I discovered Billie’s work when I was in high school, shortly before beginning my studies in Fine Arts. I was so desperate to figure out how other artists used such a wide range of materials. Where did they find them? How did they learn how to use them and mould them into artworks? Seeing Billie balance metal rods, foam, taxidermy, furniture, chains, printed mirrors, video art, and more, I was envious, inspired, perplexed, and yearning to figure it out for myself. I asked her, “How did you learn to do this?” when looking at her ‘TNT’ series. “From lots of midwestern moms on YouTube”. Her studio is up a steep flight of stairs, through a shared space, and behind a metal door. It’s simple, organised and yet lived in. Several works are seen stored on a shelf or leaning against a wall. A recliner, flipped on its head, houses a MacBook – a recent work (‘Something to Wash My Eyes’, 2025) that is being optimised, and stands smack in the middle of the space. Once flipped right way around, the viewer is supposed to crawl under the lifted footrest of the recliner to see the film playing on the screen. Currently, the MacBook is held up haphazardly, and the black cloth to block out the light during viewing is an old T-shirt. The craftsmanship is being worked on, even though I appreciate its preliminary form. The neck hole of the T-shirt is quite literally designed for a head to pop out of, and the thick material looks like it would do a fine job at blocking out light. I digress. Billie Clarken is an American multidisciplinary artist based in Berlin, working with objects that reference television culture and projected identity. Speaking with someone as nerdy and obsessed with pop culture as myself was as rewarding as anticipated. We discuss our favourite VHS tapes, North American basement lore, and Abercrombie and Fitch to round things off, and attempt to figure out the parameters for a fun but interesting way to engage with your community. The newsletter sign-up link for ‘Billie’s World’ is active on the surface, but the idea is still brewing in her mind. I can’t promise you a coherent interview, but would you take some train-of-thought rambling?

Mia Butter: So, I signed up for your newsletter last night.

Billie Clarken: I actually made that because I feared that social media was about to collapse. I was like, “I have to be able to reach people again, people that are genuinely interested, so I'm not yelling out into an ether.” So yeah, I created ‘Billie's World’, and I thought I was gonna keep a journal while I was in Mexico City, and then it felt like humble bragging or something, so now I'm working on a new project.

My intern, Paula, is coming back to work for me. I had my first intern last year, and she graduated and got a grant to intern again, so she's helping me work on this new project. I think that I'll start releasing that on ‘Billie's World’… It’s going to be a ‘reader’. I'm really into sociology and philosophy, and I've always applied my research to my art and read visual representations of deeper theories. I think I'll use ‘Billie's World’ to be a Patreon of sorts, but I hate the paywall. In this economy, I don't feel like sharing objects, but I have an excellent eye for curating text and people, so I want to share excerpts from books that I like. I'm actually having Paula scan all of these books and texts, creating a big binder, and then eventually I'll sell it for like 20 bucks or something. I don't know, I didn't grow up with this sort of thing because I was a child of the Internet. So, I was told that back in the day, you used to go to the copy shop and you'd say what class you were in, and then there would be this reader, this master-copy thing, and you'd sit there, and you'd scan every fucking page of what the professor decided was what you needed to read for that semester, and I love that. I am a destructive reader. All my books have lines, a few notes in them, and that's a huge part of my art practice. 

MB: Thank God, not enough people do that. Everyone should deface pages with their thoughts.

BC: I know! People are so precious about books. So with ‘Billie's World’, I want people to understand where I'm going, based on evidence, because I genuinely feel like people don't actually know. They might not always get the reference or inside joke. When I was a student at UdK, we were never required to read a specific list of books or essays, but to be fair, I was only in the studio class. So, I'm gonna create this reader to engage in the way I would have wanted, especially during COVID. I would love to interview other artists and people I feel like I could connect with. I want to filter out who really gives a shit, you know? As if it’s a course map designed by me.

MB: I feel you, I’m following that same urge.

BC: There is a raw human instinct to collect objects. It’s literally our human nature to create series, which is why we have children or create a physical art practice or something. It’s all about legacy building. My aunt collects these very  specific teddy bears called Muffy Bears. My mom used to collect those Precious Moments porcelain figurines. They’re really sad looking... I think I still have one.

I like to collect images. I like to share text. I can’t post text without images. My goal with ‘Billie’s World’ is, like, maybe once a month, I’d share some text. Or maybe I would share a conversation with someone, like record this and have a sound piece. Now that I’m going more into video art, I feel very nervous about sharing art on social media. I feel it loses context so fast, and I’m afraid that it’s either appropriated incorrectly or it’s not copyright-friendly. For instance, I don’t have anywhere to share my video pieces. I can’t post it in a reel, because then you’re signing your rights away, so I’m trying to figure out a way to share a diary or something where I sense that I am truly sending a transmission with some sort of direction.

MB: The democratisation of these platforms is not as democratic as we would have hoped for, huh?

BC: That’s another thing I’d like to work towards. I want to be a vigilante for the artists who don’t write consignment agreements. I mean, I’ve been almost fucked over so many times, but I know how to write contracts from my photography practice. There are so many people who don’t have that, or they don’t know how to do that for themselves. I mean, in Berlin, it used to be punk, and you brought your art into a space, and you hung it up, but if someone stole it – that sucks, end of story. But that’s changing now.

Does Instagram really serve any form of community building, besides network maintenance?

BC: I don’t know about the whole difference between network and community, but when I was in art school, my teacher asked us at the beginning of the semester to share what we were good at because we were creating a toolbox, and that was our community network. So, let’s say one artist friend of yours is handy, and something in your house breaks. You say, “Okay, can you fix this? I’ll document your artwork in return,” and that’s what we were working towards creating. We shared resources, second glances, thoughtful critiques. Social media definitely offers that to me; sometimes, I think, more than others. I could make a post about almost anything, asking for help or recommendations and get so many responses that I started to make a little archive of contacts to save for later or share with others.

MB: What communities are you a part of today?

BC: I would say my biggest community that I’m a part of right now is a WhatsApp group. I don’t think it has a name. I met Hannah on Instagram, and she works for an artist, but also makes clothes. I bought a fabulous top, that she had been making small batches of, for my birthday. It was a giant bow! Later, she added me to this WhatsApp group. People screenshot posts from Instagram stories of jobs and various opportunities in Berlin, and post them in the group. It feels like people are looking out for each other, even if it’s an unpaid modelling job, and I like to think we have each other’s backs. But that’s what Instagram and Facebook used to be. We are 264 members at the moment.

MB: What do you think happened to Facebook?

BC: Oh, Republicans.

MB: Yeah.

BC: That would be cool, though, having your own channel. I think that’s what a lot of people crave: their own way to share what they’re thinking. I just revisited this quote. I think it was McLuhan. No, who is it? McLuhan? Maybe it’s Baudrillard. Someone – Nam June Paik! He said, “Everybody will have his own TV channel”, predicting the rise of personal media. Anyway, this leads to what I’m working on now because I realised that that’s my entire practice. When I was in school, I was really into television, and growing up on the East Coast, Nam June Paik was in all the big Washington, DC museums, so it’s like, oh, I’m just copying this artist, and it’s not cool. But I was so influenced that I would put videos on media players and then hack the old tube televisions. I even curated a show in Berlin a long time ago, where I got all these TVs from an old hotel. It sounds easy, but it’s a complicated thing. So I’ve been researching TVs and radios because I feel like my purpose of being in Berlin and the way the world is working, I just want to know what the fuck is going on with the TV tower. Oh, I’m also trying to figure out how to hack radio stations.

MB: You absolutely can’t hack Spreeradio 105’5 – I have a clock radio that wakes me up to that station every morning.

BC: I think it would be cool, though, to hear a poem of mine through a transmission. I’ve been researching different scrambling devices; they were actually the first method of copyrighting television media. There’d be these paid porn channels on HBO or something, and there was a scrambling input, so if you didn’t pay for it, it would be scrambled into different patterns and sounds so you couldn’t see the media behind it. This was used during wartime when messages were being sent between spies. You’d send a message with a scrambler on one end, and on the receiving end, you’d have this decoder specialized for that scrambler. I’ve been thinking about that, but with images on a TV. It’s all just code for flashing lights.

Apparently, it’s really big in the gaming scene to buy old TVs and use them as screens. And people have been buying up VHS tapes like crazy because they’re speculating there’s gonna be this crazy boom on the resale market of old movies that haven’t been digitally mastered. I think that there’s this search for a feeling, the one brought on by physical media. My dad used to record movies on the TV on VHS tapes, but he would sometimes accidentally record over our home videos. We’d have this really precious moment of a birthday or Christmas, and then it would cut to the credits of some baseball movie. It’s funny to think that some random family in Germany recorded the same movies my dad did. I was never allowed to watch American Pie, but I have it now. Also, the sound (the tapes) make is so good.

MB: I love it when they come in those plastic cases. That thin, plasticky quality, and the feeling of the tape fitting perfectly inside the case. My parents would get annoyed at me when I put the tapes back in the wrong case.

BC: Did you ever watch Josie and the Pussycats?

MB: No.

BC:You have to watch it! Josie and the Pussycats was a cartoon, and then it was made into a live-action movie. Parker Posey’s in it, Tara Reid, like, it is the 2000s. It’s such a good satire about the music industry and capitalist brainwash. It’s so fucking funny, I just re-watched it. I think a lot about nostalgia and my hesitation to use it in my work. Nostalgia lives off an important moment that’s coated in a nice feeling. It’s a very clear reference. In television and advertising, that clarity is crucial. They rely on nostalgia because it stabilizes attention. You are meant to recognize something immediately and feel like it mattered, even if you don’t remember it exactly. Déjà vu feels more honest to me, like an incomplete transmission. It appears when repetition becomes excessive, when images circulate too often across commercials, sitcoms, branding, or celebrity culture. At that point, the reference starts to malfunction. Instead of recognition, there is confusion.

Nostalgia is the strongest marketable tool because of that. There was a lot of nostalgia for the 2000s in recent years. I was reliving the highlights of that time by buying everything I couldn’t afford, or wasn’t allowed to wear, like low-rise jeans, Ed Hardy, and Von Dutch. I smelled this perfume recently that sent me way back. I immediately recognised it on someone on the street, and then promptly went to Karstadt’s perfume aisle to sniff it out, because I knew it was something generic. When I found it – Chloé eau de parfum (2008) – I felt a wave of relief and dread overcome me. It was literally like looking through rose colored lenses at my adolescent years.

There was a lot of marketing targeted towards insecurities and self-doubt, and a general feeling of not belonging. That’s why the brands that came up in the 2000s were so successful. Like Abercrombie & Fitch? That is my trauma. You would walk into a store, and they would be like, “Oh my god, you should model for us”, and they would convince you that you were hot. I mean, the fact that there was a triple-zero jean size? I know I wore a double zero at one point. That’s not even a real size. The overhead lighting in the dressing rooms made you feel awful, but you still spent 50 dollars on a t-shirt that said ‘Abercrombie’ on it because it was your sense of belonging to something, and you didn’t have your own sense of being.

MB: I remember when Hollister came to Germany when I was about 11. I thought it was the coolest place ever as a young teen, and wore one of their body sprays all through 8th grade.

BC: My first AOL screen name was something like @hollistergrrrl92. I really was obsessed with Hollister. Hollister was a bit more PG in their approach, Abercrombie was marketed more towards college students. I specifically remember my first trip to New York with my parents when we went to look at colleges, and we went to the iconic 4 story flagship A&F store. My dad walked in and was suffocated by the smell of their trademark room spray. He waited outside.

...You want to be sent back to the past?

Billie digs out an original bottle of the Abercrombie & Fitch ‘Fierce’ room spray. She sprays it around the studio.

I used it for an exhibition at Number 1 Main Road called ‘Two Truths and a Lie’, and I sprayed the feather-filled room with it. This is nostalgia. This was the mall. This was shopping. This was your grandparents taking you back-to-school shopping. This was the smell of new clothes, a new me. I’m getting goosebumps. It was the paper bag frame for beautiful youth. This is that smell.

MB: That sounds like successful marketing.

BC: So successful. I wonder what’s in it. The fact that this is so old and it hasn’t turned is surprising. Also, how crazy is it that this smell can evoke so much emotion?

When I’m asked, “What’s with your obsession with Miley Cyrus?”, it’s like, What is with you NOT being obsessed with Miley Cyrus? Do you know what I mean? I’m just a stan. I love her and her failures. I idolize her because she’s such an artist, she truly is. I don’t think she’s a great artist, but she’s fucking impulsive and is making art from a weird place. She’s a nepo baby, but she’s also grappling with the issues imposed on her by Disney. I was so angry when she started making ‘erotic’ sculptures, and a journalist (Ellie Howard for Kids of Dada) wrote that “Jeffrey Deitch sycophantically enthused she was in fact, the ‘real deal’.”  He then added a truckload of fuel to an already voracious fire by stating, “It’s southern outsider art, very close to Mike Kelley.” She was making sculptures from stuff that people would throw on stage during her performances. The idea of her work being praised in the same breath as Mike Kelley was earth-shattering at the time! And then, Terry Richardson photographing her and directing her ‘Wrecking Ball’ video really struck a nerve with me. Even though Terry Richardson’s work was the epitome of celebrity photography in the 2000s... kind of like The Cobrasnake (Mike Hunter). He made provocative images using a high flash, and at the time, I was angry that she was entering my world of key people constructing pop culture. At the time, I thought they were different. Anyway, as we both grew up, I started to see her as more relatable, especially around the time she was divorcing her husband (Liam Hemsworth). I think then I was like, oh, you’re also still just a girl trying to figure everything out.  But, if I get married, I’m totally going to try to get that Vivienne Westwood dress that she got married in. I’m pretty sure Charli XCX also got married in that dress, maybe even Demi Lovato. It’s iconic. It reminds me a lot of the Vanity Fair cover of Miley that I appropriated in the first place. I have faith in pop music right now, because the new Rosalía album ‘LUX’ is everything to me.

MB: Oh yeah, ‘Berghain’ is all over my feed right now.

BC: Listening to the ‘Berghain’ track alone doesn’t make sense. Please promise me you’ll listen to the album. Just listen to the whole thing from start to finish.

And I did. It's not bad.

I spy one of Billie's 'TNT' works leaning against the wall. I scrawled "TNT: Millennial Ed Ruscha sentiments?" while preparing for our interview, and for some reason, I say it out loud to Billie. My point was that the work calls Ruscha's 'Pay Nothing Until April' to mind, where he paints text on topf of similarly snow capped mountains. In both cases, I wonder why those phrases have been chosen for the works, but I'm in Billie's studio and not Ed's.

BC: The ‘TNT’ works are reminiscent of the bar signs my dad hung around the bar he had installed in our basement growing up. I collect old postcards for various works, so I’ve just been scanning the ones that most remind me of the mountainous scenes on the ads for Coors and Budweiser. After combining the images with text, I print the surrounding landscapes on glass and use a special paint on the back that turns the text into a mirrored surface. I have so many text pieces that I could produce a hundred of these ‘TNT’ works. The texts themselves are usually things that I’ve written, typically when I’m a little buzzed. It’s funny because I imagine myself sitting in a bar, having a glass of something, and I catch my reflection in the mirror. I wouldn’t call them poetic; they’re more like poetry without pretending to be a poet, you’re not trying anything, except to write things that sound good. Like advertising slogans. T.N.T. is funny, going back to the screen name thing. When I was picking my AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) screen name, it was a whole family thing. My dad was like, “You should do Everlong” because we loved the Foo Fighters, and my mom was like, “Ew, you’re a child. If you have everlong online, people are going to think it’s provocative, like a dick.” So she suggested T.N.T., and I’m like, “What the hell is that?” She then told me about her friend group in college that was called the ‘Michelob Mob’, like Michelob beer, and she said T.N.T. stood for Thursday Night Therapy, and all the girls would go out on Thursday and get drunk and talk shit.

MB: What the hell? That’s so cool.

BC: Cute, right? So, she wanted me to make my screen name T.N.T. I ended up with hollistergrrrl92.

MB: So this basement housed a bar, and all your VHS tapes?