Satch Hoyt Studio Visit (Response #4)

Here is another of my response papers for the Hampshire in Berlin program. We visited the studio of artist Satch Hoyt in Berlin's district of Wedding, and loved getting to talk with him, see his studio, and go to a fantastic restaurant that he recommended for dinner afterward.

If you're not familiar with Satch or his work, I highly recommend that you visit his website: satchhoyt.com .

(I have several more blog posts in the making, and apologize that it's taken me so long to finish them. Once university started, things got really busy for me, and have only gotten more busy since. Please check back soon for several more blog posts on University in Germany and my recent travels to Ravensbrück Concentration Camp, Prague, Amsterdam, Dresden, Weimar, Buchenwald Concentration Camp, and more.)

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Visiting an artist’s personal workspace always brings about a strange feeling for me; even when you’re invited into these spaces, there’s no way to stop feeling like you’re intruding a bit. Most often, a studio space, especially a totally personal one, is the space in which an artist experiences their own artistic process, which can be an extremely intimate, personal, and (at times) grueling thing. When I heard that we were going to visit Satch Hoyt’s studio space, this inner conflict of excitement mixed with caution came over me. I was enthralled to get to see him in his own environment, surrounded by his work, but also didn’t want him to feel like we were taking up his space in a way that would be uncomfortable or detrimental to him. I became extremely aware of this as we walked through the courtyard of his building, back to the Hinterhaus where his studio is, rang his buzzer, walked up the stairs, and found him waiting for us in his doorway. His torn and tattered jeans, grungy white Birkenstocks, simple t-shirt, cardigan, bandana, and the serious yet playful smile on his face said it all: he was in his element here; this was entirely his space.

            As I walked through the door and into the space, I felt a huge smile come over my face. Looking around, I could tell that this really was Satch’s space; it was a space that was just an extension of himself and his imagination, and a physical manifestation of his creativity. It was clear that he had taken the time to think about the placement of every single object in the room, from the collection of unsharpened pencils on a coffee table in the corner to the forty-or-so multicolored darts that were sprawled across the floor as if they were coming out of an old transistor radio. We were invited warmly into Satch’s world, and despite my prior worry, it immediately felt great to be there. The openness with which he showed us his space and talked about his life and work amazed me. Nothing was off limits, and all questions were addressed head-on. As he showed us his visual art pieces, and played us some of his audio work, I couldn’t help but admire this quality in him.

            What struck the strongest cord with me was his sound work that he showed us. Naturally, I tend to take more toward auditory things, and his work with sound very much played into this quality that I possess. It was interesting to hear about how he decides to pair up these sound collages and soundscapes that he creates along with his visual art. One could listen to these audio works alone and understand his message, but when his visual and his audio work supplement each other in the way that he uses them to, it feels as if all of your senses are tingling all at the same time, pushing you to reach into yourself and understand on much more than a basic level what he is intending with his art.

            His audio work was really inspiring for me to listen to. I haven’t worked a lot with sound collages before, which is why I decided to do it here using the sounds of Berlin that I find. But it’s daunting for me to use clips of audio that I haven’t completely created myself. Perhaps because I have less control over every aspect of a recording, at least to some extent, or perhaps because I feel the need to do justice to the sound that belongs to people and spaces completely outside of myself and my own comfort zone. Listening to Satch’s pieces helped me to make sense of how found audio clips can be put into use, though, and hearing what he had to say about his process for doing so was even more comforting. He explained that the process of creating these sound collages (which often accompany his visual art pieces) is very fluid for him; he knows which pieces he wants to string together, and sits down with an engineer who works quickly to fulfill Satch’s impulsive decisions as to what feels right to him sonically at that exact moment. I often sit over my own art, particularly music and sound, and get extremely stressed over which way each small element of a piece should be situated within the whole. Hearing how good Satch’s pieces were, and then listening to him say that it’s okay to make something semi-impulsively and not let yourself go back and edit it forever and ever, was something that I really appreciated and needed to hear.

            I also really like creating sounds from objects that aren’t normally used in a musical sense, and was inspired in this light through Satch’s piece called “From Mau Mau to Brixton”, which involved the manipulated recordings of hair picks as well as sounds created by one of his related sculptures being struck with a pencil. Through these different forms of creating sound, he harnessed what he could and turned it into a piece that even had a discernable percussive rhythm section, harmonization, and depth.  I also really liked how he used sound in his piece called “How The West Was Won”, which involved fifty or so porcelain figures sitting on the head of a drum. He played a heavy bass line through a sub woofer below the drum, and the figures vibrated and teetered, clashing into each other and creating their own noise outside of what already existed.

            Getting to spend time with him out at dinner as well as in his studio space, I left the evening with the impression that it’s okay to take your art seriously, but only to a point. Satch’s work is all about making the viewer just uncomfortable enough that they can then be creatively and/or politically influenced by the same piece that just made them uncomfortable only a few seconds before. It was refreshing to get to spend time with him and see not only his work, but also how he works. I will definitely keep up with him in the future and hopefully catch some of his work at some other point or in some other place, whether visual, audio, or something completely different. The studio visit was great fun, and I’d love to do more of them.

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LG,
K