And We, Who Have Always Thought
Estelle Hoy in conversation with Elida Silvey
INTERVIEW BY ELIDA SILVEY
Estelle Hoy’s saké blue is a bullet train cutting through the arid landscapes of contemporary art writing. In it, Hoy toys with the collective neurosis surrounding cultural cliches, spaces riddled with rigid artspeak and the remnants of political issues underlying artist’s works – from Martine Syms to Marlene Dumas. Reality is established in non-linear forms in saké blue, where a collage of visual stimuli is carefully constructed into sections built with an air of effortlessness like the elegant coiffure of an icon. Keen to peek inside, I spoke to Hoy about the balancing acts enacted by the art of writing, the duality of Pinocchio's phallic nose and the rise and fall of an existential game of ping-pong. Reflecting on the embodiment of time, the array of definitions available for ‘home’, and the ability for psychological uneasiness to shape us, for better or for worse.
Elida Silvey: In saké blue, you enact symbols with synonymous truths to explore ironies, such as Pinocchio’s predilection for lying and the honesty of his nose or BANK’s illegitimate texts. Symbolisms and their duality are explored at length within psychoanalysis, so I’m keen to know what symbols exist within your wider work that serve as the yin and yang to your thought process?
Estelle Hoy: I love this question, Elida; your thought process is always unique. I wonder if the shape of death has been an object of symbolism in my work, our beautiful impermanence, and death as a subversive line of escape. My god, I sound so morbid! [Laugher] I’m an upbeat person, really I am. Remembering death is urgently needed, but I also don’t think of Life as being the oppositional Yang. Maybe the Yang of Death is becoming conscious of the enfranchising rhythms of nothingness–it's so energising knowing you’re nothing, merely a speck of dust on the silvery lakes and hot scars of this Earth; it’s heartbreaking and liberating simultaneously. Maybe the Yin in my oeuvre is our very last breath, and its sycophantic Yang is finding warmth outside the icy walls of the citadel of death. Ok, I absolutely promise the rest of this interview will be cheery! If I had to attribute an image to this Yin/Yang duality, it could probably again be cutesy Pinocchio since humans have a formidable talent for lying to themselves about our inevitable death. Pinocchio and his hardwood phallus is a very transferable symbol, I’ve found.
In psychoanalysis, there’s the interesting question of the Id, Ego, and Superego. I’m fascinated by the mental picture Freud painted about the Ego controlling its wilder and more chaotic Id, like a man on horseback does his horse. In saké blue, you mention introspective journaling as something you do and its incessant ability to produce melancholic musings. How often would you say you journal? And do you ever get the urge to stop yourself (Ego) from writing something particularly painful or socially unacceptable (Id)?
I don’t journal at all. My work isn’t autofiction, but on the rare occasion it is, I don’t have the urge to stop writing something exquisitely painful. I’m very interested in psychological frailty, the undulations of pain, and maybe existential carnage. This super beautiful poem by Rainer Maria Rilke in the ‘Tenth Elegy’ comes to mind just now.
“And we, who have always thought
of happiness as rising, would feel
the emotion that almost overwhelmed us
whenever a happy thing falls.”
He italicised rising and falls, almost like he’s declaring them as fixed human responses when experiencing concentrated emotions, which I wildly disagree with; at least I do today. [Laughter]. I’m making a soft coup against fixity in how pain manifests, and it's probably pretty dangerous ever to use the word ‘we’ when reporting on the topic of emotion, particularly as it pertains to the aches and sheen of sadness. When I’m most melancholic, I write my strongest works, so in a way, I rise like Lady Lazarus by working with pain rather than through it–I have my own little philosophical italicisation going on with tens and hundreds of elegies. Endless suffering is part of life, a part of human evolution even, and it presents itself without, I believe, the quaint nature of absolutism. What people do with my work is none of my business, and I want my readers to claim their sovereignty–their full agency–in my texts with whatever happiness or rage they want to attempt; taking hold of ideas and making them their own or building off them, destroying them, hating them, loving them, heckling them, splashing in them, all of it. I want to hear about other people's interpretations and experiences.
I have friends who do the Morning Journal, which I guess could just as easily be the Mourning Journal. [Laughter] It’s like automatic writing where you aren’t supposed to stop scrawling even for a second, and it has to be three pages long and suffocated by the cramps of handwriting. I really admire the way they shake themselves off for the day and bring to the fore all the dregs of Id that have a chokehold on them. They’re much more enlightened and dedicated to growing than I am, and I would like to practise this type of journaling, but I’m really not a morning person.
I love the idea of a mourning journal [Laughter]. As if we grieve our inner-selves before putting on the day’s mask. Mornings are difficult enough without the mental funerary proceedings. In Sub Rosa Retrospectives you acknowledge your ability to reject traditional essay narratives and adopt a more curious approach, all the while writing in a more experimental form within the same text. In psychoanalysis, the idea of non-linear thinking is closely related to the way the mind stores memory and forms synaptic associations. Do you feel there was a consideration in the way your mind moves through thoughts when writing this, in any section of saké blue, or was it carefully planned this way?
Not to be too dramatic about it, but standardising linearity in text is straight-up neural discrimination. Can I get an Amen?
Your question brings up a funny little story that happened earlier in the year. When a magazine emailed me to commission a new work for their upcoming issue, I was on the M41 bus in Berlin, an almost-child smoking a crack pipe on one side and kaleidoscopic vomit on the other—business as usual. (There’s an M41-line solidarity/support group on FB). My son and I were in the most hygienic area on the bus, but it didn’t help me relax or multitask. Hurriedly, I sent my pitch, a section of a very underripe book I’d been working on that may or may not have had the potential to rise from the ashes. The next day, they emailed me to say they LOVED the piece as it was, which baffled me since I’d re-read the text that night, and it was definitely no phoenix. They’d taken the liberty to do the layout, so I opened the pdf. To my complete horror, I’d accidentally forwarded them my iPhone notes; they thought it was a poem! My general writing methodology is scrawling insane synaptic associations and incongruent sentences on my phone’s notepad, which may or may not have included an embarrassing private excerpt, which I definitely should have deleted; my IBAN and bank passwords were in there somewhere. After my second panic attack, I realised the editorial team was right; it was a curious, disjointed poem.
I’m big into the Prozac economy, mainly because of the M41, but as it turns out, sedatives, incomparably poor multitasking skills, clang associations, and fist fights on the bus are my winning combination.
[Laughter] That sounds like the perfect recipe for a poem. When exploring Amy Sillman’s work you mention this idea of neither/nor as something that abstains from time. I often think about time as something that is linear in the body but atypical in the mind, as memory is able to access past, present and endeavour to form a future. Do you feel neither/nor has an element of this interiority, or did you mean something else entirely?
‘Linear in the body but atypical in the mind.’ That is gorgeous. Time is a beautiful person-made artwork, and I remember reading about its conception. I like water clocks more than the original invention of sundials to record duration. From memory, the Egyptians created both, but the thing is, an hour is always the same length in modern times, but ancient people operated with a more complex system. Some early timekeeping arrangements divided the light portion of the day into twelve little segments and the night into twelve segments. However, because days and nights vary throughout the year–except at the uncapricious equator–these ‘seasonal hours’ were different lengths from day to night and throughout the year. I’m seduced by the possibility of ascribing duration as much as abstaining from it, and I think Amy Sillman is, too. She came to our New York book launch for saké blue a few months ago at Art Bar in Hell’s Kitchen, and we mostly laughed at one of my really bad puns in saké blue. She’d read my critique of her recent exhibition, ‘Temporary Object,’ at Thomas Dane, and we both agreed, yelling over the top of a bad Spice Girls remix, that choosing not to choose is our temporary Modus Operandi. And by the way, she is hilarious. You must read her book, ‘Faux Pas,’ published with After 8 Books; she’s serious about the title.
I’ll have to pick up a copy, sounds right up my street! You also write about the artist Marlene Dumas’ “anti-portraits” and the challenge that is posed to their efficacy due to her privileged position as both a white woman and an artist painting in the Netherlands. I’m keen to know if you think there’s a critical self-awareness that is present there and how it can reframe an artist’s work? As a writer do you experience critical self-awareness when deciding what to write and what to abandon?
If I had to speculate on whether Dumas has critical self-awareness regarding her lot in life while framing racial issues, I would say yes. If she didn’t, she probably wouldn't even be interested in the topic of segregation in South Africa, where she was born. But truly, I don’t know. As for me, I’m not sure.
I don’t abandon work easily, though it does happen. Generally, I’m fairly stubborn and want the work to have its eventual exegesis–an amateur psychoanalyst probably has a lot to say about this.
When exploring Martine Syms’ work you carefully connect the sense of cultural dysplacement–described as ‘a term extemporised by American historian and black rights activist Barbara Fields’ that ‘disses the destruction of place and loss of collective connection to one’s familiar home or country’ (pg 116)–that Black Americans experience within their own country with the physical displacement that is felt on an aeroplane. Calling it effectively a pseudo representation of the same effect. I’m keen to know what you feel exists as a compass that directs people home when the coordinates haven’t changed–such as in the case with Black Americans or even more severely in the case of Palestinians? How do they mentally find their way back?
Last week, my friend's father died in Gaza, and she wasn’t able to return and say goodbye. When she told me, she didn’t cry, nor did she tear her Hijab or scream aloud while her life and land in Palestine is under siege. Fear implies a continual investment of nervous energy, which is impossible to manage and totally unpredictable. Even the muscles twitch. The alliance of fear and mental work cannot last forever. This is a question, and I’m generating high expectations, bubbling over with social imagination and the infinite recovery that comes after cataclysmic events. Fear can only recruit people for so long, buying little packets of concrete time until it evaporates as a possibility, replaced by teeny abstract fragments of time. Fear is a burden, a rusted ball and chain that accelerates and advances, fully operative, until it collapses in electric spasm. There are no tears left, no enslavement to its ashen grip and artefacts, troubled sleep, wretched breathing, the phenomenology of panic, its installation in every molecule of one's body. Wide-ranging provocations freeze, fear becomes grief, and all the paths we once knew are gone forever. Now, grief is a specialist. Grief is an altered state of mind that people tell you will subside. It doesn’t. It’s dense and imposing, austere and unpoetic, but it’s also drenched in un-dissolvable glitter, which eventually makes the uneasiness less compelling.
Palestinians, displaced or not, don’t need a compass to find their way back to their homeland mentally. They are their homeland. Despite their grief (perhaps because of it), their steadfastness and dedication to their people and country are cataclysmically evident.
Among the one million lessons of finding our way back that I’ve learned from the Palestinian people is: Don’t be struck down by psychological uneasiness, but rather let it curate the fuck out of you.
It takes all of three seconds to stop a genocide.
Estelle Hoy is a writer and art critic based in Berlin. She is the author of the essay collection saké blue (2024), the novel Pisti, 80 Rue de Belleville (2020), both published by After 8 Books and Jus D’Orange (2023) published by NERO.
Elida Silvey is a self taught Mexican-American writer, editor and artist living in London. She is the assistant editor for Montez Press. Read more of her work on www.elidasilvey.com or on her Substack Through The Eye Of A Needle.
