Artist Interview at MoMA - PS1: Debo Eilers

Debo Eilers Live at PS1

It's amazing how much you learn from talking to an artist. At PS1 I spoke with Debo Eilers about his sculpture work, which he recasts as recycled prop until someone decides to purchase it. From rebuilding Kanye West's sunglasses after a performance in which they were being handed out to children in Union Square in Manhattan, to hiring a 13-year-old to go shopping on Canal St. and then perform alongside him at a PS1 performance involving his work, Debo creatively reuses his pieces and reanimates them in various contexts. The canvas-size palette, on which he mixes his oils and resins, doubles as a wall hanging and a picture frame showcasing a photograph from the performance Secret Faggot, which was performed by a band of his friends.

In speaking to Debo, it is easy to see how malleable the vision of the artist can be. He nods and listens carefully and responds with new details related to the migratory nature of his work. On August 8th, during the well-attended PS1 performance, all the pieces he had set up in the space he shared with Tamar Halpern were moved or altered. The stage he had built for Secret Faggot was split into its constituent pieces and turned upside down. The broken mirror floor covering from his studio, which he had transposed onto the floor of the exhibit space, was stacked against a wall in pieces, and three of his mixed-media paintings had new plastic figurines of animals and fish stuck to them. The 13-year-old had made all the changes: she was empowered to alter the artist's vision as part of the performance.

Debo's work bears references to the aesthetic of Richard Hamilton, Cy Twombly and Gerhard Richter. He questions power dynamics in constructed interior environments, works with sculptural cutouts that are relatively two-dimensional and superimposes photography on painted cast plastic.

Artist Interview at MoMA - PS1: Franklin Evans

After reveling in watching a few others being playful, including a young girl and a group of 20-somethings running around in a frenzy, bouncing yoga balls, I clambered up the PS1 front steps and into the museum entrance. Feeling inspired, I asked the desk attendant if PS1 accepts proposals - still continuing to hope that she did not smile and shake her head no - as I bought a ticket and disappeared into the hallways of the former public school building. The first room I stumbled into absolutely floored me. Trust me, this is not a bad pun. The artist, Franklin Evans had covered floor, ceiling and walls in a labyrinthine pattern of tape, notebook paper and thread.

Franklin Evans     

I could not help but take my shoes off when I walked into Franklin Evans's painting. It was like walking into someone's memory unraveling itself in still time. A chromatic masterpiece of tape, printouts and notebook paper, Evans's walk-in painting evokes a deconstructionist palimpsest space with the celebratory pomp of Constructivism. While easily conducive to hours of scrutinizing his writing, his small, pixel-based watercolors, which read like mini-landscapes on ruled notebook paper, and old printouts of critical reviews of his work, the work as a whole presents a formidable trompe l'oeil. Strips of color dance around the PS1 room his 3D painting inhabits: they take over the parquet floors, the white walls and even the ceiling, slicing their way through recursively. Some hang precariously, ready to snap off their axis and curl up on the floor. I wanted to use it as meditation space, but I am not sure if that is what the artist had in mind.

Arttists Speak interviewed Evans about his work:

AS: You are primarily a painter. What made you create an environment you can walk into?

FE: Paint is one of the primary materials I am working with and with Painting historically.  The walk-in aspect is linked both to an installation space composed of a traditionally flat medium and to the interior painting space that exists in what I perceive as a multi-dimensional brain.  I hope the installation reads as thinking painting that exists as object, dissolution of object and peripheral information (history, criticality, process, failures) that are part of making things.

AS: Work/Play/Space - where did this exhibition name come from and how does it relate to your work? I know that space is an important concept for you.

FE: Workplayspace is akin to timecompressionmachine whereby dissimilar elements are contextualized by one another, equal and unequal parts the seriousness of work, the free-for-all of play and the multidimensional of space (implying a non-linear time), space that is both literally and informed by past and future space.

AS: Are Marc Chagall and Frank Stella two of your influences? How have they influenced your work?

FE: Chagall not at all.  Although I recently saw an amazing Chagall in Prague.  Stella, quite a lot.  In particular, Stella predetermined way of working in the Black Paintings and in his cosmologic spiraling forms of recent wall reliefs.

AS: In reference to freakout, the Jeff Bailey gallery press release describes your paintings as both "celebratory and psychedelic." What kind of planning goes into achieving these effects? What struck me about your PS1 walk-in environment was the simultaneous unity and chaos of the piece. It seemed to be in process. I almost wanted to pick up the threads on the ground and start adding to it myself. At the same time, there was a logic I did not want to disrupt.

FE: I appreciate that you did not physically disrupt the allusion to my working process.  It is almost enough that you wanted to think about it and possibly take away from it to your own practice.  The planning in my current work is quite active now.  In “freakout” days, I was process oriented but only in the allowance for chance elements to watercolor on paper.  Now I have many processes that I juxtapose in the hope that cross-contamination will lead to new processes (painted tape on wall grounds infecting the reframing of foundational viewing of art exhibitions, etc.)  It is definitely not a free-for-all.  For example, my floor piece composed of all the press releases from exhibitions I saw last year (extracted of the image) wore during the summer at PS1, particularly during the busy Saturday WarmUp Sessions.  I was away all of August and upon my return, much of the paper had torn and scattered through the installation.  It was exciting initially to see the change, but after a few minutes I read a chaos that didn’t connect to my intent.  Thus I decided to reorder the torn piece back into the initial path but under a protective layer of bubblewrap.  The path return to its initial form and the entropic process was highlighted.

AS: What kinds of collaborations have you participated in the past and what kinds of collaborations do you seek?

FE: I have collaborated performatively with writers and choreographers, both in visual design and in content of the performance.  I have also collaborated as a curator with others.  I look for collaborations that involve ideas that I cannot develop in my isolated practice.  And I hope to stretch the boundaries of my practice through these collaborations.

AS: Tell me more about how you collected material for the PS1 exhibit.

FE: “Timecompressionmachine” came out of the work I started to develop in fall 2008 at the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation Space Program in DUMBO.  I wanted to use the entire studio as a working laboratory of space, idea, material, architecture.  It was a place as much for isolated reading as it was for exploring materials.  I documented this activity daily with still images for 12 discrete points in which the life of the studio would begin and end because of the know duration of the program (1 year).  Much was open in what I could explore, but it was clear that the studio would only have a 1 year life.  I described the year that in reference to Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking” a coming to terms with the end of a life.  I called it “Component System Sub-System: A Year of Magical Thinking.”  Component was objects like watercolors, wall marks, brushstrokes, books, diaristic notes.  They were arranged into sub-systems, usually wall or extensions from the wall – “turningtime” “treetarget” “friedrichspastfromthefuture”.  And these became the overall system.  This passed onto my solo show in Sep 2009 titled “2008/2009 < 2009/2010” the past always being less than the present (given the assumption of the lens of subjectivity as filter to anything that has occurred in linear measurement of time).  I re-presented some of the elements from “CSSS: A Year of Magical Thinking” but had new architectural consideration in the gallery space and I was addressing more directly ideas of time and duration rather than time and closure.  All this was brought forward to MoMA PS1 where I literally had to compress my working process of nearly 1 year into something that would be built in 3 or 4 weeks.  Moreover, I was compressing one and half years into something that would be show for 5 months.  My hope is that the piece is transporting on multiple levels (literal, fantastical, historic).

MoMA - PS1: SO-IL

This time I walked to PS1. On a scorching New York summer day, I ventured out of my sister's Manhattan apartment on 20th St. and 1st Ave. and made my way north toward the Queensborough Bridge. I was going to see the annual courtyard installation before it closed on September 6th. My friend Ted Baab had helped design it while working for the architecture firm SO-IL, Solid Objectives - Idenburg Liu. Before getting on the bridge, I stepped into The Orchard House Cafe, where the owner raised an eyebrow when I asked if he had iced coffee. It turned out to be an excellent choice, including the complimentary soy milk on a self-serve counter. Sadly, I finished my drink before I had crossed into Queens and suffered the remainder of the walk through the scorching heat, alongside bikers pedaling their way up the bridge ramp, and later on, other pedestrians crossing over sweltering tarmac, under softly screeching rail lines in Long Island City. It was a Monday, and I was thrilled that PS1 was open.

As I turned the corner into the courtyard on the right, I realized that I was walking on sand. Medium-sized green and purple yoga balls, rolling on a barely visible supporting net, hovered above me. For a moment, I thought I could hear the sound of reeds whistling in the breeze. Turning around, I read the explanation on the 20-foot high concrete wall that enclosed the urban courtyard-cum-urban beach. Vertical poles laid out in a grid and anchoring the overarching net generated sound. The sign encouraged me to try shaking one of them, so I did. A loud, windswept sound took flight, disappearing into the blue sky above the net. I made for the hammock in a corner and starting swinging back and forth on it, waiting for the movement to vibrate across the net/sound system. To call it an installation would not be doing it justice. The courtyard at PS1 had been transformed into an immersive environment with remnants of a bar in the corner opposite the hammock: PS1 hosts "Warm Up" Saturday parties during July and August each year with a lineup of bands.

I proceeded into the bigger courtyard, which leads to the museum entrance. In the center was a large bathtub filled with yoga balls. (At this point I had already begun to think of them as beach balls.) The net above this gravel-filled courtyard waned onto the bathtub, meeting it along its perimeter, but with two openings for ball retrieval. I decided to be playful and took a ball from the pool and threw it up onto the net through one of the openings. It rolled back in my direction and into the water with a glide. It took a few tries to get it to roll away over the hills and valleys formed by the net canopy. In select locations, tubes ran through the net and sprinkled water at their endpoints. Just the idea for such a hot day! I am sure the Warm Up partiers felt the same way.

SO-IL: Ted Baab

"The life of the structure is always changing based on its context. The proposal sought to accommodate both the Warm Up parties with 3000 attendees and daily museum goers," noted Ted Baab, a member of the SO-IL Pole Dance design team.

In an interview with Arttists Speak, Baab recounted some of SO-IL's guiding concepts and the Brooklyn-based firm's local vision for the design. "You can only go to Zaha Hadid's Guggenheim if you fly to Abu Dhabi. The grid of poles references a modernist grid re-imagined in a populist way," he reported. According to Baab, the foam squiggly benches pictured above are a direct reference to Archizoom's reinterpretation of the modernist grid. The 1960s group constructed a node-based endless grid and imagined organic ways to occupy it.

"Florian started with the idea that it could be an unstable structure," Baab refers to Florian Idenburg, Principal-In-Charge of the SO-IL proposal. The goals of the project were to make something un-monumental, without an inside or outside, un-object-like and not stationary. "What is left over is totally defined by time, place and audience. The project creates a circumstance out of everyday things."

Under the constraints of the requisite $85,000 budget, SO-IL was able to mount the grid of fiberglass poles and wire them into the ground with sound filters attached to control the characteristics of the sound produced. The Arup Acoustics- designed sound room, which looks like a ticket booth at the entrance of the exhibit, automatically computes all the signals that the accelerometers attached to the base of each pole detect with changes in the speed and direction of movement. Constructed with off-the-shelf components, the installation is easily dismantled and recyclable.