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Hans Ulrich Obrist interviews Peter Coffin


This is an edit by Joshua Smith.

Maroon texts are Joshua’s edits (these can be compared against the raw transcript file: OBRIST COFFIN INTERVIEW WORKING EDIT, 11/01/2010 ) 

“- - -“ are areas of original text that have been removed altogether. 

Highlit yellow text is how far Joshua made it into text. After that point this text is unedited. 



HUO: I know that some of your interviews have been kind of fictions.

PC: Yeah. - - -

HUO: So is this the first real interview?

PC: It may be.

HUO: Before we start we should say that this is a nocturnal interview, happening sort of around midnight. And it’s happening in the basement of a gallery in Paris. Your exhibition is upstairs and is actually quite interesting to see at night. It’s interesting to think that it’s going to run all night long, right?

PC: That’s right, we don’t know how to turn it off.

HUO: It’s interesting that you don’t want to be filmed and that actually leads to…

PC: Are you also filming, I thought the camcorder was just for audio? 

HUO: Yea, but I can just point it at, ah, the computer. How’s that? The screensaver.

PC: It’s kinda nice. I like that.

HUO: It’s not the first time an artist I've interviewed, hasn’t wanted to be filmed. --- - Cartier Bresson was the first one, here in Paris, who asked to not be filmed - - - He just said, 'Film the street. The street is more interesting than me'. - - - So we filmed the street. And then Bruce Conner wasn’t happy to be filmed - - - He pointed the camera out of his window. So we filmed San Francisco, instead. Claes Oldenburg also hates to be filmed. So it’s Claes Oldenburg, Bruce Conner and now you.

PC: Maybe we’re all averse to the idea of highlighting the artist’s persona.  

HUO: So do you want to be anonymous?

PC: Not necessarily.
- - - - 

There’s the idea that the art speaks for itself, which I don’t necessarily subscribe to, but I do like to think about about this when I’m reminded how quickly the persona of the artist is tied to the art when it gets explained by other people. 'This work is interesting because this artist surfs or because this artist is psychic' or something like this. I don't believe explanations that involve the artist’s character or persona should be relied on to inform the work unless the artists persona is the work or a part of it. The appearance of the artist, their character and persona and even what the artist says or believes may inform the work but not necessarily. It would be a superficial connection if it were assumed.

HUO: A superficial connection? Yes, there’s the story that Godard tells of his experience of the people who have recognized him at customs when he crosses the border between France and Switzerland. They recognize him because he’s a celebrity but they’ve never seen one of his movies and he tells them he’d prefer it to be the other way around.

---  So I’ve prepared lots of questions but before we start, I need to --- send one message from my phone

PC: Fine, I’ll send some messages then. 

HUO: Then we have to delink. 

PC: Maybe I’ll send you a text --- right now to remind you. 

HUO: Uh, ok, great, so I'm delinking now. Are you very linked, or delinked generally.  - - Paul Chan says we need to delink. He’s convinced we need to be unreachable in order to delink. Are you very into texting?

PC: No, but it can be useful for communicating. I do wonder how it might affect what we're communicating. I know people who don’t use mobile phones or email. I link with them in other ways.

-------

HUO: OK, I thought that we’d begin with some structure and first discuss epiphanies and if there was such a thing as a kind of an initial epiphany in your practice, -a day when you realized as a child, that you are an artist. Has there been such a moment? Or has it been a gradual process?

PC: Well, when I was young, I grew up speaking two languages and this made me curious about how I think. As a result, I believe that I didn't take language for granted. It was self-actualizing at a young age and it allowed me, or probably encouraged me, to be self-reflexive and consider the framework within which much of my thinking seemed to exist. I was aware at a young age that I was able to think in two separate modalities of thought, two languages. It may also be why I didn’t follow lessons in school the way most kids seemed to. I was also thinking about how things were being communicated and not just what. I remember inventing my own ways of making sense of some lessons in school so I felt that I was aware of the lesson and integrated in it. I did however feel as if I was on the outside looking in. I remember being interested in this perspective.

HUO: You were born in California in ‘72?

PC: Yeah.

HUO: And there was obviously, at that time when you grew up there, a blossoming art scene, some art schools…



PC: Yeah. In college, I was inspired by the conceptual movement in California and in particular, the conceptual Funk Art movement. These were --- mostly ignored in New York, where I’ve lived for ten years now. I’m skipping way ahead but it always bothered me that New York declared conceptual art as little more than post-minimalism and it seemed to not want to pay attention to some important things happening on the west coast and elsewhere. California idea art - lets call it, was highly regarded in Germany and Italy for example. It was as if New York was insecure about American movements and needed to show a singular voice that had a look and feel to it—a bold new style.

HUO: Well, Bill Levitt is an example of an artist who is not known that much but is really a great inspiriation.


PC: Yeah, you mentioned Bruce Conner too…


HUO: Allen Ruppersberg…


HUO: Yeah, Allen Ruppersberg.


PC: --- I’m a big fan of the work of Stephen Kaltenbach and then Bruce Nauman.

---

HUO: Kaltenbach’s art can be a rumor.

PC: Yeah, you know his piece “Influence Piece”? I think this work can be thought of as a challenge to the artist. Are you familiar with this work? 

HUO: No.

PC: I think he silently broke a significant barrier with this work. This might relate to our talk about wanting to be anonymous - -- He developed ideas and wanted other artists to realize them. So he would talk to artist friends about the idea in an indirect way and hope that they would think of the idea themselves or act on it in a manner as if it was their own and they believed to have originated the idea. He did this in an unselfish manner. He was not trying to infect people with his ideas so to speak. He would just have them realize the idea and the resulting work on their own. Steve worked closely with -- Lee Lozano and with Bruce Nauman among other artists. This was a time when artists were competitive with their ideas. Ideas and dates were often contested. Steve doesn’t talk much about how the ideas were manifested by other artists but he claims to have “influenced” significant works. I’m interested in the fact that we can’t control the idea.  

HUO: So these conceptual works obviously inspired you or influenced you. And so when you were becoming interested in art it was the conceptual art that was of particular interest? I imagine who your influences might be. Baldessari? I love thinking about Baldessari’s “Teaching a plant the alphabet.” Was this influential to you?


PC: I like it very much. I think there’s a different relationship between artists and their students in California. It’s a little bit like the master-student relationship in Europe as opposed to New York, where collectors seem to dictate what galleries show and in California it’s the art professors who tell galleries “Hey this student of mine is making great work. You should check it out.”

HUO: In your beginnings, you’re in California surrounded by all these exciting art movements as you began to think about art in college. How do you then continue? Was there a moment that drew you to art?  

PC: I didn’t know what I wanted to do when I was in college and I feel fortunate about not having made up my mind too quickly. Students too often think about a career or an expected salary. Mark Twain used to say, “Don’t let your studies get in the way of your education.” 

HUO: So you had a necessary moment ---------you migrate, you float----------, you don’t really know, and that’s when you’re natural and that is something which is--------- hard to teach. It’s important that that exists.

PC: I couldn’t make up my mind. I enjoy that in a way.

HUO: I’m very interested in this idea of where the work starts. When is the moment you said “that’s my first piece.”?-- Ffor example Gerhard Richter at a certain moment he decided ‘this is student work.’  He lived in the east of Germany. He came to Dusseldorf. --- and he did the blurred table, the famous painting … it’s the first piece. Once, let’s say, in 2050, you work on your catalogue raisonne, a thousand page book or ten thousand page book, what’s number one in your catalogue raisonne?


PC: I like this conversation a lot but let’s talk about why this happens in the first place. I want to see what Gerhard Richter did before the photo paintings because he probably did a lot of funny things, good interesting mistakes. There are artist who have challenged their careers entirely by reinventing their signature style. 

I actually think the truth is that most people, when they decide they’re an artist, they do so for very different reasons than what keeps them an artist later in life. It’s interesting to me that we decide sometimes why we’re artists then it turns out to be something entirely different that we end up making art for later in life. I told you that when I was young I grew up speaking two different languages and so I was aware of two different thought modalities of language. I knew that language was a framework in which I was thinking about the world around me and so I really enjoyed art because it offered a broad platform from which to think about the world. And when I made it to college, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. I got into political-science, I was interested in philosophy... 

--- 

HUO: That happened  to me. I studied Political Science,I couldn’t decide, I wanted to know everything.


PC:  I just had many interests. And then in my final year, I decided to take art seriously. It was my greatest interest…

HUO:  And are you still drawing now?

PC: Yeah, but I never show my drawings. 

HUO: I’ve been Googling and searching and looking everywhere and I couldn’t find any of your drawings.

PC:  Yeah, I don’t show drawings really. It’s just something I enjoy doing. Anyway, I think what did it for me actually is when I started hanging out in the art library and began reading … I began painting in the first year and continued for three more. I was into color and form and I was looking very informally at the history of painting and then I heard about the death of painting. And I have to tell you, I really loved painting even more then. And I just put down the paintbrush and didn’t paint any longer. That’s how much I loved painting. 

HUO: When would that be?

PC:  That’d be the early nineties. Not that long ago I guess. I was inspired by the challenge to painting as a tradition with inherit authority, the death of painting called many things that I took for granted about art into question and emphasized the experience of the viewer. I enjoyed painting more from that point forward. 

Then I became really interested in conceptual art. I had a studio in a ceramics lab called TB9 where a lot of the famous California Funk artists used to work. Bob Arnesan. William T. Wiley. --- I didn’t care much for ceramics but I really liked hanging out with these conceptual ceramacists, more so than the conceptual people in the main academic building. Their work was very black and white and they seemed eager to be artists, move to the city as soon as possible. 

HUO: So who were the people you were hanging out with? Who were these artists? 

PC: Bob Arnesan is a ceramicist. He’s a real important California Funk artist. 

HUO: Is he still around?

PC: No he died the year after I let myself be inspired by hippy funk artists. 

HUO: That’s sad because it’s too late for me to interview him.

PC: Yeah, but you can interview William T. Wiley. --

Bruce Nauman also studied under Bob Arnesan and William T. Wiley and I learned later that the studio I had been working in was formerly Bruce Nauman’s. When I discovered his work in the library, it really excited me. And then a month later I discovered Stephen Kaltenbach’s work. I kept discovering more and more, and I got really excited. I was surprised when later I went to graduate school in ---Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, out in the middle of nowhere, people didn’t know about work from the West Coast. --- I think I became interested in artists who were doing work that people didn’t know about. 

HUO:  But it’s interesting, you know, I’ve had this conversation with my friend Stuart Comer, the curator of film and video at the Berlin, about paradises. You know, Berlin in the twenties is like a paradise of some sort. Maybe the Black Mountain College. These are paradises. In some kind of way there’s maybe a feeling that something is missing right now. And then, there’s many quasi-paradises. It’s difficult to find paradise right now. It’s not like there’s one place. Stuart always says that LA in the nineties -- was paradise. --- Hearing you speak, it seems to have been an incredibly inspiring, free moment. It wasn’t how you imagine art-schools now, all this stuff about the immediate career. There was something else. There seems to have -- been time, no?

PC: Yeah, time is slower in Los Angeles. And you don’t want a car there. You want a bicycle if you can. You want to be in the right neighborhood. And I think there’s a pretty good community of artists there. But I’m not from Los Angeles and it’s still kind of foreign to me. Northern California is very different and there’s still a lot to be tapped there. Paul McCarthy once said something cool. He said, “The best art ideas are realized in the Bay area … or conceived in the Bay area, packaged in LA and sold in New York.”  I think that’s how it went. JS can’t find this quote anywhere! It kinda sounds cool how you don’t know it, though. But Paul McCarthy also really admired what was happening in San Francisco, and there was some really great things happening there. Really important things that people forget. 


HUO: The museum of Tom Marioni?

PC:   Tom Marioni is a good example. He’s brilliant. Drinking Beer With Friends is the Highest Form of Art, so good. He did all this performance artworks at the museum he founded In Richmond California, which is in the middle of nowhere. I grew up next door to Richmond California. It’s the smallest little town. Not much happening. 

HUO: So that’s your home town, --- Berkeley. And what do your parents do?
---
PC: My mother taught German and she raised lots of kids and kind of a hippy family. My father was primarily a pediatrician but he was also a musician and a magician. 

HUO: How many brothers and sisters do you have?

PC: I have six brothers and sisters so that’s seven of us altogether.

HUO: Amazing, --- Now to come back to the question, --- what would be number one in the catalogue raisonne?

PC: It’s a little bit embarrassing but I think the one where I really decided to pursue my art seriously, and from a conceptual foundation was this white painting I made, that had a heater behind it. You could come close to the painting and feel the warmth from the painting and that was my first big piece. I still have it somewhere.


---. 


HUO: I’m really dying to see your drawings. 

PC: The MoMA has two of them.


HUO: How do they look?

PC: They’re really silly. One is a drawing of Koko the gorilla tickling Robin Williams, the comedian. They’re very silly. I was making work under different name.   

HUO: So are they figurative drawings of people or puppets or …

PC: Cartoony drawings… of funny situations. Before you keep asking me about that I should tell you they’re not very important. They’re just for fun. 

HUO: But MOMA has two and they’re under which name?

PC: Nico Teproff. And Prince Toffee This is incorrect. They do not have work under Nico’s name. Should we remove all of this??


HUO: We started out with this idea of not wanting to be filmed -- which is interesting because -- you share that with Bruce Conner, -- not wanting to be filmed, but he was also interested in pseudonyms.  You and I met for the first time indirectly when you emailed me about your interest in organizing an exhibition about pseudonyms. Have you always been interested in pseudonyms?


PC: Well, it happened the same time I made the white painting with the heater behind it. --The funny thing is that I was in art school, but I didn’t really care to identify with artists. Although -- I enjoyed speaking with artists, -- I didn’t care to dress like one or act like one. I also think I was caught off guard at an early age in regards to identity. Just growing up as a kid. You had to dress a certain way around certain kids. College I was really aware of this. Sometimes people decide they want to be an artist for superficial reasons. They want to be interesting. They want people to think they’re interesting. There are plenty of sincere reasons of course. I’m not discounting that. But a lot of it is superficial. --- When I was in school I didn’t like that there was really so much emphasis on being an artist. And not enough about thinking in all the possible ways we could about art. -- I remember being in art school and thinking people were disinterested in the basic questions that I thought and I still think are so important. What is art?  What is it for?  And why you do it. All these things I’m still fascinated by. These questions still keep me excited and interested. 

HUO: The big questions.

PC: Yeah. In school artists thought they were sophomoric questions, that were not important to try and answer. We should be talking about postmodernism or something. But for the wrong reasons. So I remember being excited about this. I hated the idea of the artist’s identity and persona and there seemed to be so much emphasis on this. And I didn’t have anybody to talk to about it until I met Conrad Atkinson who was a professor of mine at UC Davis and he said, “Well, you know Peter, a lot of the stories about artists are not true.” I was complaining to him about the story of Joseph Beuys having crashed his plane and how it made me not like Joseph Beuys.  For a while I didn’t like his work, it really bothered me. --- I was really frustrated with Andy Warhol’s work. This all happened at the same time. It might have been within a week or a month.

HUO: Which year was that?

PC: ’93, ’94…

HUO: Same time you did the white painting and the …

PC: Same time I read the essay about the death of painting and all that. And it kind of hit me suddenly. So there are many things about art I didn’t like and I rejected. And some of those things are still with me now. And one of the biggest ones is I didn’t care to be an artist or act like an artist or have a cool…. You know what I mean. And so at that time I talked to Conrad Atkinson about it and I said, “Well Conrad, I want to do, all of the work I make from now on, I want it to be anonymous and I want it to be under a different name. ---”  And he helped me plan an exhibition, but in the end, it fizzled out. I never did it. But it was always a dream of mine. 

So since then, I’ve been collecting the names of all the artists who have worked under different names, along with their pseudonyms. I have about 70 names so far.

--- I think there’s a special reason for making art under no name or under a different name because it separates the artist from the work, for the viewer. Not for the artist and not for the work. But for the viewer. Okay, this is important. -- the equation of the viewer and -- the work. The work is interpreted by the viewer and if we expect that the artist is somewhere -- behind the work, communicating directly to the viewer, then I think we might lose all the potential that’s in the work. I don’t think I can control interpretation. I don’t want my work to be declarative. I don’t want it to dictate the significance or the meaning interpreted. In fact I think the one thing that is my responsibility is to simply catalyze meaning and significance. 

HUO: That’s interesting because the experience of the work is essential in how it’s presented in many of your works. You create a vantage In most of your work in some way, and now you make this drawing, this drawing where you have a viewer in the back, and then the art, so I’m wondering… --- Duchamps said  the viewer does fifty percent of the work. Dominique Gonzales-Foerster says at least 50 percent of the work. What would you say? 

PC: I can’t believe they say 50 percent. That’s -- crazy. I’d say all of it. I didn’t know about this quote… Who is this guy, Marcel? I think this is an important thing to think about. I’m -- surprised that artists don’t talk about this more often. I have this theory that maybe now, so much of what we know or learn about, so much of the information that is given to us is already packaged for our consumption. It’s already created for us. And that’s not so interesting. There’s not much mystery there. I’m okay with not fully understanding my work sometimes. I’m also okay with not fully understanding other people’s work or not having a reason for its existance. There’s a problem now with a lot of art. I call it the press-release problem. Everything has to be explained in the press release. --- Some people aren’t creative enough to think for themselves when they write reviews, they just --- regurgitate the press release. 


Then the other problem is when some kind of privileged bit of information --becomes a key to understanding the work. The information becomes very powerful in a dangerous way in my opinion. It’s dangerous because it affects our ability to intuit and elaborate to ourselves.



HUO: It’s kind of a strange problem we have --- with complexity.

PC: Well, complexity is already compartmentalized. Complexity doesn’t have to be difficult. --- But, I’m disappointed when people expect that there is a correct interpretation and it is fixed. And it should be and can be fixed by the artist. The one thing that disappointed me about Robert Irwin who I like very much, whose ideas I like very much---, is that he once corrected somebody on the interpretation of a work of his. -- I was really disappointed. I don’t believe in a hierarchy of interpretation. I don’t think being educated, having knowledge of art history allows you to interpret something better than someone who may not. That sounds very idealistic but I want to believe it.

HUO: That’s very interesting. May I ask about – epiphanies? For example. Albert Hoffman told me … unintelligible .. about his epiphany when he discovered LSD. …. Unintelligible … Or Benoit Mandelbrot told me his epiphany was when he discovered fractals. And there are lots of science interviews about this epiphany moment. So there are inventors who make this one invention and you’ve got -- artists who make one or two or three major inventions in their life and they really change art history. And that’s a lot. Boltanski says an artist has like three inventions in their life. -- But then there are artists who are more like serial inventors, with serial patents, and you seem to be one of these artists… when I was thinking of your epiphanies, it’s very difficult to pin down because it’s like a chain. There’s also this sort of Picabia thing. He said our head is round so we can change directions. And that comes to mind when I think of your work. So would you agree with that? …. 


PC: Yes. 


HUO: So what’s the next epiphany? What’s the next invention, after the white painting?


PC: I think my first epiphanies were all kind of a rejection of the things that were expected of me. -- I grew up in a city where we were encouraged to question authority. And I had already learned to not take language for granted and understand what it was objectively, at least in an informal way. So it was always sort of a rejection of the things I was told that I should be doing or I was supposed to do. I was supposed to look like an artist. I was supposed to think about art. I was supposed to accept that I was part of the new globalization in the post-modern era. I was supposed to reject art from the past or have outgrown it. I think my early epiphanies were always like questioning the things around me and realizing that ‘oh no, that’s not true. It could be something else if it wants to be.”  I think my biggest epiphany after that is when it hit me that I didn’t understand what was so great about signature style. Why do people care about signature style? It makes somebody look like they’re so concentrated on one thing that they have to do it over and over for the rest of their lives?  I got to thinking in college that maybe signature style was just a product of the market. That it allows the work to be identifiable and the artist’s name is like a brand name, you know?

HUO: So your work is like the opposite of branding you could say, no? 

PC: What I’m interested in is icons. I’m interested in how these things work that affect our minds and seem to have a life of their own. – that was another epiphany for me, the idea epiphany. I was reading about ideas, and thinking of works like Influence Piece and I heard about this idea of mimetics. Not Mimesis, but mimetics, this idea that was invented by Richard Dawkins. Do you know about this?

HUO: I interviewed him.

PC: Oh yeah, he’s really interesting. And I love the idea that a thought could have a mind of it’s own. 

HUO: Like Mimes? Instead of dreams. 

PC: -- I took a fascinating class in college called “Natural Selection in Sociobiology.”  We talked -- about the fact that love is something we are naturally selected for. Interesting concepts like this. And I was kind of blown away --. So this was another epiphany: That a thought could have a life of its own. And I think it was Dawkins who suggested that we had been thinking about DNA incorrectly, viewing ourselves as the end-product of some kind of process. His stance as I understand it, is that we are actually hosts for DNA. Like a virus. There are things happening to us that we’re not aware of. That’s -- important to me. -- We can’t always expect to know what we claim to know. --

I knew that there was plenty of knowledge still to tap … and so I realized that asking questions had become more important to me than offering answers. It’s exciting to think that just the process of asking a question allows you to come to understand things. It’s -- like allowing the back of your mind to take care of negotiating or managing ideas. – Coming to some understanding without having to -- intellectualize it too much. 

HUO: What are other epiphanies?  I think the first piece of yours I saw was your greenhouse. Before this we have your white painting. 

PC: Don’t mention the white painting too much. It’s a little embarrassing. 

HUO: It’s a Rauschenberg moment.

PC: Another epiphany: the work isn’t always what it looks to be about. I choose subject to discuss with the work. You mentioned the greenhouse. It’s my first piece in New York. 

HUO: That was in 2002? Your exhibition, “Perfect If On”, yes?

PC: Yes and it was a funny proposal. I hadn’t shown anywhere in New York. -- I was lucky because I had a good attitude about being in the city. Andrew Kreps, the gallerist, didn’t know who I was. He thought the work was very strange and everybody said to not do the show because I hadn’t shown before. It’s a very strange risk to take.

HUO: So you started to exhibit kind of late?

PC: I guess you could say it was late. I had just moved to New York that year and I was showing for the first time so in fact it was pretty new. I was still in graduate school. I hadn’t decided what I wanted to do for a career or what I wanted to study and for a long time I was travelling. The first show was important to me because I was still questioning what art should be. --- I was excited about this idea of music for plants. I’ve always been curious about fringe science, pseudo-science and new age ideas because they exist between seriousness and fantasy. And that’s a special place --. I’ve always admired science. Most artists admire science, but we think we somehow present an alternative to science with art. -- I don’t really buy that. There are other in-betweens that I’m -- excited about. 

Anyhow, I found this record, “Music For Plants” in a thrift store. This was a very big phenomenon in the ‘70s. -- Everybody was buying records for their plants to help them grow. 

HUO: It was a phenomenon of your childhood, no?

PC: -- My older brothers and sisters were big hippies and did a lot of LSD. They were into this theory. But why did people buy these records?  They didn’t care to make their plants grow better. I don’t think most of the people were that generous and altruistic towards their plants. They liked to have their plants around. They wanted to know what it was like to think like a plant. That’s the most important thing. And that’s what I mean by asking a question, and not needing an answer.

Only by saying the question your mind will just do the work. You don’t have to work on it.

HUO: Like Cedric Price said “Technology’s the answer. What was the question?”

PC: Yeah, yeah, exactly. These are really important ways of approaching a problem. And when we first start with art, we approach a problem too quickly.  Why not step back and look at all the ways of asking first? That was my big epiphany --. And that was inspired to a great degree by a lot of the conceptual art that I was learning about. Robert Berry and Joseph Kosuth and all these guys. “Art after Philosophy” really inspired me.

So, the greenhouse, I want to get back to this. I was excited that people were imagining what it was like to think like a plant. They didn’t know that’s what they were doing. But that’s what they were doing. They wanted to know what it’s like to consider the consciousness of plants, if there is such a thing. So I wanted to create the scenario again. By the way I went to the library and I did like a week of research (Joshua’s Note: Please don’t edit out the “like a week” part, it’s great!) and I found a stack this high of very good solid research that plants are effected by music. They can grow better. Experiments show this over and over again. -- So I thought, -- why not present the whole scenario in a non-scientific manner and allow it to be experienced because all the tests that had been done before were scientific and they already proved something was happening. Why not prove it by experience. So I made a greenhouse, put lots of plants in it and I created a place where the plants would be an audience to -- music. People would be playing music for plants. Playing guitar, whatever. -- I invited a lot of musicians. And we just reinstalled it again and again. It’s very simple. It’s just plants and a greenhouse. They live fine. Somebody waters them every day and there’s a soundtrack -- and if the soundtrack isn’t playing it’s musicians playing. Or non-musicians. Viewers are invited to come play guitar, play piano or some other instrument. And in that act, they have to imagine how they might be communicating with the plants or how the plants might be listening. 


Well, I decided to do this in an art exhibition and in the context of art it becomes something different again. Now you have viewers, people in the gallery, looking at the interaction between plants and people. There’s an interaction in the greenhouse and then these people are looking at this whole interaction. They have to imagine what’s happening -- in the mind of the – plants --, if there is such a thing as a mind of a plant, and they’re asked to be objective witnesses.

HUO: It’s like the French expression,  “I see what looks at me.”. This idea of seeing yourself.


PC:  And this point of view was always interesting to me, I named one of my shows “It chooses you.”

HUO: That was your second show.

PC: Yeah.

HUO: Can you tell me about this? 

PC: The title--?

HUO: No, the show. (Joshua again: You should keep this back and forth too. It’s also cool.)

PC: I’ll tell you about the show. But first I want to tell you that with this title I meant that ideas or concepts are automatic things, like the mime, or the autonomy of the idea. -- Another show title was “You Are Me.”  Which was borrowed from one of Stephen Kaltenbach’s -- anonymous advertisement artworks he did – in the late ‘60s. With “It Chooses You” I was -- interested in how we come to ideas. Why we decide something is significant. And I wanted to enter into kind of an automatic process with things -- so I used images that already exist in the world. I used found images, things from magazines and books ---. And I found them, but not try and understand them myself. When I found them, I wanted to pay attention to why I decided to choose these images. And I didn’t want to choose too carefully. I didn’t want to think too much. I only wanted to re-present them to the viewer. And then set up a scenario where ideas or meaning and significance could be catalyzed for the viewer. Not dictated for the viewer or determined for them. But to create a platform for them to have their own ideas. So for, “It chooses you” I had photographed lots of books and magazines and images … a lot of diagrams, scientific diagrams. And I juxtaposed them with each other. Juxtaposes sounds like the images were posed, but I chose things that didn’t necessarily relate, so the viewer would have to make a connection between bees and a cathedral or a printing press and a waterfall. Whatever. Sometimes there were three objects or three images. Four. Five.  Two. And it just created a kind of… it looked like a puzzle but it was a puzzle with no answer. It was just something to consider. And this became very important later when I started appropriating, when I started looking, trying to look at icons from our history or icons from our culture …

HUO:  Which happens here in the show. 

PC:   Yeah. Here. 

HUO: The Pompidou …

PC: Yeah, and understanding them from a … not an objective place but kind of a place one step behind us. Like this. You know when I make these diagrams, I want to understand what’s happening so I’m make a picture of the viewer, of the musician of the plant, of the artist, of the sculpture and I want to be behind it. I don’t want to be in it. I don’t want to just be the artist making something beautiful. I want to be behind myself also. 

HUO: So the diagrams are another form of drawing. The cartoonish drawings and the diagram. You need them both in the book. 

PC:   Yeah, okay. 

HUO:  What about the role of titles?  Your show here, we see tonight, your great show, it’s called “The Colors are Bright.”  What’s the role of titles?  I mean, from “Perfect If” on to “It chooses you” to “Tree Pants?” to “Yellow Outline” to “How to Fly a Helicopter” to “You Are Me” to  “Qualungue Lies?” to “The Colors Are Bright” to …

PC: Just like an attitude about, they’re always about potential. There’s a really funny one if I can read to you. My favourite …

HUO: What’s your favourite one?

PC: It was very absurd. I was drunk when I thought about it. And that might make it fun. And it’s “Model of the Universe.” Then in parentheses (eg Sweet Harmonica Solo, eg The idea of the Sun, eg Frisbee Dog Catch in Mid Air, eg Brightly Colored Gem Stones, eg The Desire for a Tropical Drink, eg Dance, Sweat). And actually it was much longer but the guy wouldn’t allow me to do it because it took up a lot of the wall. But these are things about inspiration from that title. Things that have potential. Things that paint a picture. My first exhibition was “Perfect If On”. I was thinking about some of the ideas that were around me when I was a kid like, an obvious one, Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out. And the idea of perfection being something as simple as a moment of inspiration. Perfect If On? Is an anagram of my name. And my friend used to send it to me all the time in postcards. He used to send me a postcard that said Perfect if on and I never knew what he meant but I always kind of liked it. And he told me one day “Oh, it’s your name with the letters scrambled. 

HUO: Perfect if on comes from Peter Coffin?

PC: Yeah. And I didn’t notice until he told me. So most of my titles are just, they’re playful. 

HUO: You know, I was wondering from titles to writing, do you have a pratice… as a writer?  Are you writing?

PC: I write a little bit, yeah. 

HUO: Where are your texts?  Can we see your text?  I want to read your texts.

PC: Sure I’ll send some to you. 

HUO: What have you written about?  What, your own work?

PC: Education. Pedagogy and play. I don’t publish them because I like talking about some of these ideas …

HUO: So, are you teaching occasionally?

PC: I did for a few semesters but not now. 

HUO: What would be your advice in 2010 to a young art student?  What would you advise?

PC: If you have the money and time, travel. If you don’t have the money, teach somewhere where you have enough time to read for yourself. And don’t read art magazines too much. 

HUO: Read other magazines. Science.


PC: Yeah. There’s so much more interesting stuff happening than art. Don’t get me wrong. I actually think that science is art but the art world as we know it is so small and …

HUO: You know, I met Stanislaw Lem the great science fiction writer. I went to see him in Krakow. All his inspiration came out, not out of literature but of science magazines. All these Russian Science magazines. His art came out of science magazines. 

PC: My graduate thesis show was about science fiction. And I only chose it as a subject because science fiction is interesting but I didn’t really want it to be about science fiction….

HUO: But that leads us back to the beginning. What did you show me about … show, what was that?  Is that before your catalogue resume?

PC: It’s work I never talk about.

HUO: It’s 90?  90?

PC: Ninety … thesis show was 2000. 

HUO: So it’s after the white painting. 

PC: The White Painting was in college.

HUO: So it’s between the White Painting and “Perfect If On”. So I need to know about these things. What did you do? 

PC: Well, in graduate school I studied at Carnegie Mellon University, which is in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. It’s a science school. They happen to have a very good art program but they don’t have any other humanities. Actually all they do is … all their philosophy is geared towards logic they specialize in computer science. It’s actually kind of a war machine school. It’s a pretty frightening school to tell you the truth. They’re the ones who run the Total Information Awareness thing now. All that stuff. Patriot Act stuff. Anyhow, It was a science school. But there were people building robots for NASA who I was friends with. And pretty fascinating folks. And in fact there they told us don’t pay too much attention to what’s happening in the art world. Just work on interesting projects. So we worked as scientists and social psychologists and things like that and I sustained my interest in epistemology and that kept me curious.

HUO: But I need a photograph of that also for the …

PC: Oh, right, my thesis show. It’s a very funny piece. I was thinking about ‘What is this thing, science fiction?’  Isn’t it funny when we marry science and imagination together. It’s great. Using both at once. I’m always interested in just the basic thing that we still imagine. We mythologize. We create images of the things we can’t see. Why do we do these things?  It’s great. I don’t think we take them for granted. We are a little bit afraid and decide we need to trust the rational reason of numbers and logic. But I think the greatest scientists are so … are very imaginative and creative thinkers. 

HUO: That’s actually why … unintelligible Stanislaw Lem towards the end of his life, he did not want to talk to the literature or the art people anymore. He only wanted to speak to scientists. And the only reason I got the appointment he said, I’m a member of German Science Academy of the Third Millennium. And they wrote me an introductory letter and that’s why he saw me. He would not see the person who went with me who is the renowned curator Joanna Mytkowska who now runs the Polish Museum , she was from the Foksal Gallery…she said he would barely talk to her. But he spoke to me because he thought I’m a scientist. But in the interview he took my mask off and he said “You’re quoting Tessler. You cannot be a real scientist.”  And he kind of threw us out. That was very weird, you know, this sort of whole idea that Stanislaw Lem would be a scientist. Had this obsession at the end of his life to be a scientist. That’s the … 

COFFIN: There’s so many other artists who did this too. The art mathematician guy who every Junior High School Student has a book of. MC Esher did the same thing. He always said he’s a mathematician. And I like this. The reason why I got excited about science fiction is because I met the man who invented the term ‘cyborg.’  

HUO: Who was he?

PC: I’m sorry I’m forgetting his name. And he’s a really interesting scientist who taught at CMU (Carnegie Mellon)/ And he gave me his science fiction collection. And you know, I don’t read much science fiction. I think it’s … I’ve read a few novels. Science fiction novels. But I’m more interested in the idea that science fiction exists. 

HUO: That’s a note for the transcription. We need a fact check here. Who is the man who invented ‘Cyborg.’ Hans Moravec.


PC: I have his name. He gave me his whole science fiction collection. He’s a good guy. Again, it’s like the other things. I’m not interested in why plants listen to music or I’m not interested in UFOs. Or I’m not interested in some of the things I make my work about. But I use them as a subject and I hope with that subject to catalyze more inquiry afterwards that is like a meta some other thing that belongs now to the viewer. It departs from the piece after the viewer takes it with them. I only hope to catalyze it further. 

HUO: Great. That’s a fantastic end of part one. We need to change cassettes. 

TAPE 2

HUO: The link with science is something that pops up also in other works. The Stanford Prison Experiment. Can you talk about this. That’s almost like Bruno Latour’s… unintelligible …  tabletop experiment, right?

PC: Yeah. This is a weird piece. It’s not such a successful work but I was interested in the work by Dr. Zimbardo which was this really frightening psychological experiment called the Stanford Prison Experiment. I guess I was interested in it because I’m always curious to know why people follow, why people think the way they do. Why people follow a certain pursuit. How often we’re conditioned to think in certain ways. And that’s what that experiment was all about. It was pretty frightening and it came up again during the Abu Ghraib stuff. Why people became the prisoners became violent. You know the Stanford Prison Experiment? A man hired people to act as prisoners and prison guards and the prison guards became very abusive and the prisoners became very submissive. They were told they could leave the experiment at any time. But they decided to stay in it. And even the prison guards, who were told to act as prison guards, they were paid fifteen dollars and hour and so were the prisoners. Prison guards became very abusive and started hitting them …

HUO: It was almost the Amsterdam Syndrome inverted or something …

PC: Yeah, it was pretty frightening. So I wrote a screenplay about it. A screenplay that should never be acted out. And that was the sculpture …

HUO: Was that thing published?

PC: Only as an art piece. As a sculpture. It’s never been published. It just was presented on a table the way screenplays are sold in Soho.

HUO: It should be a book one day of your collected writings.

PC: Yeah, but it’s very boring … nobody should read it. It’s extremely boring. In fact I wanted it to be super generic. You can pick up the book and read it there if you sift through the whole thing. It’s not a very successful piece. It’s sort of my one political, direct political piece. 

HUO:   … to science, we’ve got it also with the “Greenhouse” and then with “Tree Pants” you actually go into a horticultural society. You bring it out of the … horticultural. Can you tell me about the “Tree Pants?”  Because that’s a kind of famous exhibition.

PC: Yeah, the “Tree Pants” was just a … you know, I can tell you why it’s relevant. Why it’s important to me. Only because it’s very stupid. And I’m very passionate about it because I have always rejected art’s self-seriousness from the very beginning. That’s one of the things I mentioned to you. Being frustrated with art identity and things like this. Well, art’s self-seriousness bothered me from the beginning. And that doesn’t mean that I’m paving the way for humor in art where there also happens to be a lot of potential in my view. But self-seriousness is just a limiting factor and I always wanted to break limitations when I first became sincerely interested in art. So “Tree Pants” was just very stupid and for fun. You know, when we think about … plants kind of exist in this funny place. They are kind of living and kind of non-living for us. And the way we make sense of the world around us is by applying human personality to it. We anthropomorphize things. Ships become female, women. Cars become … or anything related to … all things we look at. Even scientists will catch themselves doing this. It’s kind of like the uncertainty principle that meets the human POV, human Point of View. And, well I decided to, I was just looking at trees one day and as a joke, I put pants on them. And that’s all. It was really a joke before it was an art piece and I did it in a wonderful sculpture park called Wanas in Sweden. 

HUO: Is it still there or…?

PC: It’s still there. Yeah. It’s still there on the tree. And I did it as a joke. I didn’t tell anyone. And they discovered it and they were really excited.  And now it’s become a very important … people always ask about the piece. But it’s not to me a very … it’s not the most important piece. It’s fine if people enjoy it. It’s okay. But it’s making fun of the human tendency to project humanity onto things in order to understand them. And also just projecting our point of view. 

HUO:  You said in a conversation that you are for an art that is “political, erotical, mystical.”  

PC: Yeah, but actually that wasn’t me. That was Claes Oldenburg. And that was a joke …

HUO: It came from his art manifest. You also quote Claes Oldenburg’s Art Manifest as saying “I’m for an art that does something other than sit on its ass.”  You believe the value and function of art is important for you?

PC: That’s right. It’s the same quote as a matter of fact. 

HUO: You believe in the value and function of art somehow.

PC: Yeah. 

HUO: Is it an applicable model?  There’s a lot of discussion about art being a model. You’ve got Mondrian here in the Perrotin show, and Yvels-Alain Bois wrote a whole book about painting as a model. That obviously always raises the question “Is art a model?” … is it a non applicable model?

PC: Art as a whole would be a model for breaking models. I hope. That would be it’s greatest potential. If I could …

HUO: Art is a model for breaking models. That’s a great quote. 

PC: Well I’m sure somebody’s said it before. Anyway, I liked Claes Oldenburg’s answers so I used it for my interview. 

HUO: But Oldenburg’s Manifesto, that’s from a time when the neo avante garde in the sixties still had still manifestos. I’ve done a book now with unintelligible .. which is another neo avant garde sixties manifesto, even if they did not have a manifesto, they did have a movement. We’re the same generation. You’re born in seventy-two. I’m born in sixty-eight.  I mean almost the same generation. Started in the early nineties. And there is a lot of exchange … Douglas Garden once called it a promiscuity of collaboration. But in our generation there hasn’t been any movement. How do you feel to this idea  … did you ever participate in any movement?  Is there a manifesto?  How do you connect to other artists?  Is it something which is important to you?  

PC:  On a case-by-case basis. I think the desire for a movement is probably part of what’s a problem now in art. But haven’t people been saying this for a while, too?  There is a movement now, but I’m not so sure we can define it that easily. The desire to find a movement is causing a problem right now. I can speak for New York a little bit. Or some of what I see. But I’m really bored with style. And I think that the movement that is style it dominates so much and it really has to go. It’s so boring. Style is not important. It’s a language that’s far too limiting in my opinion. 

HUO: So you could do a manifesto against style. 

PC:   Style, yea. Anti style maybe. I’m sorry, it’s one of my opinions, but I think the movement now … you’re not asking me what movement is happening now, are you? No, you’re saying is there a desire to find a movement.

HUO: Yeah. Is there a desire for community, you know?

PC:   Yeah, community for sure. I think the movement for people to want to engage in each other and exchange ideas, especially when ideas are disparate and are brought together, it’s the same for me to re-evaluate things that already exist. 

PC: So we’re talking about the movement of art now.

HUO: You’ve got movement. There’s the movement in terms of a movement, but there’s also the physical movement. You’ve got physical movement in your conveyor belts …

HUO: So yeah, there are these conveyor belt pieces. In 2007 you did the show  … unintelligible .. at Perrotin, which I saw which is moving and there is a balloon. And then in 2008 you did another one of Andrew Crepes with more balloons. Can you talk about these?  It’s interesting because we jump and in some kind of way I have the feeling your work is almost like  … I mean actually the science book I thought about when I was thinking about your work is a lot like David Deutsch?  Have you ever read David Deutsch?  He is your author. He wrote a book called “The Fabric of Reality.”  David Deutsch. And it’s all about this idea of quantum physics, about parallel realities. I have the feeling that in your work there are all these parallel realities. And the heavy tangential connections sometimes, sometimes not. But there are parallel realities. There are a lot of parallel realities. There are your plant pieces. Like in this show, there are all these parallel realities. There are these real pieces. They’re not all parallel reality.

PC:   Yeah, the conveyor pieces, if anything, they’re work that I have some kind of formal … they’re formed by some kind of formal sense. Because the movement to me represents something else. Now, I’ll give an example. These knots, the knots that I’ve been studying now have more to do with the idea of  following the path of a knot and I’ve been fascinated by the notion that a thought … I’ve been fascinated by the notion that a thought can have a path or a life of it’s own. Can move like flow charts. I love the idea of flow charts. So I’ve mapped ideas with lines in my own sketches and diagrams the way flow charts do. 

HUO: You also do diagrams.

PC: Sometimes just for myself. Sometimes these things feel like diagrams. They feel like a line leading to something. 

HUO: We’re looking here at Untitled Rainbow from 2007, yeah a flow diagram.

PC:  The spiral conveys depth so it has another parallel reality of depth. But it has … I think I was saying I’m interested in the idea that a thought could have a life of it’s own and a path and I got to thinking once about something that Einstein said that the shortest distance from one point to another is not necessarily a straight line. And sometimes when I read about things in physics that I don’t quite understand I try and understand it by relating it to ideas. And when I was interpreting this concept about the shortest distance not being a straight line I was thinking of how a crooked line could be faster to point b than a straight line. For example, if you have an idea, the idea may begin at point a. The point of conception. And the answer may come at point b. But I don’t care too much about the answer, point b, I care more about what’s in between. And that doesn’t necessarily have to be a straight line. A straight line might be a logical explanation or a reason or something that can be mapped. 

HUO: My interviews are often about projectual reality. In my interviews someone talks about projects and then things happen. I actually want to invite you to this new book I’m doing, because I’m doing a book called “Maps Of the Twenty First Century.”  And I’m inviting artists, architects, who are doing mapping, web designers also … map, to contribute. And it will be a book with a hundred maps for the Twenty First Century. And I’m sure that you have exciting maps. So you will hear about it tomorrow but I just wanted to see about maps. For the interview it would be great to hear about your maps. There is here in your work the theme of maps earlier on, maps of flags ….

PC:   I like maps like … I’m interested in maps that are like diagrams. Not in maps for space. Do you mean maps for physical space?

HUO:   It can be all kinds of maps. It’s really about mapping time and space.

PC:  I’ve always liked the flow charts of Oivin Flaustrum(?). Even David Halley. Or Peter Halley, excuse me. And the movement. I can show you an example of a piece that is important to movement here. This piece is upstairs also. 

HUO: It’s in the show, it’s “A model of the Universe, 2008”?

PC:  I got excited about explanations in science books of dimensions. Different dimensions. The point and line are the first dimension. And then a line expanded to a plane is the second dimension. A plane rolled up into a tube is the third dimension. Which I represented with this log. And the fourth dimension is a tube rolled into a Taurus shape. And so I’ve been using the Taurus diagram to explore things that I don’t quite understand. I can’t quite understand the fourth dimension. I know people will say it’s time. … shape to it. I can’t fully understand it. So I’m playing with the Taurus as much as I can and it brings me to new ideas. Sometimes unrelated. So this shape in here is two spheres like this and they spin around each other in this shape… see what I’m doing. Like this. Two spheres that spin around each other. And they make a donut. A Taurus shape. And the light that’s in there is like a disco light. Anyhow, it’s like the fourth dimension coming to life outside of this dead log of a third dimension and, anyhow. The movement helps me feel like it’s alive and that it is living. 

HUO:  So it’s an organic thing. 

PC:   Even though it’s just an electronic light. Yeah. But all these things about movement are kind of a way of not allowing it to be fixed or tied down. I showed you upstairs the champagne …

HUO: Which I expected to be caviar.  I was wrong.

PC:  Not being tied up in round head … I have to find that quote cause it’s a good one. But you know the “Champagne Pyramid” that I have upstairs is just like one of those things you see at a party that’s filled with champagne. 

HUO: The Champagne Pyramid reminded me of certain early pieces by Robert Breir. When he has these robots that suddenly start to move. And here also you don’t really see at the beginning it’s a robot. You think it’s a table with a … and suddenly you realize underneath it’s a robot and it starts to move. It kind of invisibly moves. It can lead to strange collisions. In the case of Robert Brier it was a collision with other kinetic work in Lacma(?) Where there was this exhibition a couple of years ago. In your case there was a collision with Emmanuel Perrotin’s dog. 

PC:  Yeah, right. The thing has a life of it’s own. It’s an inanimate object but it looks to be living. We have to imagine what it’s thinking. 

HUO: That’s true also for other things in the show. They have a life of their own. No?

PC: Yeah, like the art works. Almost everything is taken from something that exists already and may even be thought of as unliving or old and outmoded and I want to give it a new life again. 

HUO: What about the slow motion campfire because out of my favourite pieces it’s really a masterpiece. It’s a slow motion campfire and it’s so interesting it’s in Epping, which is a place near London. It’s this forest where a lot of strange things are happening …

PC:   I think you said it’s where there is an underground of London …

HUO:   It’s in Epping I suppose. People don’t have the Internet. People live in the forest. People who are …

PC:  Disengaged. Well, that’s kind of what the campfire is. You make a campfire when you’re camping. When you’re out in the woods. And when you’re sitting around a fire it’s usually a communal thing and you stare into the fire. It replaces media, television, everything you’re linked to. You’re blackberry there right in front of you. The campfire is something we can focus our eyes into. Our eyes are drawn to it. We can stare at it and we look into the fires. And it’s an animation. It’s something happening in front of us. So I wanted to slow it down. I decided to slow it down 33 times so it’s very slow. You can see the flames moving. And when you’re slowing something down it’s like you’re analyzing it more carefully. You’re looking at it more attentively. You’re not deconstructing it or anything like that. It still is what it is. It’s just much slower. 

HUO:   And how do you do it?  You went to Epping and you just did a fire?

PC: Yeah, I worked with an engineer who had a special camera that can film super slow motion. That’s why it’s black and white and very digitized. 

HUO:  There’s another video which is less slow which is the RGB... “Three Colours.”

PC:  Yeah, again, here they’re very different pieces because the fire has been slowed down so we can look at it carefully while the colours are moving around very quickly and we can’t tie them down. They won’t stay still. Just like some of these other pieces that involve movement. They may be static but they encourage … they are … not restless, they just don’t want to be tied down. Like this too.   

HUO:   Like your stairways … 

PC:  Yeah, the RGB is just the phenomenon, which is still very magical, the phenomenon of light divided into three colours red, green and blue. Additive color is just a phenomenon of light that I’m interested in. I’m fascinated with … I was reading Isaac Newton’s optics and I was really excited by his enthusiasm for colour. And the science isn’t that interesting. Just like Goethe’s theory of colours. It’s kind of like bogus science. But the fervour is there. The excitement. And this idealism, this desire to connect the planets with colours and sound. It’s a very interesting thing to me that people wanted to do this. They weren’t trying to prove anything by it …

HUO: So you read Sir Newton.

PC: Yeah, a little bit. 

HUO: You’re reading a lot. Do you have lot’s of books. You have an archive …?

PC: No I’m not …

HUO: Libraries?

PC:  … that smart I just keep books around that are curious to me. Sometimes I just …

HUO: Not a big archive.

PC: Yeah. But I like to read about things that people recommend to me. 

HUO: You’re now in the exhibition and these night visits in the exhibition one goes from the fire in Epping to the … projection of the RGB. There’s another room which is also to do with projection and which is basically a space you curated? And it’s a space where you have works in the Centre Georges Pompidou. And artists made fakes of those …

PC: We could say some of them are real, some of them are fake. 

HUO: It’s something you’ve already done at the Tate?

PC: No, at the Tate, Britain, we used work from their actual collection. Actual real works. 

HUO: Does it have for you to do with curating art?  It’s interesting. Everyone always looks at art as curated. It’s always also like looking in the mind of an artist and I was thinking like looking at the selection of your painting it says quite a lot about how your mind works. For example, not by coincidence you had at the Tate “Piccabia.”  

PC: I had “Piccabia” next to maybe a Joseph Albers or a Nan Golden …

HUO:   … your colour obsession. I mean Albers like Rungeh? Or like Goethe had a colour theory. Do you have a Twenty First Century colour theory?

PC: Yeah, in a way, I just like that people … I don’t, I should say. I don’t have a colour theory. But I just like that people wanted to make a connection between colours and sounds. And just like when people curate an exhibition, they want to connect different artworks. And sometimes I put together … do you want images to look at?

HUO: Yeah

PC: Here are a bunch. This is actually the proposed layout for the catalogue. You can ask me about some of the images there. When I curated the exhibition at Tate Britain, I chose works that were not necessarily related. It was a very strange exhibition. Contemporary. Modern. Classical. Sculpture, painting, photography. And I decided that these were all works from the past. They’re all old works. And works that just hang in the museum and collect dust and people know that they’re important because they’re told they’re important. They’ve kind of been forgotten about so I wanted to give them a new life or encourage people to consider them again in a new way. And so I decided to animate them again. It’s quite an aggressive art project. Projecting onto other people’s work. It’s at the same time making fun of the work, but it’s more making fun of us. Just like the pants make fun of us. Or the way we think. I don’t think the artists would be too offended. They would probably understand what I’m doing if they gave me an opportunity to explain but most of them are dead. 

HUO:  What’s happening to Mondrian Is particularly astonishing. 

PC: Yeah. That’s just a way of saying “Hey, this is a possibility.”  That’s all. This is a possibility. In a piece that you might not have expected, here’s something that could happen. And I think it’s important for us to always to take something out of the context that we understand the thing in and just look at it in a new way.

HUO: And there are more of these to come? That’s an ongoing series?

PC: Yeah, I’m going to keep visiting museum collections and curating exhibitions with their work and then animating them in funny and interesting ways. Sometimes with colour and sometimes with sound. Sometimes with moving images. It’s always a play. But I think it’s a necessary play. It’s like a way of saying wake up and look at this again in a new way. Point of view is the most important thing, perhaps. 

HUO: Maybe that should be the title of our interview. 

PC: Point of view? Yeah. You asked me about my epiphanies and I think in all of the six or seven epiphanies that I’ve mentioned since I became committed to being an artist, I always decided that point of view is important. Point of view was important when I thought about language as a young child. And I always want the point of view to be broader. I want to step back behind myself in a way. 

HUO: Maybe within the very heterogeneous practice your sort of Piccabiesque head is round direction kind of thing it’s really the umbilical chord of some sort, point of view. 

PC: Maybe. The umbilical chord because I’m trying to connect with something original perhaps? Is that what you mean?

HUO: Yes.

PC: Yeah. 

HUO: I’m also wondering what was your medium what is your post-medium  condition  … because Rosalind Krauss, she coined this term, post-medium condition, what in the post medium condition would be your medium?
She goes into Ed Rusche, not necessarily painting, but he considers the car to maybe be his medium, so I’m wondering what of the post medium condition would be your medium? If for Ed Rusche it’s the car, what is it for you?


PC: Maybe a helicopter. Or the question. Or the thing that grows and dies and then it grows again. A living thing like a plant or an animal. It could be the sun. 

HUO: Plants are popping up again and again. They also popped up in your extraordinary Barbican Show I saw …

PC: Yeah. Well, that’s different. That’s the point of view of nature that existed in Japanese garden design, which is very interesting. Japanese garden design is not really about … it is about nature, it appears to be about nature, but it’s actually about time and space. And the Japanese gardens were designed to fool our perspectives. To make us not take for granted time and space. 

HUO: I was thinking of these giant coherent big photo collages, montages David Hockney made. 

PC: Oh yeah, they’re really beautiful right?

HUO: Yeah. 

PC: Of course they make us think like cubist paintings …

HUO: He came to my mind because when I entered the Barbican? … that was the connection.

PC: Yeah. All these little fragments at once.

HUO: Yeah.

PC: That makes up one thing. 

HUO: I was thinking of Hockney and perspective …

PC: Yeah, it’s super important. The Japanese garden is a really fascinating thing because obviously it’s a very controlled garden in reality. But it points to nature being much more than just what we think it is when we walk through the wild woods in Epping Forest. It’s telling us that nature is actually also time and space. It’s also the realities that to us are science fiction realities that we can’t yet believe in because they’re almost impossible based on everything we know. That if we’re in the middle of the Epping Forest, that tree is really just an amalgamation of energy that our hand cannot pass through because our hand is also an amalgamation of energy. We’re physical and non physical at the same time. 

HUO: There was a gigantic piece, the sculpture part …

PC: It was a really weird space. So I can explain to you how the piece came about. The video projection takes up the full wall which is about I don’t know maybe about three hundred meters or so. And it’s curved so you can’t see from one end to the other. It’s just curved enough so you can’t see the other end. And I projected this footage from Japanese gardens from a moving point of view that was three hundred and sixty degrees and I wrapped the three hundred and sixty degree view across the full length of the wall. So we had seven hundred and twenty degrees. And then … that was the macrocosm. 

HUO: It was the oscillation between the macro and micro, no?

PC: Exactly and the small sculptures were these little points of macrocosm like the individual David Hockney photographs. As an example, these little fragments that make up the whole. I had a dozen or so little fragments, little microcosms. And each of them was an example of a common thing. So each of the microcosms were a common object, and then, a transformation of that object, a very simple transformation using our imagination. So I worked with the topologist …

HUO: It’s interesting because a lot of practitioners right now tell me that topology is one of the great disciplines. It seems for you going from the knots to the Barbican to topology is in the air. 

PC: I think all of my art is kind of a topology. It is because it’s a way of looking at something from other points of view. I chose really simple objects like a human or an old shoe or a camera and I worked with the topologist and asked him to help me transform these common objects in absurd ways. We turned a skull inside out. We stretched a camera into the physical shape it exists in if it were passed through the optical lens of the camera itself. We kaleidoscoped a seashell. We made all these transformations with mathematics and we showed the point ‘a’ and the point ‘b’. We showed them in a very matter of fact laboratory manner. Like here is the beginning and here is the end. Here is the common thing you know. And here is the transformation of the thing you know. And you usually recognize the thing you know in the transformation. What I decided to do then is leave that open so that people had to fill the space between. The physical space between the two objects was actually about this much. That’s maybe about twenty-four inches. You have the pine-cone and then you have the transformed pine cone. It’s kind of like a game. 

HUO: It’s also a 2D, 3D oscillation of some sort.

PC: You mean metaphorically?

HUO: Yeah.

PC:   Yeah, it is. When you make something 3D from 2D or even in the reverse, which I’ve done with the silhouettes, it’s like saying let’s look at it differently again. Sometimes we can look at a 2D thing as though the way we look at a sculpture. Do you know what I mean? You can take an idea and you can walk around the idea and look at it. You can look at it as though you’re looking at sculpture. That means you freeze it in time the way sculpture is already frozen in time. It’s suspended in a way. And you have a special time to analyze it. 

HUO: That also ties in with your other sculpture which is this …

PC: The slow motion fire in a way …

HUO:   Yeah, the slow motion fire but also your sculpture park. You’ve done the public art fund in New York with the sculpture silhouettes, which are in some kind of way another installation in 2D and 3D and it’s something which continues here.  It continues in the garden of the gallery with your Joseph Beuys “Fat Chair”, with your Bruce Nauman “Model for Trench Shaft and Tunnel”. And continues also somehow. But there’s also the link, cause you mentioned the garden, to some extent these stables you present here in the gallery with the small sculpture silhouettes inside almost like sculpture gardens of some sort …?

PC: Yeah, these are models for the real, for the big things … for the outdoor pieces. Because outdoors they’re only one inch thick. So when you see them from the side like this, you see just the very thin sliver and when you walk around them in City Hall Park in Manhattan, or wherever else they’re on display, sometimes you just see the thin sliver. That’s when the memory goes out of you, and then when you see the front view in two dimensions, that’s when the memory’s in view. It slips in and out of view depending on how you’re looking at it. Even when you walk around it appears to move because it’s flat. If it were 3 dimensional, it would not appear to move when you walked around it. That’s what’s sort of interesting. So by flattening them we are allowed to step away from it in another reality.

HUO: That’s funny. I thought of Lichtenstein when I saw the Nauman in front. It didn’t go into 3D. Then I looked at the Beuys. It immediately went to 3D and then you mentioned Nauman. And suddenly it’s Now.  But then it can be both. You can see again back to 2D. It really, yeah …

PC:  So they’re like icons. And I wanted to flatten the icons. 

HUO:   They’re also kind of appropriations of some sort?  I wanted to ask you about the appropriation because … Sturtevant really dislikes the notion of appropriation. Once we recorded this conversation here in Paris, there was a big exhibition of Sturtevant which you saw I’m sure at the Musee d’Art Moderne in Paris. She talks more about clones and I was wondering are these appropriations? Are they clones?

PC:  They’re definitely not clones. So I would probably disagree with Sturtevant but … They are appropriations but they just already exist. I appropriate any image, even if I make a drawing. All things are kind of appropriated. You know when I was studying art history in college I would fall asleep during the slide lectures and see these images in my mind and they would enter my dreams and I would wake up suddenly and I’d see something else. They just are in my memory. They’re just there and I didn’t put them there. They just exist there. 

HUO:   What triggered these public sculptures because it’s a new thing for you?

PC:   I want people to walk around them. And I want them to be larger than life. That’s important for me so that … this piece we’ll throw away. 

HUO: What is it?

PC: It’s a funny monument. Still I’m very interested in icons.

HUO: It reminded me of Koons.

PC: It might look like it.

HUO: It’s a bit like the “Kiepenkerl” of Koons. 

PC: It’s just a monument to … it’s just kind of like a monument. I’m interested in icons. 

HUO: And who is the protagonist?

PC: It’s the ultimate monument to the martyr who’s suffered immensely. He’s the pirate who’s lost both his legs and both his eyes and both his hands. And he’s still the anti-hero standing proudly on the base. But this interest in icons for me has more to do with everything we associate with the icon. The icon again, has a life of it’s own. It is a little bit like a mime. It just sticks in our minds. It works somehow. I don’t care to study how it works but I want to be aware that it works. It’s doing its thing. It’s there. And that’s why I made all these silhouettes. Millions and millions of … lots of silhouettes of things that already exist in our minds. And I believe that by flattening them in a way I can then have the opportunity to walk around them, to look around them.

HUO: And there are other sculptures, I mean the cigarettes but then there are also these, more these distorted sculptures you do. “The Unfinished Hand.”  “… unintelligible … or the Stairways at Saatchi.”  “… unintelligible..”  That’s what I would call distorted sculptures. What’s this series?

PC: The distortion has to do with point of view again. So I’ve been looking at things that already exist. I just did a piece recently with … unintelligible …The World Intellectual Property Organization, I showed you the logo. I made a flower garden in …  Biel Switzerland at The House de Congress.  And what I was trying to do there was to look at something that’s plain and simple and be evaluated because I think the world intellectual property organization is kind of an antiquated … it’s an antiquated idea to be an authority on all intellectual property, on the originality of all ideas, seems so absurd and so I decided to re-evaluate it by looking at it carefully. The UFO is a good example too. 

HUO: Yeah, because you didn’t speak about the UFO. The UFO is something which goes through your work. It pops up in different really in different moments. In different shows. It’s something which it’s not just one show. It’s not just one project. It’s sort of like different moments …

PC: It actually doesn’t really exist much in the art world, which I’m happy about. It got this one review. It was a performance in … 

HUO: Here in Art Forum it said that it’s a uniting symbol in the collective unconscious. 

PC: That’s what Carl Jung said as a matter of fact. Carl Jung wrote a whole book about it.

HUO: In ’58 the flying saucer, a magnificent thing seen in the sky. 

PC: He wrote a whole book about UFOs. Because he believed … Now again, the UFO for me is not really about UFOs. It’s about how the mind works. And Carl Jung showed that during wartime there are more UFO sightings than any other time. That’s a little bit odd to me. It’s very interesting. After 9/11 everybody was watching fantasy - Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter. And our mind needs to do this to escape. In the 80s during the cold war I was thinking a lot about this because I was young and impressionable and I was afraid of the idea that a nuclear bomb could be dropped. In our enemy country or in my own where I grew up. This affected the way we think about the world so we escaped with fantasy or any other way. And that’s what the UFO’s about. We decided to do a flight over the Baltic Sea and another in Rio de Janeiro. We announced it in advance. We didn’t want the shock and awe kind of experience. We wanted… 

HUO: So not an Orson Welles kind of a rumour.

PC: Yeah. In fact, did you know that Orson Wells’ “War of the Worlds” frightened people so much for a few days that it contributed to the war effort in the United States? Before War of the Worlds, most Americans were isolationists still and they did not want to go to war. But after the War of the Worlds, the fear was still in them. Even when it was proven just to be a radio show. Even when everyone knew it was not a true story any longer they still were then very eager to go to war because they were afraid. I’ve been interested in the politics of fear. 

HUO: It produced the reality.

PC: It produced the reality and it allowed the US military to enter into war even though the people didn’t want to. 

HUO: One can connect also the …

PC: So the UFO is a war phenomenon.

HUO: One can connect it to the Rockwell incident.

PC: Yeah. 

HUO: And you’re going to continue to do it?

PC: Well I’m interested in collective consciousness and collective psychology. 

HUO: Because you’ve done lots of things with it. No photographs. Films?

PC: No, not much. I just documented. The press did a lot. I let it be. I worked with the press and I allowed it to be talked about on the Internet. And there are lots of debates whether it’s real or not. The most interesting one is “Why would anyone create a UFO because it’s no longer a UFO. It’s not a surprise any more.”  But I’m saying the reason why I’m creating the UFO is because it is ourselves. Humanity created the UFO. It’s a man-made thing. Now we should create it to look at it again. We need to create it so we can put it in the sky and walk around it and look at it. It used to be that it was the purpose of the artist to make physical or to make real the things that are unreal or invisible. And the UFO’s always been invisible. So I wanted to make it real. Kind of create it again. 

HUO: It kind of creates a sort of magic. But I was also wondering in terms of chance. What kind of role does chance play in the world?

PC: I guess chance exists because we allow it to exist when we are open to observation. We allow ourselves to observe things. That’s when chance is part of the equation.   

HUO: It’s almost my last question. It’s been incredible. We’ve covered so many things. … unintelligible … What are your unrealized portraits. 

PC: I can tell you a few of them if you want. I’m going to make the Empire State Building into a light organ. 

HUO: You have images of that or drawings?

PC: I should show you the image here on my phone. Or I’ve made a model of it. Yeah, you’ll like this very much. 

PC: I want to turn the top three tiers of the … here’s the model. A woman playing it. And you can zoom in … this is a model of the Empire State Building … I made that out of white plastic. And the top three tiers light up when someone plays the piano. It’s a little bit like the Mondrian upstairs and the Bach Organ. So I used Issac Newton’s colour scale. Red, orange, green, blue, indigo, violet, and Stevie Wonder will play the keyboard on the Empire State Building. The sound will be broadcast over the radio tower. And the colours will change in real time and it just offers … it’s a provocation. Proposal. To consider synesthesia, but not scientifically. Not seriously. But to consider it just imaginatively. C could be red. D could be yellow. Orange. It’s just a suggestion. 

PC: I’ll give you some other huge projects … I’m really excited. Of course, I think, I have … I want to do a film about a helicopter. Inside the MOMA. Do you know the MOMA has this beautiful green helicopter that hangs from the ceiling? I want to fly a helicopter through the MOMA because I can feel as though the space is designed for imagining your movement through it. We walk on the stairs and we walk on the ground but the space designed for us to imagine that we are giants or to imagine that we are flying in the space too because you have these atriums that are fifty feet high and you see windows into other galleries up above. Well, I want to realize that imagination. 

HUO: That’s amazing. You know, Cedric Price … unintelligible … when I invited him to the Villa Medici, the uh, Hortus Conclusus?? Hortus Conclusus? the French Academy … unintelligible … his proposal was to fly in helicopters. He made these beautiful architectural drawings. 

PC: In the space?

HUO: Yeah.

PC: Wow.  

HUO: Yeah, he sent me the book. He mailed me the book. Cedric Price

PC: Cedric Price.

HUO: He’s really lovely. He’s really a hero. He died a couple of years ago.

PC: And what’s the book?

HUO: I’ll send it to you.

PC: Oh yeah. 

HUO: So that’s another unrealized project. 

PC: Yeah, and Empire State Building Light Organ. 

HUO: Actually when we get the transcript you can add a list. A long list of projects.

PC: I have some great ones yeah. I want to make a movie about interspecies communication. All the examples of how trees communicate through fungus. Interstellar communication …

HUO: Mary Donna Haraway?

PC: Donna Haraway. Yeah. 

HUO: That’s a Donna Haraway topic.

PC: That’s right because she does a little bit of like animals and …

HUO: And books, books, books. This interview, our long interview, which will go into your book, which is your first anthology. Your first big book. What’s the role of books in your practice?  I mean,you’re kind of bookish. 

PC: Okay, this is important. The book is usually closed and it’s on the shelf. Just like information and memory and knowledge but by doing this, I want to open the book each time. I’m going to open it like this. I always want the book to be open.  I mean I want the idea to be open. The knowledge and …

HUO: So is that your book?

PC: No, this happens to be a picture book from “The Red Balloon.” The Albert Lamorisse film. And I just found these books in the library. I looked through the books very quickly. When I did this project I just looked through books very quickly. I looked for diagrams that caught my attention. I didn’t read the information about them. So for example when I turn to this page here, I didn’t read the page before or the page after that explained this diagram. I wanted to take it out of its context by showing the image itself. And to see what it could communicate. Knowing also that it might not communicate what it’s meant to communicate. 

HUO: So that’s a piece then?

PC:   How do these mountain tips communicate with the … interrupted … or the explanation of chemistry? They don’t necessarily connect to each other, but by creating a connection, we are …


DISC FREEZES

HUO: …pseudonyms.

PC: Pseudonyms, oh yeah? Is that one of the questions?


HUO: Oh yeah


PC: That’s great, 


HUO: That’s his answer. 


PC: Wow, that’s so great, Hans Peter Feldman has one then? I need to take a picture of that. 


HUO: Yeah, yeah, I’ll give you the book afterwards. I have a copy of the book so you can keep the book.


PC: You have a lot of cool books that I’m excited to see, I’m going to be sending you some books and CD’s too.


HUO: Yeah cause I’m obsessed about books and I want, and I believe in this idea that you have to do at least a book every month.


PC: It’s so important. And books are sometimes the best way for art to exist, aren’t they?


HUO: Yeah.


PC: It’s much better, a book is much better than hyper-text or a website, it’s much faster…


HUO: What could change everything?


PC: Uh... love.


HUO: What is your plan for the next years?


PC: Love. Ha. Uh, in the next few years I wanna, uhm, I wanna make my creative practice more efficient, I want it to become more fluid, by that I mean I don’t want, I don’t want to encounter the complications of, uh, of business, and uhm..things like this.


What’s happiness?


PC: Uhm…


VIDEO ENDS