Kate Durbin is often described by those vague terms that obscure more than explain. Sure, she’s experimental. Yes, she does performance art, and lots of it is about digital life. A better description comes from Heidi Montag, of The Hills fame, who called Durbin “pop culture’s stenographer.” That feels apt, if a bit inadequate. She’s the founding editor of Gaga Stigmata, an online journal pioneering work in Gaga studies. In addition to a number of chapbooks, she’s written The Ravenous Audience and, most recently, the first contribution to a genre she calls “literary television,” E! Entertainment. She travels through the echoing halls of the Playboy Mansion, explores the commonality between Amanda Knox and Anna Nicole Smith, and, through a meticulous process of transcription, offers a strange and delightful way to consume reality TV, sweatpants not included. She spoke to contributor Alex Ronan over the phone from her home in Los Angeles about the cultural significance of Hello Kitty, what we can learn from the Real Housewives, and what happens when you spend three years straight watching reality TV. (Interview conducted in 2014)
AR: How did you end up focusing on reality TV?
Kate Durbin: Reality TV is the medium of our moment; we’re all straddling the line between living an “authentic” life and performing that life in front of the world. We’ve been under surveillance for a long time, but I think that reality TV is this unique medium in that it’s aware of its own surveillance. Most people think reality stars are really stupid. It actually takes a lot of savvy and a level of meta-awareness to do reality TV at all.
AR: It seems like a lot of people get stuck on the question of whether or not it’s real, without thinking about what that even means. Why is it so important that reality TV be defined as real or not real?
KD: That’s a really weird question when you start to think about it. Real. That’s what reality TV does — it raises these existential questions that make people uncomfortable — what is real? What does that mean? It’s not that the shows are necessarily fake, it’s just they're reflecting our culture right now.
AR: It doesn’t seem like the recent conversations in fiction about likeability and female characters have progressed to reality TV, where there are loads of unlikeable and complicated women. Why do you think that might be?
KD: I wonder if that approach to female characters in fiction — wanting them to be likeable — is the flip side of the same coin where you can mock these women on reality shows for being stupid or trashy. I definitely view the women of reality TV compassionately. In the process of writing the book, I was so entrenched in their world for hours and hours, days and days — it took three years to write — I ended up merging with them in a way.
AR: I know what you mean. I’ll watch four hours of reality TV straight and then feel revved up in this strange way or like I could get into a Housewives-style brawl. Were there emotional or mental tolls in immersing yourself in reality TV so intensely?
KD: Before I started, I was like, “What am I going to discover about reality TV and myself in doing this?” I didn’t really know what would happen but I knew it would be valuable. Paying that close of attention to anything can yield really rich results. Watching these shows became almost like meditation.
When you watch something for a long time it really affects you. The way we judge people on reality TV is the way we judge ourselves. We wouldn’t be judging them if we didn’t feel those anxieties about ourselves. When I’m watching I tend to confront some of that within myself.
One of the things I noticed when watching the show so closely is that moment when the camera person is reflected in the mirror, or the lighting guy is visible in the background. I started to see how constructed every moment was. Now when I walk around I sometimes feel as if I’m on TV, which I don’t think is totally untrue given the direction surveillance is going, and our constant social media presences.
AR: The genre of E! Entertainment is literary television, which you coined. Why did a new genre feel necessary for this book?
KD: A large part of me inventing a genre is based in the fact that I don’t care for genres, so if I’m going to work on something I want to make up something just for that project.
AR: I was thinking of what it would be like if literary television took off —
KD: — Yeah! And every show had a companion book. I think the closest to that is the novelization of The Hills. Lauren Conrad’s got some pretty good books. Have you read them?
AR: No, but sometimes I see her books in a Salvation Army that also has Whitney Port’s novels, and it fills me with glee to place them side by side on a shelf. It’s like, finally, Lauren and Whit will have to talk it out.
KD: [Laughs.] Wow. That could be really good for them.
AR: How are you thinking about hunger in your works?
KD: I’m always dealing with the audience’s hunger, which can also feel kind of threatening, for women’s blood, to watch women fail. Then there’s also the hunger of me — my hunger. I’m consuming them as well. I don’t always fully understand my own motivations. We’re all hungry, even though we don’t always fully understand what for or why. It can fuel you or it can be really destructive if you don’t try to understand it.
AR: What about gendered notions of hunger?
KD: One aftereffect of reading E! Entertainment after I wrote it is that women become like treats or cakes in the way they’re commodified. There’s a lot of food in the book and a lot of objects and all of it seems like diamonds you want to eat, and yet, the characters themselves seem kind of airless, like macarons or cotton candy. In E!, the women have been so commodified you can’t even reach their hunger.
AR: You once said that The Ravenous Audience was for teenage girls. What was it like for you to be a teenage girl?
KD: Well, I said that in an interview a long time ago and I don’t think it’s untrue, but it’s also a book for anybody. When I was a teenage girl I went through a really rough time. I was in Christian school, I felt really lost, and like I couldn’t be myself, and like I didn’t know who my self was. At the time, my mother gave me The Bell Jar. That book really helped me, to realize that someone else felt the way I did was incredibly powerful. I thought of The Ravenous Audience as existing in that way — it was my way of working through my own adolescence and coming of age, reckoning with all these myths and stories I’d heard that were supposed to be helpful but were actually really complicated. So in some sense it’s an offering to teenage girls and also the teenage girl I was.
AR: What are you working on now?
KD: I just did a performance art piece, #HelloSelfie. It’s six women dressed in underwear, bras, covered in Hello Kitty stickers, wigs and bows. I wore a clear plastic dress which had melting Hello Kittys on it. We went out in public and took selfies for two hours straight. People were coming up to us; they were taking pictures with us. They were generally amazed, bewildered, and confused by us. It’s my way of closing out a certain era of Tumblr and the Internet. That moment of time in which that aesthetic developed is over now. I really wanted to take it offline, bring it into a public space.
AR: Was it how you’d imagined it would be?
KD: It was better than I imagined. As we were walking down the street people were automatically pulling out their phones, they just knew exactly what to do. The best thing was that people took so many selfies of themselves when they saw us taking selfies. I thought that was really beautiful. One of the things that's bothered me is that people have criticized teen girls for being so narcissistic, for taking so many selfies. And yet, when we started unabashedly taking selfies, they all began to take selfies too. We all are this way; it’s not just teen girls. They just tend to be the scapegoat.
AR: Can you explain why you chose to use stickers? Sorry if that’s a dumb question, I’m just very curious.
KD: Stickers are interesting because, for one thing, they carry a hint of a commoditization. We put price stickers on things that we buy. The stickers that I use are always Disney princesses or Hello Kitty or mass-produced characters, so the girls are objects. Part of the aesthetic involves putting the stickers on yourself, which I think is really different than someone putting a price tag on your ass. Using too many stickers can introduce a grotesque element: if you have a lot of stickers it starts to look like a skin disease or something. Then there’s something very childish about it that I love too. It’s hard to even express what that sweetness means but I think we all recognize it. Standing there in your underwear, covered in stickers — it renders you sweet and vulnerable and childlike.
AR: That seems to be a big part of the critique of the Tumblr aesthetic, that the use of materials like glitter, stickers, and sprinkles are infantilizing. How do you respond to that?
KD: What’s interesting to me about that criticism is it doesn’t ever address what’s so wrong with children. We have that side of ourselves that is vulnerable, that is child-like, and I don’t think that’s something we need to beat out of ourselves. There are things about Tumblr and that aesthetic that are disturbing. Things you could liken to child porn, very violent things — those are very part of our culture and very worth critiquing. But glitter, stickers, and sprinkles are not that. It’s not infantalizing if you put the stickers on yourself.
AR: Your work is often called experimental, but a term like that often obscures the particular ways in which a work is experimental. How do you think the experimental nature of your work has changed?
KD: One way I look at it with The Ravenous Audience is that I was watching a screen and with E! I was sucked into the TV screen. With #HelloSelfie I’m being spit out of the screen onto the street.
AR: I like that a lot. How does collection play into your work?
KD: It’s a very natural impulse for me to work in that way. I’ve had a lot of people say your work is so anthropological, but everything I interact with is of the moment, so that’s not really accurate. I’m always aware of myself and my presence. I’m always trying to embody the material I encounter. It’s the only honest way to do it. There’s no remove. I never want to give the impression that I’m above something. We’re living in a time where there’s so much stuff. There isn’t just one Real Housewives show, there are seven. When I focused my attention on Hello Kitty, I started seeing her everywhere — she’s in the back of someone’s car at the mall, she’s on a little girl birthday cake. Things are multiplying, endlessly.