So, you installed your piece at BAM, and you went to California, and you had a nagging feeling....
It was a kind of nagging feeling all the way down to California. But it wasn't a bad feeling. It was a cool; it gave me a kind of distance. I was thinking about this character that I made. He came from my cartoon research--I wanted his eyes to bug out. And I just didn't take time with him. I had made the felt-and-metal clown figures in Paris, and I was really happy with them, so I thought, let's try a different approach. So I went to, you know, Linda's Craft Store, actually a fabric place, and I started picking out things I thought would be quirky and fun to work with. And I put it all together. At first I liked what was happening, because the character grew up out of the base, and the television rotated around and dropped on his head, and as the television dropped the eyeballs bugged out. I liked that whole concept, but the materials weren't solid enough. They didn't have any integrity. Metal and little pom-pom balls and those little eyes that you put on craft teddy bears. I wanted to get the metal figures in there; they're futuristic like Buck Rogers, like 1950s conceptions of what the future would be.
So while I was on the road, I realized, it's not me. I'm not happy with it. I wasn't angst-ridden, but excited about getting back to work on it. And then I got back in town on a Sunday, and it was all I could do to bite my fingernails until I could get there on Monday and take the piece down.
It's interesting that it had to be set up in that space for you to start to realize what was wrong with it.
I never installed the piece [in my studio]. I knew the size of the room that I wanted, but I didn't project shadows on the walls or anything. And once I set it up, the piece itself became more of a focus, which it always should be anyway. I was thinking of the theater seats--I always wanted that--and then the red carpet. It was idea after idea. And then the color slides--that was something I thought of while I was installing the piece as well. So I got a timer so the colored lights would be synchronized to the music. But then, when the music stops, the colored lights go off, but the strobes are on, so it goes back to the early stage of black-and-white film. You see black-and-white, shadows--the past, instead of the colors and music we see now on television and media, and the visual barrage.
It's a little history of animation.
Animation and film, and where film and visual imagery have taken us now. It's sort of become this big parade: "Look over here! I'm the best thing!" Everything is this hodgepodge of the same messages over and over again, and everyone's kind of numbed by it.
It's different from your other pieces, where you have to kind of crouch down and peer through a hole to see what's going on.
That was a big thing for me, because people have always wanted to linger [at my work], and I want them to. The fact that there are seats in there now--you can sit down and chill out... it's more comfortable. I like the fact that the room has become more of a presence, and it's not just about the piece itself.
So, you play on people's tendency to want to sit and watch, but then you show them something they've never seen before.
An alternative to what they're barraged with all the time.
Does it still nag at you?
No, I'm good with it. I'm at peace.
