DON'T LET ME BE MISUNDERSTOOD

INTERVIEW WITH SEAN DUFFY

DC: What is the one thing you wish viewers would understand about your work or what is one thing you feel is most misunderstood about your work?

SD: It's one of those things that I think about a lot in the work, but I actually don't care if they get it or don't. In the end, part of the process is considering the viewer, but if they misunderstand it or if they get it completely it doesn't matter as long as I follow my process and it's out there. I think in some way I am trying to tell a really good story and if they don't get the metaphor of the story or the hidden meanings that's ok. As long as it's an enthralling story and they are getting something out of it. Often the misunderstood part is more interesting. I really want my work to be layered enough that it can come out over time. Burn Out Sun has these different layers, Buckminster Fuller, Sun Records and the 1970's reissue of Sun Records. Burn Out Sun is about the cycle of fame and failure like how Buckminster Fuller is brilliant one year and then a joke, and then brilliant. Sun Records was so credible and then it kind of became a joke, then all of a sudden it was great again and it's about that kind of cycle

DC: What is the idea behind the repetition in your work?

SD: It kind of started with this body of work I did on Mods and Modernists and actually it started before that but, this idea of how the same gesture in a different time and different place takes on a different meaning. How a Sun Record released in the 70's is really different than an original record; the 70's record is virtually worthless. It's this time and place and how it started in the late 90's, the resurgence of Modernism, and how at that time it became a very conservative movement. If you go back to the Bauhaus it's this very Avant-garde movement and then you go to the 50's and it's a little more comfortable, so each time it comes back it changes. Now it is kind of comfort food rather than rocking the world. I was thinking of Mod kids and how the 60's Mods were about being modern, changing times and androgyny. Then when there was a Mod revival in the 80's it was slightly more about that Retro look. So when I did that body of work in the late 90's, a completely Retro thing, where rather than it being about androgyny it's about boys being boys and girls being girls, old scooters and old clothes. I thought it was interesting listening to the past, present and future.

DC: You like this idea about things being copied?

SD: Yes, I like what happens when things are copied and how they're copied. I did this piece a couple years back, 3rd motorcycle; it was my third motorcycle from when I was a kid. I took the old rusty bike and painted it to look like an old rusty bike, with oil paints, and recreated the version. I was thinking about this idea of restoration and when you restore something you almost erase the memories from it and delete it, or set it back to the start, and in copying it I was sealing in the memories.

DC: What is the connection between your work and music?

SD: I think music has always been amazing to me because I don't understand it at all. I am not a musician so it's like magic to me. When I see an artwork I understand how it's made, how it's put together, the elements and how they did it, but then I see other people who see artwork like magic. I find all these parallels with music and art. What I have always liked about stereo systems is that they are about social interaction. It is the only appliance in your house that's really supposed to be turned on when more people are there. Unlike the TV or computer, those all get shut down, but the stereo is on and becomes part of the group. I think music is a really important part of how we get through our day to day life. We have a tiny sound track right now- I love hearing the fragments of sound.

DC: What does the title Burn Out Sun mean?

SD: I was thinking it's the end of the sun itself and how the vinyl looks like tar but, it's from Sun Records and the generation of Buckminster Fuller burning out too. Every once in a while you find a Buckyball building that's kind of decaying and it reminded me of that.

DC: What issues (topics, subjects or events) motivate you at this moment?

SD: More recently I have been more autobiographical and I have gotten into the idea of including myself into the mix. I was almost taking an anthropological approach like the Mods and Modernists approach where there was this distance. Even though it is very personal to me, I was trying to keep myself out of it. Last year I did two main bodies of work. One was Growth Interactive, 18 turn tables and 360 speakers and the other was a group show series about curating myself. I have all these scattered ideas and it was a chance to step outside of myself and ask myself how can I put a show together that works as a group show. They ended up becoming very personal bodies of work.

DC: Would you say most of your art work is about personal experiences?

SD: Yes, last year I did this piece, with all my t- shirts and a starship chair that you could sit on. It was about this idea of getting older and I decided I wasn't going to wear t-shirts any more because I was an adult. Then this year I decided I would wear t-shirts because I like t-shirts. It's this really interesting thing because I have about 70 t-shirts from shows, events, shirts I have made and shirts friends have given me. So it ends up being this piece that looks like a bunch of t-shirts to other people, but to me this is my whole life story. Bringing it back to first question, it doesn't matter what the viewer knows or not.

INTERVIEW WITH PETER GARFIELD

DC: What is the one thing you wish viewers would understand about your work or what is one thing you feel is most misunderstood about your work?

PG: I'm not too concerned about the misunderstandings about my work. Once an artwork is out of its creator's control, it takes on a life of its own depending on its context. I see this as a condition or precondition for life in general, so through my work I attempt to mirror the uncertainty and confusion that I believe is inherent in existence.

DC: Where do you get the houses? Is the location and context of where the house comes from significant? Or is it more relevant as iconography?

PG: I got all the houses at various hobby shops. They're off-the-shelf H-O scale train models which I constructed and embellished and then carefully and methodically destroyed. Sometimes I have a specific site or landscape in mind when I build the house, or sometimes I search for a site that seems to fit well with the style of home I've already built. They're all simply dangled by fishing line from a stick in front of the camera. Since the model is in motion, I don't have much control over the act, so I have to shoot quite a few pictures. From there it's a matter of editing down to one image. There's no digital manipulation involved because I want to retain the raw quality of the snapshot.

DC: How often was this action repeated?

PG: I've probably made two dozen of the Mobile Homes but still haven't printed some of them.

DC: Which aspect or which part of the preparation do you enjoy the most, find most interesting?

PG: For me the most rewarding aspect was creating the artist book / catalogue (Harsh Realty). It allowed me to put the Mobile Homes into a larger context, to give it a "meta text".

DC: Do you believe it can be appealing to everyone, crossing economic and cultural boundaries?

PG: What I am most satisfied about in the project is that it can be appreciated (or not) for either of the two main readings of the work. One can believe and be fascinated by the narrative that I destroy real homes to make pictures or one can discover the fiction and appreciate the alternate narrative that that affords.

DC: What issues (topics, subjects or events) motivate you?

PG: In all of my work I am perhaps most interested in exploring, and exploiting, our need to believe and to feel certainty. Governments, corporations, families, individuals -- all of us -- create narratives and put them out into the world. They allow us to mirror ourselves into our environment and to influence in some way that environment to solidify and to justify our existence.

INTERVIEW WITH ALICE CHANNER

DC: What is the one thing you wish viewers would understand about your work or what is one thing you feel is most misunderstood about your work?

AC: To assume that the communication model contains something to be misunderstood in the first place. I hope that I can be ambitious about the language art can attempt to establish, and to me that means trying to imagine different ways of speaking and acting. These are less to do with communicating a specific message and more attempts to create a particular kind of spatial configuration that can be entered and experienced. I'm optimistic about my chosen category (art), and that's the risk I've taken.

DC: Can you explain your piece Untitled, (Hair Pins)? Your process and its significance to you?

AC: Untitled, (Hair Pins) piece was a work that led me forward rather than the other way around. I remember very clearly installing it at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery as part of a group show, Took My Hands Off Your Eyes Too Soon. The drama of the effect it created on the space around it took me by surprise. I stood back, looked, and learnt a lot from what was happening right in front of me. Here was this untitled thing, hardly an object, that was acting so strongly on the wall below and above it. It reminded me of something Bridget Riley said, "A stripe is all edge, and it's along the edge that interaction happens". I think a great deal of what I'm trying to do is to use objects to set up or to act as those kinds of edges. Another thing I return to is attempting to give the work the status of clothing, which only exists in relation to a body, a context, and the other parts of an outfit. Sculpture as a kind of dressing for a space.

DC: Would you say you have a signature aesthetic to your work?

AC: Maybe what I am really inventing is a kind of aesthetic template that consists of my practice as a whole, and brings all its disparate parts together momentarily across space and time. I have certainly exploited aesthetics as a way of unifying a show or a group of works together as a temporary 'whole'. The stripe, particularly, with its ability to exist optically outside of time, has been a useful tool in this respect. All of my materials, both objects and ideas, are aesthetic leftovers of a kind. When I make a drawing of a neck scarf or a cast of a bangle, I'm trying to reduce the object to some kind of aesthetic residue that it possesses and cannot be erased. I think that what may be at stake in my work is what can be done with aesthetics, what I am still able to extract from it now. Duchamp said that an artwork was only an artwork for a brief period of time – he gave them 10 years. The question he's left for me to work through is what happens to them afterwards? What can I make of the aesthetic leftovers left behind for me by others that have gone before?

DC: What (topics, subject's, events) motivates you at this moment?

AC: I'm motivated as much by the topic, subject, event or content as it is the way in which I'm able to look at or position it (is that what formalism is?). I want to try to open up spaces below, beside, inside and between things that facilitates, necessitates and suggests a particular way of looking

INTERVIEW WITH THOMAS DEMAND

DC: What is the one thing you wish viewers would understand about your work or what is one thing you feel is most misunderstood about your work?

TD: Hard to say, as I don't have prefixed expectations about the viewer's response. One has to let things go at some point. However, people seem to assume I am pessimistic or cold-blooded. The opposite is the case, as Dave Eggers said it once on my behalf: "The work that I am doing is a long and wet French kiss between my subjects and the photographic proof of them".

DC: Were you provoked, inspired, or what motivated you to create the Jackson Pollock's studio piece?

TD: The resemblance between the all overness of his work and the background light peeking through the creases of the barn.

DC: Is there a particular subject/scene you have wanted or have tried to create that won't lend itself to your process?

TD: The scene in Toy Story 2 where Potatohead tries to cross a street.

DC: What do you find valuable about the space between where reality becomes imaginary?

TD: It's the space we live in.

Desiree Cronk holds a degree in Cultural Art History from the University of Minnesota. Currently, she is the Collection Associate for World Class Boxing (WCB) in Miami, Florida. Earlier in her career Desiree was an Associate with the Walker Art Center and Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

Many thanks to Debra and Dennis Scholl, Natalia Benedetti and George Sanchez-Calderon for their support.