Interview with Gregory Climer
In a follow-up interview with Nathan Vincent in his New York City home, I had the opportunity to meet his friend, Greg Climer. Greg is a quilt maker who queers the homey domestic and hand-worked associations of his medium through erotica and innovative technology. You can check out more of his works via his website. I enjoyed his irreverent approach to domestic craft and I think you will too.
Please tell me a little bit about yourself. What was your trajectory to becoming an artist? How did you settle on your preferred medium(s)? What drew you to traditional craft practice as a medium of expression?
In retrospect, my whole career makes a lot more sense then it did as it unfolded. As a kid I wanted to be an artist. Our mom was clever, she hired an art teacher to be our baby sitter when we were in elementary school. So a few days a week me and my sisters had endless art classes (more open studio time since she wasn’t necessarily teaching us anything.) I learned to sew as a kid by helping my grandmother thread her sewing machine. I also had an aunt who sewed who I had a strong connection with. Between the two of them I learned basics.
My other career plans were typical nerdy kid ideas. The one which makes me laugh now is I wanted to be a geneticist until I learned that they didn’t really make new animals as if animal parts were legos. I studied costume design in undergrad. It was a liberal arts education and no one really insisted I take classes to fill up my weaknesses. So I never learned to sketch well. This definitely hurt my ability to be a costume designer. I couldn’t communicate ideas effectively on paper and I lacked the confidence to hack it in that field because of it. (though I could talk about that for hours…I think that laziness on the school’s part actually made my whole career better)
After worked in a variety of jobs ranging from machinist sewing in a workroom to pattern maker for broadway and film. I worked for a shop that built mascots and characters for a while. I was a dyer in the costume shop at one point. I was basically an incredibly handy person at making things with fabric. I eventually quit that job and switched to Fashion Design just because I thought it was the same skill set and I was burnt out on costume work. This was successful enough…it got me a job teaching at Parsons. But I didn’t really fit into that industry nor did I enjoy the business aspect and the social aspect of it. I still teach it (and I’d argue I teach it well) but it’s with the intention of evolving it. Once I started teaching, I started taking classes for an MFA in Design Technology. The program really suited who I was. It was open to someone who dabbles with tech without mastering it. It encouraged collaboration and didn’t really put too much emphasis on defining yourself with boundaries. It was in the MFA where I started bringing all my interests together. I started the current quilting while experimenting to make the knitted film. Id quilted in undergrad and it was an effective tool to sort through some of the ideas I wanted in the knit film. Sewing was what I was good at because I started it as a kid and it’s what I kept reverting back to because no one pushed me to excel at other things. It wasn’t until my MFA that I made a conscious choice to be excellent at it. I can’t pinpoint exactly what changed but good enough was not good enough. An incredibly strong editor formed in my mind and I wouldn’t allow myself to work on autopilot. I’m not saying I was instantly a master of the craft but every piece involved reflecting on the previous ones and learning from them.
Traditionally, there has been a scholarly divide between fine arts, the decorative arts and craft. How do you place yourself on this continuum? How do you define yourself as an artist, artisan, craftsperson, maker, etc.? Are these distinctions meaningful to you and your work or not?
I don’t know where I am on that continuum and I think its actually a hurtful one. Twice this week I’ve heard the word “de-skill” being used in reference to artists. There is this imaginary notion that intelligence cannot coexist with quality craftsmanship. Art is intelligent, crafts is labor? It’s not substantiated by the work out there in the world. We have highly intelligent yet craftless work out there but so what? There is also completely pointless and thoughtless work which is perfectly crafted. I would love to see the data to back up this narrative. A survey of art which calculates the crafts and lack craft through the last century and compares it to the success of the artist, on any number of rubrics from financial to happiness. I think there are a lot of people who need that narrative to survive so we won’t see it fall apart any time soon.
If anything, these distinctions are things I need to work through in relation to my self-esteem. Being an artist is confusing enough when you run it through the lens of art markets and trying to survive financially as an artist. There are so many pre-conceived notions in both culture and within myself as to what being an artist means that I bounce around through all those titles depending on the context I am in and my own mental health at the moment.
Who are your influences? Who are the other artists or individuals your work is in conversation with?
I remember being in undergrad and going to a museum show of Faith Ringgold. She talked in an interview about painting on quilts because then she didn’t have to frame them. They were easier to transport for a young artist. She is inspirational in a million ways but that one tiny action always stuck with me. She also proved to me that my work can be quilts and art. They aren’t always separate.
Other influences: Scott O’Hara (not for the unsafe sex advocacy, that was irresponsible. But for being one of the first gay porn actors I lusted for and for being unapologetic in his queerness.) John Waters, for everything he is. I get emotional when I see evidence of the community in the art. Seeing Robert Mapplethorpe photographing Patti Smith and Bill Jones, or symbiotic relationships like Tarsem Singh and Eiko Ishioka or Peter Greenaway and Michael Nyman. Phillip Glass showing up in Chuck Close’s portraits just because he was a friend. I love the idea of putting artists I call friends into my work. So I have Andrew Cornell Robinson in my knitting, Nathan Vincent and Timo Rissanen in my quilting. I’m in Andrew’s work and I know I influence Timo’s since every once in a while he’ll tell me how I did. That idea of friendship and influence being muddy is inspiring. It’s not about documenting the talented people but about acknowledging their influence on me. From the outside looking at other artist circles, it seems so magical. From within my own circle of friends, it just is what it is. I try to remember how lucky I am to have the circle of friends influencing me.
Your work focuses strongly on queer interpretations of traditional domesticity, sexuality and gender. Was this always a facet of your work? How did it evolve? Have you found your work informed by or in tension with the traditional associations or history of your medium? What were the moments in your life that influenced this perspective?
I was a typical gay kid in school. I was bullied, had faggot written on my backpack in sharpie, etc. I made my dates’ prom dress and homecoming dress. I was in high school theater. So many clichés! I also have a step father who is an Episcopal priest. He (unlike the rest of the episcopal church) is anti-LGBT. He would publish opinion pieces on it, donate money to the American Family Association, etc. He would do all this and insist he loved me for who I was. (you can’t “love the sinner and not the sin” unless you accept that good deeds are not what makes good people good.) We basically have limited conversation to how the weather is for the last 20 years.
I started sneaking into gay dance clubs when I was in high school. Having an outlet where I was gay and no one cared and it was high energy, fun, and boys hit on me (as opposed to school, where I was shy and beat up on and did well but wasn’t fitting into a proper box) probably reinforced the value of being gay to me. I remember moving to NYC and CBGBs had a gay punk night. It was transformative to suddenly have a gay outlet which was music I liked and not typical stereotypical gay club. It was when I realized that gay was not one thing and many things could be gay AND something else.
There is a desire to say fuck you to people with my work. It’s not aggressive but I think it’s funny to annoy the judgmental social conservatives. (I’m avoiding saying the evangelicals, but mostly them.) The porn quilts started out as just a joke, something to bother traditional quilters while I worked out the technique. But I actually think they have evolved into something more important. The later ones are more tender than the early ones. The knitting I’m working on now is a recreation of a scene in 7th grade when I got beat up in class. I’ve also started reaching out to victims of hate crimes to ask them to sit for portrait quilts. The connection formed by being a minority group is incredibly powerful. Being rejected by society forces us to come together. I think those bonds are incredibly strong and we see them evidenced in events like the gay pride parade. Celebrating who we are despite our differences and despite the history of oppression is powerful. It’s that same feeling that makes me want to use traditional crafts in my work. It’s in opposition to the dominate narrative and yet uses their tools to celebrate who I am.
The tensions within my medium? Yes! When my work reaches a certain size I need to use a long arm quilter to do the stitching. It’s expensive machinery and very common to hire out for it. I have a rejection letter from a woman who said she would be happy to do my stitching when I started working in more Christian themes! I posted on a FB group for men who quilt, looking for some recommendations and someone commented that my work was offensive. When I was in residence at MAD I had a woman yell at me! (ok, not YELL, but get extremely angry) and tell me I “was not a real quilter” because of the way I use Photoshop to do layouts. She let me know my work “wouldn’t cut it in Michigan” because I’ve developed my own way of binding quilts and I manufacture my own fabrics. That sort of reaction has made me avoid quilting shows. The venues I reach out to and work with tend to be arts organizations, galleries, and museums of craft, where I’m dealing with scholars/curators/artists and not craft practitioners. (though many are practitioners too.)
Craft is frequently associated and lauded for its strong emphasis on community, in terms of communal production/creative processes in domestic or studio environments, or generating community participation/action around an issue. Do you find this to be true with your process and work? What community do you envision as the audience for your work?
See rant above!
I actually don’t work in community enough. I need to. I don’t object to it, in theory. Maybe my comments in the influences question blurs with this one.
The last decade has brought significant societal and political change for the LGBTQ community with the advancements in marriage equality, but there are still important advancements to be made. Have you found your work addressing or evolving in light of these the social and political changes? What do you see as the new front-line for the LGBTQ community and do you intend to address it in your work?
The above mentioned series on victims of hate comes to mind. It’s an infant of an idea so I have no idea how it will evolve. I do think hate is our biggest enemy right now. Not the legal hurdles or the socially acceptable hurdles but just hate. It’s a subterranean river that run deep beneath our society and influence everything. We can’t address it by assimilating. It has to be addressed by teaching people that “other” is not dangerous.
Please tell me a little bit about yourself. What was your trajectory to becoming an artist? How did you settle on your preferred medium(s)? What drew you to traditional craft practice as a medium of expression?
In retrospect, my whole career makes a lot more sense then it did as it unfolded. As a kid I wanted to be an artist. Our mom was clever, she hired an art teacher to be our baby sitter when we were in elementary school. So a few days a week me and my sisters had endless art classes (more open studio time since she wasn’t necessarily teaching us anything.) I learned to sew as a kid by helping my grandmother thread her sewing machine. I also had an aunt who sewed who I had a strong connection with. Between the two of them I learned basics.
My other career plans were typical nerdy kid ideas. The one which makes me laugh now is I wanted to be a geneticist until I learned that they didn’t really make new animals as if animal parts were legos. I studied costume design in undergrad. It was a liberal arts education and no one really insisted I take classes to fill up my weaknesses. So I never learned to sketch well. This definitely hurt my ability to be a costume designer. I couldn’t communicate ideas effectively on paper and I lacked the confidence to hack it in that field because of it. (though I could talk about that for hours…I think that laziness on the school’s part actually made my whole career better)
After worked in a variety of jobs ranging from machinist sewing in a workroom to pattern maker for broadway and film. I worked for a shop that built mascots and characters for a while. I was a dyer in the costume shop at one point. I was basically an incredibly handy person at making things with fabric. I eventually quit that job and switched to Fashion Design just because I thought it was the same skill set and I was burnt out on costume work. This was successful enough…it got me a job teaching at Parsons. But I didn’t really fit into that industry nor did I enjoy the business aspect and the social aspect of it. I still teach it (and I’d argue I teach it well) but it’s with the intention of evolving it. Once I started teaching, I started taking classes for an MFA in Design Technology. The program really suited who I was. It was open to someone who dabbles with tech without mastering it. It encouraged collaboration and didn’t really put too much emphasis on defining yourself with boundaries. It was in the MFA where I started bringing all my interests together. I started the current quilting while experimenting to make the knitted film. Id quilted in undergrad and it was an effective tool to sort through some of the ideas I wanted in the knit film. Sewing was what I was good at because I started it as a kid and it’s what I kept reverting back to because no one pushed me to excel at other things. It wasn’t until my MFA that I made a conscious choice to be excellent at it. I can’t pinpoint exactly what changed but good enough was not good enough. An incredibly strong editor formed in my mind and I wouldn’t allow myself to work on autopilot. I’m not saying I was instantly a master of the craft but every piece involved reflecting on the previous ones and learning from them.
Traditionally, there has been a scholarly divide between fine arts, the decorative arts and craft. How do you place yourself on this continuum? How do you define yourself as an artist, artisan, craftsperson, maker, etc.? Are these distinctions meaningful to you and your work or not?
I don’t know where I am on that continuum and I think its actually a hurtful one. Twice this week I’ve heard the word “de-skill” being used in reference to artists. There is this imaginary notion that intelligence cannot coexist with quality craftsmanship. Art is intelligent, crafts is labor? It’s not substantiated by the work out there in the world. We have highly intelligent yet craftless work out there but so what? There is also completely pointless and thoughtless work which is perfectly crafted. I would love to see the data to back up this narrative. A survey of art which calculates the crafts and lack craft through the last century and compares it to the success of the artist, on any number of rubrics from financial to happiness. I think there are a lot of people who need that narrative to survive so we won’t see it fall apart any time soon.
If anything, these distinctions are things I need to work through in relation to my self-esteem. Being an artist is confusing enough when you run it through the lens of art markets and trying to survive financially as an artist. There are so many pre-conceived notions in both culture and within myself as to what being an artist means that I bounce around through all those titles depending on the context I am in and my own mental health at the moment.
Who are your influences? Who are the other artists or individuals your work is in conversation with?
I remember being in undergrad and going to a museum show of Faith Ringgold. She talked in an interview about painting on quilts because then she didn’t have to frame them. They were easier to transport for a young artist. She is inspirational in a million ways but that one tiny action always stuck with me. She also proved to me that my work can be quilts and art. They aren’t always separate.
Other influences: Scott O’Hara (not for the unsafe sex advocacy, that was irresponsible. But for being one of the first gay porn actors I lusted for and for being unapologetic in his queerness.) John Waters, for everything he is. I get emotional when I see evidence of the community in the art. Seeing Robert Mapplethorpe photographing Patti Smith and Bill Jones, or symbiotic relationships like Tarsem Singh and Eiko Ishioka or Peter Greenaway and Michael Nyman. Phillip Glass showing up in Chuck Close’s portraits just because he was a friend. I love the idea of putting artists I call friends into my work. So I have Andrew Cornell Robinson in my knitting, Nathan Vincent and Timo Rissanen in my quilting. I’m in Andrew’s work and I know I influence Timo’s since every once in a while he’ll tell me how I did. That idea of friendship and influence being muddy is inspiring. It’s not about documenting the talented people but about acknowledging their influence on me. From the outside looking at other artist circles, it seems so magical. From within my own circle of friends, it just is what it is. I try to remember how lucky I am to have the circle of friends influencing me.
Your work focuses strongly on queer interpretations of traditional domesticity, sexuality and gender. Was this always a facet of your work? How did it evolve? Have you found your work informed by or in tension with the traditional associations or history of your medium? What were the moments in your life that influenced this perspective?
I was a typical gay kid in school. I was bullied, had faggot written on my backpack in sharpie, etc. I made my dates’ prom dress and homecoming dress. I was in high school theater. So many clichés! I also have a step father who is an Episcopal priest. He (unlike the rest of the episcopal church) is anti-LGBT. He would publish opinion pieces on it, donate money to the American Family Association, etc. He would do all this and insist he loved me for who I was. (you can’t “love the sinner and not the sin” unless you accept that good deeds are not what makes good people good.) We basically have limited conversation to how the weather is for the last 20 years.
I started sneaking into gay dance clubs when I was in high school. Having an outlet where I was gay and no one cared and it was high energy, fun, and boys hit on me (as opposed to school, where I was shy and beat up on and did well but wasn’t fitting into a proper box) probably reinforced the value of being gay to me. I remember moving to NYC and CBGBs had a gay punk night. It was transformative to suddenly have a gay outlet which was music I liked and not typical stereotypical gay club. It was when I realized that gay was not one thing and many things could be gay AND something else.
There is a desire to say fuck you to people with my work. It’s not aggressive but I think it’s funny to annoy the judgmental social conservatives. (I’m avoiding saying the evangelicals, but mostly them.) The porn quilts started out as just a joke, something to bother traditional quilters while I worked out the technique. But I actually think they have evolved into something more important. The later ones are more tender than the early ones. The knitting I’m working on now is a recreation of a scene in 7th grade when I got beat up in class. I’ve also started reaching out to victims of hate crimes to ask them to sit for portrait quilts. The connection formed by being a minority group is incredibly powerful. Being rejected by society forces us to come together. I think those bonds are incredibly strong and we see them evidenced in events like the gay pride parade. Celebrating who we are despite our differences and despite the history of oppression is powerful. It’s that same feeling that makes me want to use traditional crafts in my work. It’s in opposition to the dominate narrative and yet uses their tools to celebrate who I am.
The tensions within my medium? Yes! When my work reaches a certain size I need to use a long arm quilter to do the stitching. It’s expensive machinery and very common to hire out for it. I have a rejection letter from a woman who said she would be happy to do my stitching when I started working in more Christian themes! I posted on a FB group for men who quilt, looking for some recommendations and someone commented that my work was offensive. When I was in residence at MAD I had a woman yell at me! (ok, not YELL, but get extremely angry) and tell me I “was not a real quilter” because of the way I use Photoshop to do layouts. She let me know my work “wouldn’t cut it in Michigan” because I’ve developed my own way of binding quilts and I manufacture my own fabrics. That sort of reaction has made me avoid quilting shows. The venues I reach out to and work with tend to be arts organizations, galleries, and museums of craft, where I’m dealing with scholars/curators/artists and not craft practitioners. (though many are practitioners too.)
Craft is frequently associated and lauded for its strong emphasis on community, in terms of communal production/creative processes in domestic or studio environments, or generating community participation/action around an issue. Do you find this to be true with your process and work? What community do you envision as the audience for your work?
See rant above!
I actually don’t work in community enough. I need to. I don’t object to it, in theory. Maybe my comments in the influences question blurs with this one.
The last decade has brought significant societal and political change for the LGBTQ community with the advancements in marriage equality, but there are still important advancements to be made. Have you found your work addressing or evolving in light of these the social and political changes? What do you see as the new front-line for the LGBTQ community and do you intend to address it in your work?
The above mentioned series on victims of hate comes to mind. It’s an infant of an idea so I have no idea how it will evolve. I do think hate is our biggest enemy right now. Not the legal hurdles or the socially acceptable hurdles but just hate. It’s a subterranean river that run deep beneath our society and influence everything. We can’t address it by assimilating. It has to be addressed by teaching people that “other” is not dangerous.