Sculpture Magazine January/February, 2005 Vol. 24, Issue 1. Working in the World: A Conversation with The Art Guys by Christopher French

Transcription

1 Sculpture Magazine January/February, 2005 Vol. 24, Issue 1 Working in the World: A Conversation with The Art Guys by Christopher French Jack Massing and Michael Galbreth met in 1982 while students at the University of Houston. They began making work together the following year, and after graduating in 1984 began exhibiting together under the nom de guerre The Art Guys. Twenty years on, their diverse artistic collaborations continue to be as funny, biting, incisive, notorious, and (sometimes) just plain baffling as ever. Galbreth and Massing have created and performed wacky scenarios that critique the humdrum routines of daily life; made decidedly odd sculptures out of all manner of altered found materials; and partnered with clothing designer Todd Oldham to brand clothing. They have exhibited their work in museums and galleries worldwide. During most of their two decades in Houston The Art Guys have operated out of a rented studio/living quarters in a former mattress factory. They fashioned it into a central spot in the city s artistic firmament by hosting events, presenting decidedly alternative and opinionated exhibitions of work by Massing and Galbreth, and an array of the local and national artists that they favored. Depending on their mood, they advertised their studio as the Art Guys World Headquarters, MOMAG (Museum of Modern Art Guise), Metropolitan Museum of Art Guys, Art Guys Ink, The Museum of Fine Art Guys, The New Museum of Contemporary Art Guise and The Museum of Fine Arte Guizados, Ink. This fifteen-year tradition will end shortly as they realize their plan to construct their own studio building. The Art Guys production has also reached a point of transition, with the pair taking on major public commissions, including their decidedly glamorous Video Ring at the new Terminal E of Houston s Bush Intercontinental Airport, a second, sculptural installation planned at Bush Intercontinental, and an upcoming airport terminal sculpture for Phoenix, Arizona. Artist and writer Christopher French spoke with Massing and Galbreth about the continuing saga of The Art Guys and the vagaries of working together as an artistic duo. You recently completed your first major public art project, Video Ring. MG In our original presentation we called our proposal a video piece, and suddenly everyone wanted to see storyboards. But we did not have a narrative in mind at all. If you think outside narrative terms the video screen becomes a very sophisticated light bulb. You can change the color and get variations within

2 each bulb at will, and subject matter is minimized. In this sense, Video Ring is a light sculpture. JM We shot a lot of simple subjects, and combined them intuitively. For example, we saw balloons on an antenna of a car in a used car lot. We shot this, and edited and processed the footage. This became our balloon section. We did the same thing with our garden. We composed the soundtrack in the same way, by collecting local sounds, sampling them, and then processing and arranging them. The transitions between segments became key. Did you use found imagery, or did you record all of your own images? JM We shot everything in Houston; most material was shot in the immediate vicinity of our studio. We work with one three-chip Sony TRV-900 digital camera. It gives us a strong image, and the camera is not physically intrusive, so we can record easily. We shot and processed all the images ourselves taking turns with camera work, editing, and soundtrack composition. From my experience Video Ring is expressionistic and painterly, like an animation. MG At a certain point we became concerned that some of the images were becoming too recognizable, and we tried to remove any trace of narrative or allegory. In some cases we filtered images almost to the point of abstraction. JM We also imposed a few restrictions. No audio or video using language. In an international airport terminal, English-only content limits the audience. We wanted it to be open-ended, which is one of our guiding principles for all of our work. This abstractness seems different from much of your work.

3 Suitcase Wheel, 1995 MG A lot of our earlier sculptures Carrot Wheel, Suitcase Arch, or Shiner Bock Sphere used circular iconography to explore everyday materials. But when we devised Video Ring our discussions were not only technological or formal, but also in terms of how the audience would deal with it. Structurally the piece is not a narrative but a light sculpture. We composed a video loop to exist as a totality within 80 televisions. This is a larger scale than any of our other videos. JM Each monitor shows the same image, delayed three frames from one monitor to the next, so that each image takes 7.8 seconds to cycle the ring. Because it is time-based, you get one image that comes up on monitor one, quickly followed by another image, while the first image appears on monitor 2. It is like pulling a chain.

4 Video Ring, 2003 Contrast Video Ring with your earlier video efforts. MG A lot of our work was short one or two minutes, like our television commercials. We never took the durational approach. Some documented our performances. Others recorded very Rube Goldberg-esque situations, rather like Fischli and Weiss s The Way Things Go. Your current project is Height Like Mike. JM Height Like Mike consists of a pair of boots that were altered and placed in a vitrine. After this phase was finished, Houston collector Lester Marks purchased the artwork. The act of buying the boots transformed them from static pieces of sculpture into props for the performances that result from having my height become the same as Mike s height. We will do this from

5 April 1, 2004 to April 1, 2005 at selected public events. Then the boots go back into the vitrine, which will also contain a Height Like Mike diary and house a small television monitor to display a short video. We were inspired by Chris Burden s performance residue pieces. He put stuff in glass vitrines, labeled them, and sold the object. This reverses that, like a backwards reliquary or an activated readymade. We make the dimensional form, and then make the event. What is it like to be Height Like Mike? JM 5 1/4 inches makes a dramatic difference. The weird thing is that my other limbs are still the same size I m just taller. Not only do I look freakish, the idea of sitting down in a chair becomes extremely challenging. I fell the first time, and I was really surprised how fast I came down. Luckily I didn t get hurt. Since then I have worn them more than a half-dozen times. Most recently I wore them to our opening at Galleri Stefan Andersson in Sweden. The Swedes loved it, but then a lot of them are fairly tall. Is this your first activated piece? JM Yes, but it was really an outgrowth of Suits: the Clothes Make the Man, in that it is yearlong, and that it involves Michael and I in public. But there is no leasing of ad space, so it doesn t address issues of commerce, notoriety, and sponsorship.

6 Talk about your Suits project. SUITS: The Clothes Make the Man, JM We were watching one of those New Year s Day football games sponsored by a fast food or credit card company. We combined that blanket sponsorship with the idea of paying individual athletes millions of dollars to wear a logo. Now, no one is going to call up and say We ll pay you 1.5 millions this year to wear a logo. So we decided to reverse the usual dynamic by going directly to the companies. We didn t want charity, or to become a 501 [c] 3 and raise money for our project. We wanted to be in the business. So we looked at ad rates, figured out the mapping of our suits, based on what NASCAR drivers wore. One thing led to another. A lot of your recent work seems concerned with entrepreneurship and the structure of selling. MG We want to be part of the dialogue of everyday American life without sacrificing our artistic priorities and values. My role model in this is Christo, because his end product is both a sculptural piece and a dialogue with the community with which he works.

7 The suits themselves ended up in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. JM Yes, but the larger result came from the movie and the book. We planned these from the very beginning, as ways to leverage ourselves. We could say to potential sponsors, if you buy into this suit not only will we be wearing it, but your ad will appear in a movie and a book. We spent the entire year of 1997 selling ads so we could wear the suits the following year. The combination of event and documentation is one of the reason that I think Suits retains its integrity, for all its salesmanship. Suits is like a lot of your work in that it incorporates your own images like a signature or logo. MG We have positioned ourselves as agents of celebrity, and that s what allowed us to sell the ads for Suits. The Art Guys has its own personality that is really quite separate from each of us. This allows us to do things that as individuals we might not otherwise do. Our personalities disappear into The Art Guys. And the name is easy to say, easy to remember; it does become, like you say, a logo. This branding concept permeates many levels of our work. Why does this entity, which is larger than either of our physical beings, work? This brings us to marketing, and advertising, and so many areas that I think are so important to American culture. But I think our basic approach is sculptural, just like classical performance artists like Vito Acconci or Bruce Nauman. They worked out of sculpture into performance. The Art Guys production is extremely diverse and opportunistic. You seem to take advantage of whatever you come across. MG We are more than schizophrenic we are all over the map. That comes from the fluidity of our working and together for so long. We have become comfortable with the idea of being uncomfortable, which is our willingness to expand our selection of materials, or put ourselves in situations that may or may not work. As people who work in a sculptural vein, we are probably most akin to tinkerers or experimenters. JM Sometimes we make scenarios, but usually our art happens as a result of seeing something, seizing upon it, and then talking things through. The birdhouses we sold on the freeway in 1991, for example, came about because we noticed that people sold all sorts of stuff by the side of the road. We talked about how fun that could be, which led to the question, What would we sell? We thought about art, but who would stop on the side of the freeway to buy art? So we made birdhouses. We made a bunch of blanks, and started decorating them. Second question, When shall we do this? Labor Day Weekend is when a lot of people are out and about. So we put out a press release, sent out invitations

8 just like any art gallery would. And there was our art gallery, by the side of the road. There is plenty of parody and critique in these pieces to go along with the humor. JM Parody and critique plays a strong role in our work. MG Humor is a complex emotion, and it doesn t work if you think about it too much. When you react to something by laughing, it is an uncontrolled response. To define that is to acknowledge the quirkiness of the world, where things don t always work out right. Ours is not only an institutional critique about galleries and selling art. We are making fun of ourselves too. We end up looking pretty stupid in some of our pieces. Is humor your vernacular, the common language you share? JM We incorporate humor into our work because we enjoy it. That is our nature, our intuitive way of dealing with the world. We use humor to quell our individual tendencies or desires. For example, I think there is a craftsman in me who would be happy making objects. I think there is a composer in Mike that he sublimates. Do you work on each piece together? MG No. We work every which way there is no prescribed pattern. JM Mike does more of the drawings, because he likes to draw. I would define our labor specialties along these lines I have a tendency to work with my hands, and Mike has a tendency to think things through with drawing. But because there are two of us, there are a lot of talk that goes on between us about the work, so that no successful piece can be attributed to a happy accident. In the same way, if something fails, it really fails two people thought really hard about it and this is all they got. In Sweden you presented one of your match installations, in which you arrange matches to create images on walls. Someone lights them, they burn, and then the burnt matches remain as wall sculptures. Yet you talk about this piece as a drawing. JM It is a performance drawing. We think of drawing as a gesture or gateway to an idea. You can draw with car lot banners, or flame, or a dump truck. MG We also make computer line drawings that use very unconventional approaches and materials to make what we still call a drawing. But a lot of our drawings use traditional materials and methods. I like drawing as part of our vocabulary because it connects Art Guy production, however wacky, with the

9 great historical lineage of art. Drawing is a fundamental. It is to art as dribbling is to basketball; you are not going to play basketball unless you know how to dribble. I get the feeling that talking is your way of getting yourselves in trouble, and working is your way getting out of trouble. MG In our work one thing leads to another. For example, in 1990 we made 1000 Coats of Paint. It involved twelve common objects, including a telephone, hammer, baseball glove, and a teddy bear. We made a chart listing all the colors, and then checked each one off as we applied them. It took us nine months. This resulted in our performance billboard, of the same title. It took another ten months to realize. We hired the painter Bernard Brunon to realize it. We thought this was a perfect match. Bernard will make some money, and he can articulate what painting is about. So it worked out all the way around. We were not working outside of the artworld, we were just working in the world, and that is what is really important to us.