, and a lot of times because it is so
expensive to make some of these pieces, I used to mock them up beforehand and
sell them as proposals. That’s how conceptual the whole thing was. They were a
proposal for an Art Bag, which would get made when I ran into somebody who wanted
to buy it. It started with a fantasy or phantom object. I sold the concept to
clients and then I would have enough money to actually make it. The funny thing
about the whole process is that everything that I make from the sale of an Art
Bag goes straight back into making more Art Bags. There’s absolutely nothing
that comes back to me, personally. It’s purely its own little universe.
A lot of it is a critique on commercialization and
globalization. In the show, there will be big prints, like adverts, on acrylic
panels. They’re literally like Prada adverts you would see at a high-end store.
I call them my “Billboards.”
JH: So you show them together, the Art Bags and the Billboards?
DFB: Yes. The Billboards are big plexi-glass frames. They are about A1 sized,
and they’ve got ten thousand LED lights behind them. These illuminated panels
scream, “Hello, I’m here!”
JH: “Think about me! Buy me! Fantasize about me if you can’t
afford me!”
DFB: Exactly. Another Art Bag I really like is the one with
the butterflies called Duet. I was
making those before butterflies were sort of everywhere. It was about, again,
the brevity of life. To catch a moment of beauty and preserve it.
JH: Are they actually found butterflies? Where did you get
them?
DFB: There is a Butterfly World kind of place near where I
live. At the end of the season they would give me a call, and they had all
these dead butterflies for me in petri dishes. They were so beautiful, and I
wanted to preserve them.
JH: I can imagine how beautiful they are to see from all
different angles.
DFB: They are incredible. I also used to design wallpaper
and fabric, so getting back to the Billboards, that’s how I got into that
world. I won a Pop Art award at St. Martins, and this printing company named me
Student of the Year. They loved my handbags, and they wanted to make a
wallpaper out of the handbag design. So I was always in this commercial
mindset. Then I was approached by Harvey Nichols. They asked to have this
wallpaper and an installation of all the bags in the reception area of the store.
My show was a kind of critique of consumerism, and it did beautifully. There
was a lovely bit of text up on the wall about wanting to buy the same item over
and over again. It’s like the Pringle factor, you can eat an entire can of
Pringles, and yet you’re never satisfied. It’s the same desire to shop, buy,
and keep consuming more and more. At the opening of my installation show, the
head of the store came down and removed my text.
JH: That sounds typical.
DFB: We were both playing the same game. They wanted my work
to make them look nice, and I wanted to place my artwork right in the heart of
the emporium of consumerism. It just had to be a little bit subtler. That’s
when I realized that I didn’t want to go down that route, and the only place to
show my work was in the gallery context. It’s the only place where I could say
what I really wanted to say.
JH: Exactly—and without having to please the corporate
sponsor. These places like to look really smart while remaining somewhat
shallow.
DFB: Yes, sprinkle a little bit of art in there to make them
look good. I had to send a few bags up to New York for Vogue Italian, who was doing a cover story with Steven Meisel. They wanted to use them in a story. They have
quite a jet-set lifestyle, these bags.
This interview was originally posted at
Unframed, an online artist-lead gallery dedicated to the celebration of art and creativity. Find out more about Debra Franses-Bean on her
website.
