Agathe Snow is Tunisian by descent, born in Corsica, and raised in New York. She comes from a long line of culinary artists, (her mother, father, two brothers and sister are all in the business), so naturally she came to use food as a vehicle for making her work. Along with her sister, Anne Apparu, and Marianne Vitale she was hostess to many of her now famous roving culinary events around New York, bringing together groups of people to create meals. For Agathe, establishing these ephemeral communities and locales was a way of creating environments and moments in time.
Over the past two years her materials have changed, grown, and expanded as she has committed to working as a visual artist. Her 2007 exhibition No need to worry, the Apocalypse has already happened. . . at James Fuentes LLC was part narrative, part installation. The gallery was filled with the sculpture of a deteriorated whale carcass and became an Ellis Island of sorts for people in the city who had survived this fictional apocalypse to congregate. The show caught the attention of collectors like Charles Saatchi as well as the media, whose coverage of her career and status are overwhelming, even for an outsider. The text below is taken from an interview with Agathe at a studio in Brooklyn, NY on New Years Eve, 2008.
Are there parts of your career that you think have received too much attention? Other things that you want people to know more about? No I think I’ve gotten pretty lucky, I’m getting a lot of attention.
I know! Your career just exploded this year. Two solo shows, New York and London, a piece at Gagosian, a show at the Parish Museum. What happened? I have no idea. Now I can sit back and look at myself. It’s good, it means something and I give a fuck. If anyone should get attention it should be someone that gives a fuck. But I’m learning to get confident as I go. Before I didn’t call myself an artist or anything. I just made things. An artist has to be responsible and nice and I didn’t even know if I was good.
Does that make this seem like a dream? No! It’s happening, I’m very conscious. I can maneuver; I’m very organized, which is really surprising.
Were you not like that before? I didn’t need to be. Right now it’s obscene. I’ve always juggled my life but now I spend my days making budgets, I know what I’m going to be doing until a year from now.
I thought that things would calm down for you after the flurry of attention this past year. No, no. It’s getting bigger and bigger. There’s this museum show in Paris, in April. So I thought, oh this is great I’ll just do this show at James’ and I don’t do anything until April. But now I have three museum shows before April. There’s a performance at the Guggenheim in New York on the fifth. And I have a show at the New Museum on the twenty-eighth.
Is it a solo show? It’s just a little project room. And then I have a solo booth at the Armory. And then I have to do a seminar. All at a time that I was thinking, oh, nothing to do until that show in April… But I can make a lot of things real fast. It has so much to do with the place. I was just in Turin for a week to make a whole show and I basically walked around for five days to seep it in and then in two days I made the show.
What did you make? I’m working the whole year on Da Vinci and his brain. He’s the greatest mind of the Renaissance. And in my narrative we went over the Apocalypse with the show at James’ in 2007 and all and now it’s Renaissance time, a Renaissance that starts from America. So if I mix in the American dream Da Vinci’s mind then maybe I would come up with a solution. Like a presentation of what this new Renaissance would be. So now it’s Da Vinci and the American dream, for a year.
So, do you write a narrative to present with the show? I write plays. I write a lot. I’m kind of confused about this whole art thing because I didn’t go to school for it. I have a problem with the weight of a person.
I am not sure that I follow what you mean by the weight of a person. Well, I take a lot of space and I travel, I move a lot, so I was kind of embarrassed to make more weight. So I was using all of these like half dead things. At first it was things that didn’t make any weight at all. I make sculptures, so then I was going to use things that have already been used. So the weight is already there. And then I did this show at Xavier’s where I actually made my own garbage first time, this huge show and it just came in bags of cement. I actually had garbage to throw out and it was just like fuck I’d better be good at this because I can’t just go around throwing garbage. So, I go back and forth.
Which show was that? It’s called I don’t know but I’ve been told Eskimo pussy’s mighty cold. That was a great show. That’s the time I realized I was a good person.
I was looking at Saatchi’s website and there are sculptures that he’s acquired from you and along with these narratives. Yes, I wrote all of that. They’re all collections of words or phrases and words from the newspaper, from the same time that I was making the sculptures. And then they’re just arranged. Every night when I’m not working I’m just collecting words. I have notebooks, like two books a year I have filled up with sentences.
So they’re narrative collages. But on the website it seems to be like a description of the sculpture it is posted next to. It says, “This is taken from level one or level two…” Well the story is supposed to be like the Apocalypse happened, the whole city flooded, and then when everything settles down, I come back and there’s this whale carcass, I live in there and then…
Did you actually live in the gallery? No. But then I tried to find all the people that survived the ocalypse, so you can come there and register your name, like a new Ellis Island. So people would bring me things and I would melt gold and it was like a pawnshop. So all of these things are made with the stuff people brought me, and the ideology was that I went digging and there were different levels. The flooding was all around Chatham square.
So, it was all fictional… I can’t tell where the truth ends and fiction begins, you’ve blurred all the lines. Are there other artists like that that you look at? I’m learning about artists now, I actually feel really badly for that. You need a reference point.