Martine Syms: “I’m interested in when humour and pain can kiss”

I meet American artist Martine Syms the day before the opening of ‘Present Goo’, her solo show at Sadie Coles HQ, London. She’s wearing a navy and white shirt, printed over and over with car licence plates. It immediately calls me back to her NTS Radio show, CCARTALKLA, on which she interviews people while driving around Los Angeles. I follow Syms upstairs to a room in the back of the gallery; she is a relaxed counterpoint to the drills and wires of the installation behind us.

Syms’ practice is versatile and wide-ranging, realised through cinematic video, sound, painting, installation, performance, software programming and curation. In 2022, she made her directorial debut at the International Film Festival Rotterdam with The African Desperate, starring artist Diamond Stingley. The film charts the main character Palace Bryant’s (Stingily) last 24 hours at Art School. In 2023, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship which, as she tells me, will fund a year of research for an upcoming script.

The new work in ‘Present Goo’ features large drawings framed in bold blues, reds, greens and yellow that are lively and diaristic, as though ripped straight from a notebook. Film works dot the exhibition on yellow-backed circular and square monitors. The films capture collaged moments from the artist’s life which flow through the exhibition, including CCTV footage from her studio, sunsets, and text conversations between her and her friends.

One drawing, I Was Surprised to Hear Doom at Breakfast (2023) made with a thick black marker so explicitly from her own hand, features a severed leg, declarations of love, tarot symbols, and the declaration “THAT’S THAT”. The stark contrast between black ink and the white of the page leaves space to pinball around in these emotions.

Syms’ previous work has featured a digital avatar of herself as a narrator. It can feel exhausting to present a self and to also be a self. It is something much discussed on and around social media: the self as narrative, the self as a brand, and all the labour involved in the maintenance of both. “I don’t have much trouble distinguishing between the two! My self, in terms of how I experience it, feels quite separate from the image of myself in my work. Though I understand how for another person these could be confused, it is not very confusing for me, because I feel like a lot of my interest – whether personally or spiritually – is actually towards no self, an understanding that the self is a collective of habits or experiences of sensation… I like to put a lot of pressure on that notion of self… I think now I am more curious about that moment when everything collapses.”

Slices of vibrant yellow pull you through ‘Present Goo’. On one wall, three floor-to-ceiling photographic works are edge to edge; in one, a blown-up image of green shrubbery full of lilac buds is sandwiched between a body, naked from the waist up flashing a toothy smile, and a bus, its number and destination ‘69 HARVARD’ lit up. Upstairs, a bush of white flowers in full bloom is framed in a car’s rear-view mirror. There is a sense in this show of acknowledging a journey. This is compounded by the references to tarot, the fool’s journey, the symbolism of which pops up through the drawings and film works. The fool is the main character in tarot’s major arcana whose 22-step cyclical journey through the cards is often thought of as a life cycle full of tests and learning.

And of course, there is humour. “I think I just have a real deadpan, dark sense of humour,” she tells me, laughing. “It’s hard for me not to find something funny about most situations. I also feel like laughter is an involuntary reaction to something unexpected, it’s a very physical thing and I like that sense of eliciting it. I’m also very interested in when humour and pain can kiss, and what that allows for, or opens up… It can be vulnerable to make a joke, but also shame comes a lot in my work so the joke not landing is as okay as the joke landing.”

Syms’ work embodies references on references, a life on life, played out, held back, edited, represented, and then edited again. I think about how she can hold all these potentials, and when she knows the work is done. Syms smiles, “I just know.”