A conversation with Cody Herrmann and Julian Louis Phillips

Cody Herrmann and Julian Louis Phillips are multidisciplinary artists based in New York City. As an artist and community organizer, Herrmann uses community engagement exercises and grassroots organizing to foster iterative, human-centered approaches to environmental problem solving. Phillips’ work uses sculpture, performance, video, and text to explore relationships between social structures and personal narratives. Phillips is an artist in residence at the Queens Museum.

Alexandra: Cody, tell me about your floating dock, Passive Recreation Platform. 

Cody Herrmann: We all need to learn how to float. The floating dock is fun because there’s no place to hang out on Flushing Creek. The Passive Recreation Platform turned into a functional tool. It became common for Guardians of Flushing Bay to take people to it for their advocacy work. You need to have experiences on the water in order to care. As a nonprofit, they had tried to get these docks set up at the marina, which is controlled by the Parks Department. It just seemed impossible.

When I put on my artist hat, I can go around those rules. As an artist, you can do really lo-fi, fun, quick fix, things. This is influenced by my background in urban design. 

Julian Phillips: Newtown Creek Alliance had built floating platforms for vegetation and educational purposes. Cody’s design maximized the hanging out potential. 

C: It’s 120 square feet. So, you can fit four people.

JP: Public space that you have to kayak to.

C: It’s made of Cedar and 35-gallon barrels. It has been in the water since 2019. We have a permit from the state to have oysters in that location. We’ve taken state senators and city council members there. They always ask, “Hey, who approved this?” And I’m like, “Don’t worry about it, the state says the oysters are allowed to be here.” They’re allowed to be here, so we are allowed to be here. We’ll probably never be able to eat oysters out of the Harbor in our lifetimes. But they absorb storm surge, and filter the water. They provide habitat for other animals. They’re super important. 

Working in Flushing, which is right on the waterfront, I have realized the urgency around waterfronts and why so many people talk about them in relation to climate and urban planning. They are vulnerable areas and there are a hell of a lot of people that live on coasts.

A: Being out on that water and being able to experience gives you a new understanding of what’s going on in this land, water, what grows here… Speaking of embodied experiences, Julian, tell me about your recent performance at the Queens Museum.

JP: The performances came out of pandemic uprising energy. It was about making space for that anger and that rage, but also recognizing that this is a long and historic fight. There was a five-channel video installation, two monitors, three projectors and drawings in the gallery. The posters were screenshots from the June 4th, 2020 protest in the Bronx. And then there’s me. I start the performance in a full back bend.

It comes from this desire to fully open up the chest and the gut and the sacrum, and to leave it exposed… to emanate this pain, this rage, this hope. I’m trying to hold that pose for as long as I can and being crushed under the weight of it. I had a loose script of things that I knew I would say, things that I knew I would do, readings from the Frantz Fanon text, The Wretched of the Earth. The first chapter is “On Violence,” which the performance is named after. Actions, which included boxing, writing, sitting and reading.

A: Watching documentation of your past performances, it struck me that there’s something about being physically with your audience and exposing people to the energy of your body moving through space. Cody and Julian, as spectator and performer respectively, how do experience of that energy exchange?

JP: Spectacle and spectatorship are fundamental aspects of race. These are fundamental aspects of how we experience people based on scripts and schema. I have always been attracted to sports, not only because I’ve always been athletic. Sports mean a lot of different things to me. They mean expression, being in one’s body, opportunity. I’m interested in how people consume blackness and consume black death in the form of media and fiction and stage, and how that is different from experiencing it personally. 

One of my impulses is to make the space between audience and spectacle as small as possible, to erase the feeling of separation. When you go to a play, you sit down in a chair and you look at a stage and the set and you expect something to happen. When you’re sitting on the train and someone starts moving around you violently or quickly or in a way that you don’t expect, it changes your perspective on what action is, what that energy is. 

C: [Julian] is evoking shit that’s hard to watch, hard to talk about. As someone who loves [him], a lot of it sucks to watch. I’ve seen [his] parents leave the room. They didn’t know what they were going to walk into. They see their son in a cage, exasperated. It’s a lot. 

Your last performance [On Violence] made me cry because I was at that protest in the Bronx too. It would be nice to be emotionally removed from you as a person and be able to enjoy your work more. It is an enclosing, crushing feeling. You do a good job of distributing it to the audience.

A: Julian, when doing your back bend and you’re opening your heart to everybody, it’s very fierce. It’s also a loving and vulnerable act.

C: Is your work based on love [Julian]? Because my work is only motivated by love, love of a place.

JP: My work is based on love, but that love that will only meet you in the trenches. I’m not here to convince everyone. My work is based on trying to understand why we hurt each other. Why do we do these things to each other? Why do we allow ideologies to trump our experiences?

I’ve always been attracted to Cody’s work because of the vulnerability that it embodies. She grew up in Flushing her entire life, and then, 6 or 8 years ago, figured out that there was this river there.

C: Nobody told me.

JP: One of my favorite of Cody’s pieces is one where she walks out onto the frozen part of Flushing Creek barefoot and lays down. She’s walking out onto this tenuous place that she is not sure is going to be good for her. She’s there to hold space for understanding, knowledge. That is love, right? 

My work is tied deeply into a desire to abolish oppressive systems, including race. But you can’t do that without love. It might not be the first tool you reach for, but it’s the workshop you’re working in. 

If people are going to advocate for and believe in their own safety and their own accountability, they have to imagine it. ‒ Julian Louis Phillips

A: Julian, tell me about how you transformed police barricades into movable furniture at the Queens Museum.

JP: We’re artists, so we operate in the realm of imagination. Concrete police barricades weigh four tons each. You see them around the city and they’re plastered with “NYPD.” Psychologically that represents the presence of the police everywhere. It’s immovable. What if these things were different? What if [the barricades] were something the people could use? What if they turned into these plush, soft, things that have handles on them and people can write on and change and make something with? What if people could open them up put things in? 

I made three soft barricades that existed in the Queens Museum atrium for about five months. They became a sounding board of people’s frustrations, ideas and joy.

C: We both made soft versions of our subjects in the last two years. I made a plush sculpture, Flushing Creek From Home. I wanted it to be cradled by the creek. We need to be able to interact with the subject matter. Whether it’s a hard edge along a waterfront, bulkhead or it’s the hard edge of a cement cube, It’s not working. Make things soft and friendly.

JP: That’s something that Cody has taught me. You can’t bring up abolition in a militant way. If people are going to advocate and believe in their own safety and their own accountability, they have to imagine it.

People have to be able to approach the subject matter and be a little confused, put ajar. With art, you can ask someone to do something that they normally wouldn’t do. Outside of performance art you rarely get people just to sit in an empty room and expect something to happen. When else would people come together to float on a 6’ x 12’ raft?

C: Playfulness introduces the joyful part. It’s easy to have fun when you’re doing things with other people. It’s more fun to dive into these weird, confusing things with other people, even if they’re strangers on a white cube, or floating on the dirtiest river in New York City. It makes awful hard topics something people feel they can be playful and friendly with. They don’t need to be right all the time.

A: It’s about cultivating curiosity about things that would be taboo or feel broken or feel too heavy.

C: I think that’s what’s interesting about thinking about broken systems, because I wouldn’t necessarily say the systems that we deal with in our work are broken. They work for some, they just don’t work for us. 

JP: These systems aren’t broken, they were designed to do a specific thing. The police, the state is used to relegate a certain type of violence to certain communities. Drugs and violence pour into communities so that those communities become destitute, and then the vultures come on top of that destitution, take the land, and then sell it for enormous profit. 

C: The story is dispossession of land from Black and Brown communities.

JP: And it continues. The brokenness is not about trying to fix the system, the brokenness is about seeing what’s happening. And that process takes love. It takes care. We are dealing with systems that are inherently made for the rich. 

A: You used a phrase, “pandemic energy.” How would you describe that? 

JP: Pandemic energy is a glimpse that something else that could be, an understanding that the world that we created is super fragile. It’s understanding that fragility, and also wanting that fragility to the break. Because no one’s okay with the rush back. My taxes are about to go into another war that is happening as we speak. 

I would like for us to slow down and take a break and hold hands and figure things out. Also let’s bring back some of that energy that just wants to tear it down and not go back to work…. And help each other out, like, “You need food? I got you. You need that? I got you.” Let’s get back to that. That’s pandemic energy to me.

C: I also feel pandemic energy is being constantly undermined by the state. People were dying [of COVID] on the street in Flushing, people are dying in their homes because of the flooding. We scratched the walls as much as we could, and now, with the election of Eric Adams, it feels they’re mending a system that works for them. I hope that there is a point where people are motivated to keep creating this different world. We had a taste of it.