James Franco and Kalup Linzy. Courtesy of the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery.

Since General Hospital brought the two together in 2010, James Franco and Kalup Linzy’s collaborative work has been rooted in a shared sense of camp, performance, and a fusion of art and show business. However, as is clear in James Franco & Kalup Linzy: Collaborations at Fort Myers’s Bob Rauschenberg Gallery, on view through June 3, Franco and Linzy arrive at and move beyond their collaborative work in tellingly different ways.

The exhibition is structured, physically and thematically, around Ozara and Katessa (2017), a new ten-part video installed in a structure resembling a TV production set. A wooden cube built for the series fills nearly a quarter of the large gallery. The structure’s impromptu character adds to the artifice. At the center of the series are its namesake characters: Ozara (Franco), a theatre director with aspirations to “cross over” into film by way of her latest project, and Katessa (Linzy), an actress dedicated to her craft, and the star of Ozara’s new project. Like many of Franco and Linzy’s past collaborations, Ozara and Katessa draws heavily on the narrative conventions and melodramatic stylings of soap operas set against dialogue voicing that is digitally altered and overdubbed.

Throughout, Franco overacts, genuinely enjoying the pantomime and lip syncing. He is abidingly self-aware and folds contemporary art into light entertainment so thoroughly that it’s disorienting. Linzy is comparatively subdued. In contrast to Franco reveling in farce, Linzy digs into something much more personal. For example, another video in the exhibition, Linzy’s First Soap Opera (1994), deploys a typical soap opera story arc to detail the deterioration of the ozone layer, in a video replete with emotional havoc and histrionic dialogue and music. Notably, this piece was originally a high school science homework assignment. While many of his peers may have doodled in diaries and sketchbooks, a then-teenage Linzy utilized soap operas as a mode of personal expression—a deep well from which he still draws. Although Collaborations features a partnership, it is Linzy’s emotional heavy lifting—earnest in its campiness—that gives strength to the exhibition.

James Franco & Kalup Linzy: Collaboration will be on view through June 3, 2017.

Danny Olda is a freelance art critic and editor. He currently lives and works on the west coast of Florida.

Kalup Linzy. Romantic Loner, 2013 (still); video; 73:00. Courtesy of the Artist.

Calder Yates: You went to college at University of South Florida, and then you got your graduate degree there. Did you take any time between undergrad and grad school?

Kalup Linzy: Nope. From age 5 to 26, I was in the system as a student. In college I worked in the Winn Dixie photo-lab department. When I finished grad school, somebody suggested I go back to the photo lab and I was like “no way.” I didn’t want to be standing in the Winn Dixie photo lab department with a graduate degree. So then, when I got to New York, there was a brief period for like a year where I had to get public assistance and I had to get food stamps and I was so embarrassed because I had a master’s degree. And the social worker was like, “Why are you embarrassed?” It’s not that I was freeloading, it just got to the point where I needed the extra help.

CY: Did you find a job?

KL: I found a temp agency and started working for The Mark [Hotel]. It was 2005. The Mark actually wanted to hire me full time because I guess I was the only one willing to get up at 3:30 or 4 a.m. to oversee the kitchen. I would get off around 2 o’clock. But I didn’t have the energy to go to art stuff because I literally had to be in bed by 7 or 8 p.m. to wake up the next morning to do it all over again. And then I got the Marie Walsh Sharpe residency and I was able to quit the job. Since then, I haven’t done anything completely outside of art.

Kalup Linzy. Melody Set Me Free 4.0 “We Wiki”. 2014 (still); video. Courtesy of the artist.

CY: No other odd jobs? Were you an artist’s assistant?

KL: Well, I did have an interview for the Ricky Lake show, but I didn’t get the gig. It depends on what you mean by “odd jobs.” I was working for Whitfield Lovell and Fred Wilson [while working at the Mark Hotel]. After I did Sundance in January 2016, I went to Miami and did a residency. And then I went to Tampa and did a residency. And, you know, I’m teaching at the School of the Visual Arts (SVA), too, so it is a hustle. But all the jobs are connected to my career, so it doesn’t feel like “odd jobs.” I never had my entire income come from one thing or one source anyway.

CY: Did these residencies help?

KL: Yeah, I guess I’ve been fortunate because I went to Skowhegan. It gave me access to a New York network before I actually moved there. When I got the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant, and I remember Whitfield telling me that you may or may not come across a fellowship like that again. And so he gave me advice and said invest it in equipment and computers and cameras.

Kalup Linzy. Melody Set Me Free 4.0 “We Wiki”, 2014 (still); video. Courtesy of the Artist.

CY: What’s the new project with James Franco?

KL: It’s a new series called Ozara and Katessa. I wrote the script and directed it, but it’s a collaboration. His production company is also financing. We play different characters. I’m doing the voice of one of his characters and he’s doing the voice for a different character. We both take turns playing damsels in distress.

CY: Do you still feel like you’re hustling? Does it ever slow down?

KL: The thing is, I don’t think the hustle ever slows down. The money does, is the issue. If there’s nothing going on, I can create something to do and approach people. But the money slows. I don’t think the hustle slows for any artist. I don’t know, I don’t want live in my means. I’m always trying to get to something else more, something bigger. I don’t know what that will look like, but I’ll know what it feels like.

Like a calm place, where things are a little bit more settled, and you have the right finances. I don’t know when that’s going to happen. It still feels precarious, but I’d rather be doing this than not. Probably in Florida—my imagination runs wild in Florida, and I can think. I’d love to be there part time. My mother and my aunt, they’re getting older. Sometimes it’s nice to be around that calmness.

When Marsha Norman began her play ‘Night Mother, she gave her protagonist Jesse one ominous line of dialogue: “We got any old towels?” It sounds utilitarian, but it actually dives right into the core of play’s tragedy.

As playwriting instructor Richard Toscan has pointed out, if Norman let all the implications of that line hang out, Jesse would have said something like:

Do we have any old towels, plastic sheeting or foam
rubber padding? I’m going to commit suicide in the
bedroom tonight with Daddy’s pistol as soon as I get
everything done for you and I need the towels so all the
blood won’t make a mess on your floor.

But Norman never would have written that. She’s a queen of subtext, and ‘Night Mother is about what isn’t said.

Kalup Linzy’s films hardly use subtext at all. The characters say what they feel and want with a frank degree of self-knowledge that would be prescient if their personas had a little more nuance to them. But like the stars of the soap operas Linzy takes inspiration from, his characters have fairly predictable preoccupations–love, rejection, betrayal, themselves–and embrace cliche guilelessly.

Linzy, who gained a swell of fresh attention for appearing in General Hospital with James Franco this Spring, is a Guggenheim Fellow who has been art-making for the past decade.However, Fantasies, Melodramas, and a Dream called Love, his current exhibition at Ltd Los Angeles, is his solo debut in L.A. It includes three short videos and a number of dumb-fisted cut-out collages that look like the quaint results of a Henri Matisse-Romare Bearden collaboration.

The videos, roughly made and surprisingly spare considering the flamboyance of their casts, are the exhibition’s highlight. Linzy overdubs all the voices, which gives the otherwise blatant dialogue an absurdly robotic quality. In Conversations wit de Churen VII: Lil Myron’s Trade, an animated short in which characters gallop across the frame as if riding invisible horses, two men have a sexual tryst that ends with one dead and one in prison, all because a woman in town chose to “run her mouth off.” Women are always running their mouths off in Linzy’s work. In Keys to Our Heart, two women, one a matronly Linzy in drag and another a wispy blond thing, try to help “John J.” navigate his “bitchy” lover. Linzy, playing “Lily,” says she “wants to do something positive,” then tells John, “If you can’t be an asshole to her, I suggest you leave her and find a good girl.” “I’m looking for a queen of my heart, not a shady spade,” declares John, once his female friends have coaxed him into breaking it off with his girl.

But even if Linzy’s characters purport to have their hearts on their sleeves, the over-the-top intensity of their acting always makes it seem as though their shallowness is a front for something deeper and heavier. In a way, the undercurrents in Linzy’s films are just as quietly ominous as the subtext in Norman’s play–his characters speak with a cockiness that suggests they know what they want and more or less understand their own feelings. Of course, they don’t understand themselves at all and that’s what makes listening to their “running off mouths” so exquisitely, smartly uncomfortable.