The idea of flux, kind of constant change, whether it be our sense of time or geological time or cosmic time. It's always there, and I think that maybe it's a way of dealing with the idea of mortality, trying to acknowledge the fact that all things change, and whereas, maybe death is the end of one state of being it's the beginning of something else. I'm not talking about going to heaven or being reincarnated as a toad, I'm talking about the idea that the molecules in our bodies, or at least the atoms, were here at the beginning of the universe, and the sense that we are basically matter.
I see myself as a very eclectic person and artist. I use all kinds of sources for the work as maybe some large pieces. Ideas come from all kinds of areas; literature, popular culture, dreams, you name it.
For me, my work is pretty much a lot of my identity. I mean I live to work, basically. With money I'm able to earn I don't put into clothes especially or things like that. I use it as a way of buying time to work. That's how I see money for me. It represents time to be by myself working on these ideas. So in that sense, the work is kind of a surrogate religion, maybe not so surrogate, maybe it is part religion.
We're living history all the time, in the papers, in the news, you think about stuff and it goes into your brain and you think about it and it comes out somehow. You have an idea; you've heard a phrase, or you're angry, or something disturbs you, or something seems paradoxical to you, you explore that idea, much like a writer would explore maybe an idea through metaphor. Maybe artists use their vehicle to explore ideas, so I think the things that interest me are the kind of idea of continuous change and how nothing stays the same and it's always disintegrating into something more.
A large part of California is a sensual state. It has a huge range of geographical features and in addition to the deserts and the mountains and the huge coast line. The fact that we don't have harsh seasons, like they have in the East, means you can have convertible cars. There's more sunshine, per year here, and it affects people psychologically and physically. I think California has always been an attractive place for many, a lot of strange cults have been here over the years. Again, it's an experimental place.
I've spent most of my life in L.A. and I'm still amazed at things that I don't know about the place. There are a lot of places I've never been to yet and I may never even make it. There's so much here and there's so much of a variety in terms of culture now. It's amazing. It's all here in one big city. In a lot of ways, the city is unique in the world because it's hard to find another city that has the diversity and range. It's a microcosmic planet, if you look at it that way. And in that sense, it's very much an experimental city.
I always thought that art that is produced somehow has to reflect the zeitgeist or the ambiance and the time and the history in which it is produced. I think it's inescapable. It's like we look back now, at work done savoring the thirties, and you can almost tell it was done during that period of time. Now maybe, that's a style of period or something, I don't know. I think my work, or the things that interest me, come out of my reaction to history.
The idea of getting old and dying, falling apart, does not sound fun at all to me, but it's an observation that I'm sure I'm not the first one to express. There're thousands of year of history attest to the same thing. Maybe it's the way I'm personally dealing with that inevitable transition. So I'm making metaphors out of the work possibly to think about that and try to get comfortable with the idea.
That's what I like about the idea of the aesthetic experience, the idea of both enjoying looking at works of art and how they kind of talk to you, and also the process of making art, getting back to that idea of the aesthetic experience of making art is very important, It's another way of thinking. Instead of just using your brain, you're using your hands to think with. They're different connections, the brain that comes through the fingertips as opposed that comes through the eyes and ears.
You see a lot of interesting visual irony on movie sets all the time, you know duality, set illusions, the reality, all that stuff. You play with interesting materials that you couldn't afford to otherwise. You meet interesting people that you work with, have special machinists or mold makers and make-up people, and people who make prosthetic appliances for actress' faces. It's really interesting kind of witch's brew of people in that business, aside from the sleeze bags you hear about on the financial end.
I think we all have a tendency to have things. Even, I've noticed, people on the street collect things. So I think there's some kind of human impulse to collect. That's why they build museums, I guess.
I can't make things I don't feel passionately about. I've never been able to. Years ago when I was going through college, I was trying to earn some extra money by making motel paintings and it was the hardest work I've ever done in my life, psychically. It was just torture.
I want to create objects that will stimulate the viewer in ways that I am stimulated by these objects. Now that's an ideal situation and the artist has no control over what his audience is going to think, but they can try to communicate some quality, some poetry through the work and just hope that the viewer has something in the vicinity of a similar experience.
I don't need to control the mind of my viewer. Now this might sound contradictory because I want to make these installations set up an environment that will produce a certain kind of experience in the viewer, but beyond a certain point, I take hands off and leave it up to chance and personal experience. So maybe it's a marriage of control and no control we're talking about where the artist produces the artifact or the environment and then walks away from it, and the second half of the equation is the viewer and their personal history and how they feel about what they're experiencing.
Making art can be maddening at times and frustrating and not always rewarding, frequently not rewarding. But you do it because you believe in it and you do it as a passion that drives you, and it sustains you during those lean times.
I don't refer to myself as a sculptor, but I use the word "visual artist." I prefer that, because that leaves the medium wide open because I've got ideas for film and video, things I haven't had the time yet to really fully explore, probably never will, but I want to be able to have that option open to kind of do that.
As a kid, I wanted to be an inventor and realizing that being an artist is like being an inventor because you create problems for yourself and you solve them and you create things that weren't there before. That's awfully simplified, but that's how it is.
Art is a funny thing. It's a communicative medium. It really is, and it works outside of literature, the movies, stage, it has its own realm. It's like when you say "The Arts," those are all the arts, dance, theater, ballet. So within that set of areas of expression, we have visual art and it is visual and it's about looking at something and seeing it in the light with our eyes, maybe touching it or not touching it, or wanting to touch it, not being able to touch it.
One of the ongoing themes of my work of interest has been the idea of the inevitably of disintegration, of entropy, constant flux of matter, and so I've done a number of pieces that have explored those ideas. In the decline, there's a lot of beauty.
A lot of the pieces I've done over the years have involved alterations of scale and the idea of the viewer's relationship to the object and how we see things by either enlarging or reducing objects, it causes the viewer to look at them again. It's hard to do because our culture is so bombarded by images and media. How do you make something fresh for a viewer? That's a real challenge.
I've always seen L.A. as a giant kind of laboratory for ideas in a caldron for concepts where you can try anything you want to and if it fizzles, so what, you try something else.
L.A. has a lot of tackiness to it, but at the same time, in that funny kind of fantasy pretentiousness, it's unpretentious because it's all here. It's what you make of it. It's a land of opportunity in a lot of ways. It's a great for an immigrant because it is what you make of it, and especially artists as workers in this culture, it offers so much, in terms of variety, of diversity. For years, the alleys of Los Angeles were my art store.
In a lot of ways, L.A. has always been kind of colonized or marginalized by New York. It still goes on to this day, but I would add that it really feeds New York because it provides artists for that system. This is really a laboratory where they grow the seeds and they go there and blossom because there's still not a lot of support in L.A. for artists.
One big disturbance, I think, between L.A. and New York is that New York is so condensed and together that it's very hard to be private there. There's a lot of constant interchange, people know what you're doing all the time. Here in L.A. it's the opposite, it's very spread out, unless you make a conscious effort to go someplace and look at something, you don't see it and we hear about it. So in that sense, it's a city where you can be very anonymous if you want to be, or even if you don't want to be.
L.A. as a geographical entity is very much a mixture of surf, desert, and the mountains, earthquakes and urban sprawl. Within an hour of driving, you can be out into the desert. I like that very much about living on the edge of a continent, conceptually is an interesting place to be. You're at this kind of juncture of a tectonic plate. The idea that the Pacific Ocean is right behind us, on a macro scale, is an interesting place to be.
