S C U L P T R U E

Catalogue contents:

1. PawnShop interviews:
Hansch, Kleinschrodt, Vascellari and Verhoeven
about the context of Sculptrue.

2. James Krone in Conversation with Justin Hansch

3. James Krone in Conversation with Kelly Kleinschrodt

4. James Krone in Conversation with Nico Vascellari

5. Pawnshop interviews:
Lee Grandjean, Artist and Senior Tutor of Sculpture at the Royal College of Art, London

6. Chosen text by Julie Verhoeven

1. PawnShop Interviews Justin Hansch, Kelly Kleinschrodt, Nico Vascellari and Julie Verhoeven. October 2007

PawnShop:
This is a sculpture survey exhibition and you were invited because that is not your primary medium. We were interested in the objects we have seen in and around your practice. How did the concept of this show influence your thinking in considering what to exhibit?

Justin Hansch:
I’ve been wanting to make some fountains for my sculpture garden. Sculptrue provided a swift kick in the ass.

Kelly Kleinschrodt:
For Sculptrue, I am extending a collection of supports to fit the gallery space as opposed to a small tabletop stage, expanding the setup beyond the field of view that my lens would capture.

Nico Vascellari:
I would say that sculpture has become my main medium at the moment. For the exhibition, I thought about which sculptures you’ve seen of mine. 
’90-60-90′ was the only one I could come up with. I thought you’de like that one. I was right.

Julie Verhoeven:
Chose to politely not think too hard about it as it could inhibit my natural responses.

PawnShop:
What interests and drives you in the materials and methods you use?

Justin Hansch:
It might as well be a painting.

Kelly Kleinschrodt:
I start with materials that are found in my house or in a craft store. It amuses me to work with materials that are domestic in origin and/or other materials that are charged with some notion of existing just for the “lay” creative act. I tend to stick to loose guidelines involving states of strangeness, intimacy, contingency, and embellishment.

Nico Vascellari:
Void. Absence and boredom.

Julie Verhoeven:
Amusement, passing of time and urgency.

PawnShop:
What are you working on in the studio right now?

Justin Hansch:
What Father Wants.

Kelly Kleinschrodt:
Yesterday I camouflaged gopher traps with craft moss and photographed the traps against its natural counterpart (It’s a trap!). Today I photographed a levitating piece of paper. Tomorrow I will photograph a levitating piece of paper with a black hole.

Nico Vascellari:
A large sculpture made with what remains of a crate containing a whole exhibition of mine that got destroyed during transport. Collages, a couple of new videos and a closing event for the Venice Biennial are to happen inside my installation at the Arsenale.

Julie Verhoven:
New, large work on paper.

PawnShop:
What do you love or hate about group shows?

Justin Hansch:
Groups shows usually suck due to an annoying theme or concept. Trust me, I own a museum. At the same time, when you are working with a group, and you believe in each other, trust eachother, that can be magical.

Kelly Kleinschrodt:
I like meeting artists I would not necessarily run into otherwise. I like observing other artists’ embarrassing family members that inevitably show up at the opening. I do not enjoy Charles Shaw wine.

Nico Vascellari:
Normally love and hate share the same shit when they happen to meet. When it’s for group shows, mostly it’s because of ‘themes’ or ‘artists’.

Julie Verhoven:
I hate even numbers.

PawnShop:
What is your Dream Team for a group show (and you have to be in it)?

Justin Hansch:
Katie Herzog, Kiersten Puusemp, John Knuth, Jason Starr, Jason Starr’s mom, James Krone, Justin Hansch, Bruce Nauman; maybe a couple other artists chosen by raffle. But everyone has to do the work of James Krone, including James.
Oil on Canvas. Catalog text by James Krone.

Kelly Kleinschrodt:
Gary Hill, Petrus Christus, Patty Chang, Gabriel Orozco, Robert Smithson, Kelly Kleinschrodt, Pablo Rasgado Quintanar, Ed Ruscha, and Janine Antoni.

Nico Vascellari:
Caspar David Friedrich, Cameron Jamie, Gordon Matta
Clark, Mike Kelley, Rudolf Schwarzkogler, Eva Hesse
 and…

Julie Verhoeven:
Niki De Saint Phalle, Dorothea Tanning, Marnie Weber, Jann Haworth, Julie Verhoeven.

PawnShop:
What kind of effect do you imagine your work having?

Justin Hansch:
Happy.

Kelly Kleinschrodt:
I imagine that some people will snicker and some will start talking about the weird things they do when they are alone.

Nico Vascellari:
Mental, visceral and physical effects. Possibly together.

Julie Verhoeven:
Small ripple.

PawnShop:
What is coming up for you in 2007/2008?

Justin Hansch:
I have a show with Jason Starr at China Art Objects in December. For ‘08, I plan to get back in shape and learn Spanish.

Kelly Kleinschrodt:
I am working on graduate school applications. I will have a solo at Pawnshop in spring ’08. I will go to Mexico City to work collaboratively with Pablo Rasgado Quintanar and I will trek to Paris to hang out with a fashion photographer, Catherine Louis.

Nico Vascellari:
For ‘07 a solo show at MAN Museum in Nuoro, a performance in Prague and a group show with videos from the collection of GC AC of Monfalcone. 2008 will start with a 3 month residency at American Accademy 
in Rome and then…

Julie Verhoeven:
NADA presentation with ZINGERpresents, solo show at Gallery
Tache-Levy, Brussels, and Illustrated children’s book, Cicely Scissors.

PawnShop:
What question would like to asked in an interview like this?

Justin Hansch:
Got any good jokes?

Kelly Kleinschrodt:
What object do you return to most frequently in your practice?

Nico Vascellari:
What are you listening to while answering these questions?

Julie Verhoeven:
What were your parents’ names?

PawnShop:
Please answer your answer to the previous question.

Justin Hansch:
What’s the last thing to go through a fly’s head as it hits the windshield?

Kelly Kleinschrodt:
The dead housefly.

Nico Vascellari:
Abruptum’s ‘Evil Genius’ LP. Cult album.

Julie Verhoeven:
Jack and Shirley.

2. Justin Hansch interviewed by James Krone. October 2007

James Krone: Your practice as a painter seems to be about using painting as an act to build a body of work to open up other ideas about habit and the intention and desire to make. I know that in your series, Sunday Paintings, the image selection (where you’d pull an image from a newspaper once a week) was often quite arbitrary in the sense of “like”, “taste.” You presented these works at the Circus Gallery, last June, as stacks, hung in a vertical line on the wall and also, literally, stacked on the floor. This act obviously rejects the notion of attaching too much importance to any single painting as an object of particular value. Why, then, are the individual paintings different from each other at all?

Justin Hansch: It would be boring for me to make the same painting. You know that. Part of the appeal of that project was getting a new subject to paint every week, literally delivered to my front door. All I had to do was pick my favourite picture or story and start painting. I chose the things I thought would make the best paintings. Some were better than others. One week it was the pope. The next a watermelon.

JK: I know you’d get bored painting the same painting over and over again. To some degree, though, I think a lot of artists remake the same piece for the entirety of their careers. I know you come from a certain vantage point in art making that shares a lot in common with certain German “populist” painting from the eighties. What’s interesting to me, though, is how you are reacting to the seductive elements of making a painting. Your subject has been blurred and in spite of your efforts, you have become in many ways, a real Peinture. While this sort of a thing apparently freaked Kippenberger out, driving him to sculpture and installation, Albert Oehlen seemed to have embraced this kind of painterly fascination. Is this a contradiction that interests you or are you just trying to hurt yourself with pleasure?

JH: I suppose it’s a little bit of both. I do love painting. Whenever you love something and you spend a lot of time doing it, you get better, or at least you gain authority. When you sit down at your easel, and you groove, and you do something that for one reason or another you believe to be good, that’s pleasure. That’s purpose.
And at the same time, the whole thing is quite sad, pitiful even. Nothing is sadder than a painter. Except maybe a video artist.
With so many options, it just gets harder and harder to assign value to things. A good mark is a belief. A proposition is a belief. The contigency you describe is like when everyone on your childhood soccer teams gets a trophy, even the fat goalie, and you didn’t win a single game.

JK: It is sad and lovely to become immersed and tangled in the thing you thought might behave as a can opener. It makes sense to me that you’re drawn to painting in this way because it seems to relate to a surfer’s mentality (Hansch surfs). There is that feeling, sometimes, when you’re painting that makes you forget all of the paintings you have ever done as well as the ones you’ve thought of doing. At some point, there is a break in the reverie and the painting falls into a place among everything else. You can get a high score for the way you handled the wave because you forgot everything except for the wave, but the wave goes and the score is etched. This play becomes dangerous at some point when it breeds a language. You become a secret biter as your romantic detritus develops ambitions.
Your tendency is to implement, initially, an apparatus or a system which determines how you are going to work, whether it was the Sunday Paintings or the What Father Wants series. I realize this as a formal decision to draw an immediate parameter for the work to be made within. How important is it for the architecture of your systems to hold up? Are you more intrigued with the way the interior makes it bulge?

JH: The structures, on some level, come out of a… like, insecurity. I don’t know how to just paint; I haven’t gotten there yet. I don’t know always believe in the language of painting. The systems are created to rationalize the output. The motivations are always questionable. There is a comfort in the system; I am able to trust the action. It is a miracle that there are artists, hundreds of people out there who believe that what they have to say is worth a shit to the point that it becomes their mission to communicate it. Maybe it is also true that on some level as an athlete, when I approach things, I see a structure. You have rules and standards for correctness and you can work within that structure and bend the rules and dance around precedent. As an athlete there are moments when you reach a spot where none of that matters, the structure is reduced down to opportunity and performance. And it wavers back and forth between the gestalt and the moment. And I don’t know if the practice gets you there or if you are there in spite of it.

JK: All kinds of people say all kinds of shit. I like art as a front for saying shit. If you don’t like the cargo you can still think about the ship and what it might say about the sea. Most art that I’m drawn to tosses a proposal out there. Somewhere between suggestion and description. Your work is kind of like a hard lined, mid-sized, industrial steamer, painted grey and packed with gummi bears, confetti, French ticklers and beer.
You often talk about using a conservative painting aesthetic as a vessel for less conventional ideas. In your take on certain giants, Picasso, Matisse, Cezanne, Munch, Richter, Kippenberger, etc… whose aesthetic devices you use, there is a kind of playfulness, which I guess could be viewed as both joyful and pathetic. The way you use their styles kind of seems like you see them as imaginary friends more than as historical juggernauts. From knowing you and having spent a lot of time talking about our motivations for making art, I know that friendship and forming an impetus for sociality is a cornerstone of your creative actions.
Maybe it’s easier to make the paintings if the historical precedents are turned into fuzzies. Do you see yourself as a delusional and drunk friend to art, happily stumbling down the halls of historical prescriptions, giving an open ended tour of preferable misinterpretation? Is your take on historical vandalism an act of love? What did Francis Picabia do to your family tree?

JH: You really understand my work. People often bring up my use of historical styles…I’m not even sure if I mean to do it anymore. On some level, it just comes out. Maybe it’s too much education. In school I learned that the avant-garde is no longer possible, and authentic experience is a thing of the past. Since I rarely question anything I learned in school, I have never believed in or aspired to a Justin style. This of course, could all change in time. Regardless, I have no problem using history for my own purpose of survival and pleasure. I whole-heartedly embrace tradition when it is convenient.
There is no difference between a beer and a French tickler or Pablo Picasso and James Krone. History has authority… it’s proven, a prescription, as you say, imaginary friends with real friends. People are still drowning in information and options. Hippies and punk music. We feel like we should be over this by now, it has been lamented / theorized / rhapsodized. There is all that history that you have to deal with. Kids now will just be able to deal with it. There was a sentence while I was growing up, “Authenticity has come and gone.” Ask a 65 year old if they liked their parent’s music when they were 14. You and I have talked about the truth that subculture does not exist in the same way it used to. Maybe it never did? Time now is as good as any. It is equally, if not, more interesting now than it ever has been. Is an industrial steamer a ship, or a vacuum, or a device for cooking vegetables? Oh well, they all work anyway.

3. Kelly Kleinschrodt interviewed by James Krone. October 2007

Hi Kelly
My name is James Krone. PawnShop approached me about conducting some interviews for the next show, Are your works photographs in and of themselves or is that just the documentation of your work?
-James

Hi James,
The Sculptrue exhibition has come at a very interesting time for me as I have been questioning my role a photographer/performer/sculptor. I have a background exclusive to photography (with some video) and therefore the work was exclusively ‘for the camera’, the images are absolutely documents of time-specific occurrences/objects. The most laborious part of my process is the object preparation, which is initially conceived of and built without regard for the camera.
Sincerely, Kelly

Hi Kelly,
Thanks for the response. Vermont must be quite nice this time of year. I think the questions that your work is making you ask yourself about your relationship to the medium seems like issues a lot of young photographers are dealing with. Some photographers who come to mind, Laura Letinsky, Thomas Demand, certain works by Fischli and Weiss, James Casebere, Jeff Wall, in that their work is all very much predicated on the act of creating a staged physical representation of subject before the camera is pulled out. There seems to be a sense of humble or simple set-making going on as far as your subjects are concerned. What I mean is that they don’t necessarily seem like sculptures so much as objects manipulated specifically for the camera. At the same time they don’t seem to be still lives so much as stand-ins constructed of available apartment and studio detritus. What is your process of selection as far as your subjects are concerned? Some of them look like chance constructions, dirt sandwich…, filthy rag, while others seem more consciously arranged as if according to a plan of some kind.
-James

Hi James,
It is unusually warm here in Vermont and the color is just starting to change…
You have a very intuitive read of my work. The best images lately are these digressions of the initial setup, the detritus of the shoot. filthy rag came about when I was cleaning up the set of ouch stick (a lethal-looking dried rose cane dripping with ketchup and coming out of a hole in the floor).
Kelly

Hi Kelly,
It sounds like your making habits lie more in the mode of a studio fiddler than those of a scripted craftsman. I wanted to ask you about this kind of playful treatment of bodily references. You seem drawn to a kind of seemingly innocent, or maybe mischievous, scat. Eating dirt, smelly odors, bloody stains… I’m in Berlin right now and I think I could walk down the street to the nearest sex shop and use this list as a pretty effective shopping list. There is also a sense of resurrection in your pictures of dying plants that are bound into a more erect position. Have you ever thought of your work as a kind of potential Catholic pornography veiled by an Erwin Wurm-ish Victorianism? -James

Hi James,
I have never made this particular link, but I will ‘fess up to the conjecture since you asked. I admit to the pallid pornography under/on the surface of many of my works.
Lets just put it this way: I think about the euphemism “la petite mort” or “the little death” as dually representing death and the orgasm. Even with inanimate objects I am thinking about their life expenditure, their ability to be pleasured or harmed, their capacity to move from non-being to being to non-existence.
And then there’s the scat- I feel like the (Catholic) girl who just got caught for asking naive classmates to join the Pen15 club.
One must ponder: Is to be free from guile and stratagem to be artless?
Best, Kelly

Hi Kelly-
I think to be free from guile and strategem would be something like a medium-sized death. It seems to me that the atmospheric middle formerly known as the subconscious has risen to the surface of most art that is made these days. Anything subliminal often feels somewhat planted. Maybe the conscious state has evolved into a useless matter that is doomed to hang around in the air of the museum bookshop. How comfortable are you with allowing the viewer to wander? Every artist seems to have their own ideal parameters somewhere between cloud gazing and a fascist edict. Say something brilliant and confoundingly terminal, if you please. Otherwise, I like your last question. Maybe the interview should end with that beloved question mark. It’s up to you. It’s been great sending with you and thanks for being so generous with your time. I look forward to seeing the show.
Take care, James

Hi James,
Hmm, there is no fascism in my personal art dictionary. I am very comfortable with my viewer wandering (or not). I think mind wandering happens about 75% of the time when we are reading and it also happens a majority of the time when we are looking at art (after the initial conscious judgments of aesthetic and logical qualities). And, hopefully, it is what happens 95% of the time when we are making art. If my images start to disengage the viewer and jumpstart some other recollection, then atleast my work has been a vehicle for some original thought.
However, it may be that it takes a like mind to wander as mind wandering generally happens alongside familiarity or repetition. As I have chosen subjects that are oddly familiar, my work may tend to spur some sensation of wondering, and that is good.
As for the heavy-handed fog of the subliminal hovering over many contemporary artworks… it’s probably because the work is a memory of the subliminal, something the artist wrote down after a good ‘mind-wander.’ Artworks in this vein are more successful or genuine when the subliminal memory is used as jumping-off point and the lack of precision between the two becomes a point to wonder about.

I am not sure about the above statement being the last. I liked the previous question too, but now you have an option to work with. Enjoy your time in Berlin. Sincerely, Kelly

Hi Kelly-
Your work doesn’t project any fascist elements to me, either. I was thinking of certain artists who believe that a very strict and specific reading of their work is mandatory. Sometimes their work can be quite good, positively influential, and then harmed by the text which they encase it in, a la Peter Halley. Having said that, I also find Mary Kelly’s term, “debate specific” very useful. If one isn’t careful, they can become a sort of generalizing, unsolicited photo journalist, like Andreas Gursky. Successful art often seems to illuminate a shared subliminal space that we had been either dismayed or pleased to think of as our own. William Burroughs defined art as something which reminds us of what we had already known but forgotten. I experience a similar thing while reading where I often realise that my eyes have been scanning a page, entirely as a physical procedure, while I’ve been thinking of something else altogether. How many pages have we reread which we never absorbed the first time? How many times did I just go on to the next page? Maybe half of our knowledge comes to us as a sort of deja vu. There is a pressure on visual artists to be extraordinarily articulate, as a viewer looking at a singular piece is probably much less likely to wander. We don’t always have the next two hundred pages to reiterate. Your work, with its gaze turned to ephemera, seems to allow or even desire a certain forgetting of. Is this something you desire or is it the chance mental by-product of your interests? Sorry, I just keep having things I want to ask you. I can never shut up, once I begin. It’s been great corresponding with you. Hope to see you in LA.
Thanks again- James

Hi James,
Thanks again for your time and for engaging me in a process that has been more valuable than my thesis crit.
Warm regards, Kelly

3. Nico Vascellari interviewed by James Krone October 2007

James Krone: Your work employs certain aesthetic and ritualistic tropes of speed metal, bringing them outside of the metal environment, into art exhibition spaces. This has become a somewhat common source of material for a lot of artists over the last few years. What is your interest in this intersection?

Nico Vascellari: A lot of my influences come from direct experience with the music scene. I wouldn’t necessarily identify that scene with speed metal. I started being involved in the hardcore-punk scene when I were 15 putting up concerts and making zines, and then as the singer of different bands, releasing records for other bands, touring etc.
When I started going into museums I was blown away by a lot of what I was seeing. I was, also, feeling a lack of physicality, energy and sometimes risk…that’s where my work stands.

JK: It seems like a natural marriage and I guess that is what interests me about the work of your’s that I’ve seen. A lot of art that gets shown, which uses metal or hardcore or punk or hip hop as a reference, seems to exploit the fact that much of the art audience has a generic background with this. It often seems employed to take advantage of middle and upper middle class generalizations about these genres in order to give the artist a sense of danger or proximity to danger. Your work seems more to me to be about getting caught up in the moment of the creative act, the moment of realizing it and in analyzing and recreating its system of happening.
The piece where you perform with your parents and sister lets a bit of the steam out of this pretext of danger. It’s literally family entertainment. At the same time, you are using your family as your backing band. It’s Nico and the Vascellaris, not just The Vascellaris. There is a similar twist, although in a less humourous tone, when you present a Slayer concert as a video piece in a gallery. The polemic becomes interesting in that your participation as a member of an audience is elevated
to the creator of the art piece. Slayer becomes the hired help to some degree. Could you talk a bit about your ideas regarding the relationship between performer and audience?

NV: I feel the need to become so specific, that I become universal. I see and enjoy boundaries but I don’t care about them that much. Till this day it has been very important to me to perform live. It’s a lot about energy. It is necessary to enjoy, to improvise too. Again, all this is directly connected to my experience as a singer.

JK: You say that your take on performance is specifically related to your experience as a singer. This is usually the central position of attention in a band, from the visual perspective of a performance. What I’m trying to refer to is the tradition of the singer of a band being the physical representation of the content of the music. Maybe this experience creates a more direct transition from music performance to performance that refers to itself as art, than it would have had you been a bassist or the drummer. I’ve seen a lot more performance that took their chops from Iggy Pop, GG Allen or Mark E. Smith than from Merce Cunningham. There is quite a difference between an audience at a punk show and a group of people standing in a museum. A punk show is often much more physical, bodily, in that the performers and the audience are somewhat synchronized in the experience. I can’t ever remember seeing a mosh pit in a museum, maybe pictures of them. Does this difference affect the way you think about making or presenting your work, not so much as a boundary, but as a formal concern? I’m curious about how you develop your performances for an art audience and how or if this differs from preparing to perform a concert.

NV: I don’t demand anything from an audience but I’m very excited about getting everything they give. Audience is usually a third eye, often a third hand,
sometimes a second brain.

-James Krone is an artist living and working in Los Angeles and Berlin.

5. PawnShop interviews: Lee Grandjean, Artist / Senior Sculpture Tutor at the Royal College of Art, London

PawnShop: The concept of the multi-media artist is often considered a trait of post-modernism, but it’s as traditional as immigration and homosexuality. Yet the history of modernism predominantly tells a story of 2-D painters and canvas.
What was the important 3-D sculptural work of this period produced by painters, and was it a by-product of their practice?

Lee Grandjean: As long as our brains are housed and carried on top of our body, and as long as our eyes look out, or our hands feel towards the world around us, we will want to imagine INTO the real.
Our imagination will want to join thinking with those entities outside of us. We want to embody the dream, thought, or feeling; to give it material substance separate from ourselves. Come to think of it, the British Museum is a display of human culture representing itself as object.
As well as ‘dreaming’ onto cave walls, early humans picked up stones and bones and pieces of wood that looked like things in the world, particularly the hunted quarry. They fashioned the ‘found’ further to bring out the ‘likeness’ more.
So, painting is the dream still: the picture we imagine into; it is Alice’s looking glass.

Imagination made into ‘thing’ however, given substance, the other made into STUFF, out there, like all the other stuff, but not. Now that’s something else. Seeing image is one thing but ‘being’ it, is different. It’s getting the viewer to inhabit the idea with greater connection, to meet another body of it, as it were. Like knowing something as if it were shoved in your mouth. Isn’t that some of the drive to make sculpture? Food is close, and fucking of course. For me the imagined object, that is, the object which has had its material transformed from first function to ‘other’, is a different category of thing to that which is ‘found’. There is transformation, of course, in an intellectual way, by context, but it does not have the same kind of ambition (which may be folly) to put the idea, re-constituted as new thing, into the very substance of the material: the sculpture as a fresh event.

Painters have always been drawn to place their vision into thing. Remember Michaelangelo was a ‘multi-media’ artist. It is curious that the great 20th century imaginative advance of cubism was developed in painting, but what a sculptural vision!
All about fracturing and re-constituting things and reshaping spaces. Cubism is all about objects; a cube is a ‘thing’ after all. Picasso kicked it all off by looking at prehistoric Iberian and African sculpture. It was a sculptural imagination that propelled him through Demoiselles D’Avignon. Mattise made his clay sculpture after being inspired by the French sculptor Antoine-Louis Barrye (d.1875).
I guess a version of the modernist sculpture canon would run: Rodin, Medardo Rosso, Degas (ballet dancers in wax), Maillol, Matisse, Picasso, Julio Gonzales, Rodchenko, Henri Gaudia-Brezchka, Jacob Epstein, Brancusi, Jean Arp, Giacometti, Hepworth, Moore, Zadkin, Lipchitz, Lehmbrucke, Gabo, Marini, Calder then David Smith. You should check out Marcel’s brother, Raymond-Duchamp-Villon whose a much better sculptor than old Marcel. I think that great artists in other ways might have been, but Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Beuys rather messed something up for sculpture by being too symbolic, too cerebral, over literal and egocentric.

PS: The decline of sculpture can be linked to the demise of art colleges as places for a decent studio space: time for making and thinking. They are now streamlined and corporatized. This is an international trend. How do you see this evolution, and what are you hopes and fears for the future?

LG: In the UK, there is a problem for sculpture in the undergraduate art schools because of the lack of studio space and the tendency of new media to suit the bureaucratic mind: let’s give them all a desk and a computer, nice and neat. Yet everywhere you look in art, the sculptural imagination is in the ascendant: Hirschorn, Urs Fischer, Mathew Monahan (check him out in LA) Isa Gentsken, etc .
The imagined ‘thing’ and ‘space’ is everywhere. I feel very excited and optimistic about the more imaginative freedom and richer visual expression in much of what is going on now, and I maybe going on a bit, but I really want to be a part of it as it is much more than I am.

PS: The decree of ‘painting is dead’ echoes from the 70’s, and the medium is now perhaps stronger than ever. The phrase has never been applied to ‘sculpture’ yet it has arguably gotten a worse public status in terms of chisels, bronzes and beards. What should be dead? And what needs resuscitation?

LG: Nothing is ever dead. Whenever someone says that, then it’s probably the place to look for a way forward. Sculpture is always changing in its forms and materials. It is interesting now to see the sculptural installation; I mean, the space or housing as part of a plastic whole (Hirschorn, Bock, etc).
I want to make walls and rooms and things, all as connecting parts of an imaginative whole. But I don’t like the literal tendency of spaces made to look like they could exist somewhere else. I don’t buy the pseudo-realities of say, Nelson and others. Too theatrical. Saw Barney at the Serpentine, very little sculptural invention. He makes good, simple, physical performances but all that myth making is just embarrassing. I’m interested in resuscitating a more complex sense of the organic. The simple blob is not possible anymore (Arp and Moore) but what about all the biology and cosmology that hasn’t been used yet. All the fluidity and complexity of matter should be reflected more in how we make things.

PS: With most artists (through the ages) working across a range of mediums, why do we need the categories? Beyond the human necessity for categorisation, are there pros and cons intellectually for those making? (And looking?)

LG: Art is freedom, so fuck categories. BUT… I will die thinking there is a particular kind of imaginative vision that expresses itself through ‘stuff’ and in ‘space’ and it’s called sculpture. But it will take many forms. I’d like to do a book in which artists talk about the moment in their lives when stuff out there became attached to their imagination, when it becomes more than itself. In a talk recently, I told the story of being a small boy and kicking randomly discovered stones along a road. After a while, I could not discard them because I had become attached in some emotional way. My pockets would be filled with stones that I’d take home to scratch and mark and clean up. I imagined they would be lonely if thrown back into the world.
Sculpture is loving the world.

PS: The notion of truth in art seems a nostalgic term. As does sculpture. Both are paradoxical and subjective. But do you see truth as relevant and possible, or something we all agreed to forget about and go get a latte?

LG: Not truth as some given ideal. No, I don’t believe in that. But I do believe in being somehow objectively true to the work and to how my intelligence perceives what is emerging out of the process of making. I think I make a great mess and then try to see what is there and where the journey of decisions or play has taken me. My truth is being true to whatever emerges, to make it more clear if I think it’s worth it. I mean, often I destroy old work that once I thought made some sense but turns out to be crap (in my opinion). There is a truth in the struggle to break through one’s own taste. To realise there is something true IN THE WORK even though you think it looks ugly or wrong.
Great artists, who make breakthroughs, often doubt it. They think they’ve gone off the edge or what they’ve created is an abomination. Well, I am a romantic, I suppose, in always thinking there is a work to make that I have not seen before. Everything is relevant, everything is possible and making art is a great privilege. We should keep it in perspective, though, because there’s a lot of real pain out there in the world and what we are is luxury. But it’s always gone on. It’s the most profoundly human activity: employing our brains in this way, wondering and imagining, getting our hands into stuff and shaping it. It’s the beginning and the end.

PS: If you could expand the roster of this show, what would you include?

LG: Oh come on, that’s too obvious. And any artist must answer: Me.
To be serious, I realise I wouldn’t fit your criteria of someone who isn’t usually an object maker. There’s a very good painter called Stuart Cumberland (shows at THE APPROACH, London). I’d like to see what sculpture he would make.

6. Chosen text by Julie Verhoeven

The Rezillos
(My Baby Does) Good Sculptures.
1978

She don’t care
For one night stands
And naughty boys
With sweaty hands
She got a thing
About carving wood
Or shaping a figure
From a lump of mud

Don’t love my baby for her pouting lips
Don’t love my baby for her curvy hips
I love my baby coz she does good sculptures yeah



Her fingernails
Roge talens fonce
They cut my skin
More than once
She is a thing
Made of solid love
She shape my body
Like a lump of mud

Don’t love my baby for her pouting lips
Don’t love my baby for her curvy hips
I love my baby coz she does good sculptures yeah



She is cool
In her studio
E-I-Addi
Add-EE-O
he killa dilla
She cut it smooth
Always looking
Like she never loose

Don’t love my baby for her pouting lips
Don’t love my baby for her curvy hips
I love my baby coz she does good sculptures yeah