Chris Larson
The work produced by the American artist Chris Larson examines the relationship between humans and machines - sometimes expressed through a moment of impact, sometimes through great toil and effort. Many of his early sculptures are large wooden constructions composed of objects that have collided: in one example, a spaceship nearly flattens a wooden barn. These works are filled with metaphors of heroic and anti-heroic acts and of the collision of good and evil in human nature. In his films, characters perform mysterious tasks with elaborately constructed tools that become unending necessary labors, thereby threatening the boundaries between human and machine.
In this interview, which first appeared in full in Hatje Cantz's monograph on the artist, Larson discusses the ideas that contribute to the narrative of his films and sculptural installations with his Berlin gallerist Sönke Magnus Müller.
Sönke Magnus Müller: It often feels that the situations and activities in your films are not real. How important is fantasy in your work?
Chris Larson: I am not interested in the ideas associated with fantasy. Fantasy deals with magic and the supernatural, my work has nothing to do with these ideas. I do like placing the unusual in the commonplace. In 'County Line' I built a machine that really worked, had real people operating it, and they produced real sweat from working. Maybe we could talk about this as a situation where people are performing unrealistic tasks. I perform these types of tasks in my studio all the time. I like to think of my artworks as fragments of a story or pages that were torn from the middle of a book. My works begin in the middle of an action and end in the middle of an action. Nothing is ever resolved.
Sönke: The film 'American Gothic' in 2000 was followed by the film 'County Line'. I feel like there is a big difference between these two projects. What encouraged you to do 'County Line'?
Chris: I had just finished my last project called 'American Gothic (Saturday Night/Sunday Morning)', a short film that was layered with metaphors and symbols. I was tired of making these types of connections in my work and did not want to start working on this new project with a list of "this stands for this" and "this stands for that." When I began building the sculpture for 'County Line', I started with only two concerns in mind. I wanted to build a machine that had two levels, a top and a bottom and I wanted to use two characters. In 'American Gothic' I played all three characters. In this film I wanted to play one of the characters, and I wanted someone else who did not look like me to play the other. As I began building, I first built the skeleton or pod that would hold the characters and the machine. After completing the pod, I began working on the environment that I would work in. I wanted my actions to be minimal and mundane. My character's job was to exchange numerous liquid-filled bladders that had been broken over the course of the operation. The bladders hung and spilled a liquid into the space that the other character would occupy. After completing my area of the machine, I then focused on the lower level of the contraption. I decided to cast a friend, Brooklyn-based artist Rico Gatson, to run the lower level. I was interested in using Gatson for this project because he does not look anything like me. I am white and skinny, Gatson strong and black. His tasks were more complicated than mine; he would only use his mouth to operate the machine and would perform multiple movements to complete the cycle of the machine. I wanted to set up a situation in which two people were working together in the same capsule, not in direct contact with each other but with the appearance of working together. When workers are working on an assembly line, they are only responding to the work that is coming at them from down the line. They are not in physical contact with the other workers but are aware that they are part of something larger, they are all contributing to the completion of a final product, a product they usually never see or use. I have never been interested in the final product. I am interested in the emotions and questions that are created by the physical interaction with the machine and the materials that are being mixed, manipulated, and transformed.
Sönke: Chris, we have spent quite some time together, and in one of our conversations you said that you could not live anywhere else in the world than in Minnesota. What is this specific relation you have to this area and how much is it related to your work?
Chris: There is something about who I am that is dictated by this place, the Midwest. There is something about the work ethic, about making things. I grew up making things. I mean I know they make things in other places, but the motivation or the purpose of making things seems different; maybe one could say that things here are on a more human scale, or more mundane. I guess it is why I have so many references to the South in my work, because I think there is a similar ethic there. Making mundane things, for mundane purposes, by, I guess, mundane people, becomes iconic, or at least important to point out or see.
Sönke: Whenever I showed your work in New York, people were surprised to hear that you come originally from the Midwest. Statements like, "Oh, there is actually art in the Midwest" were common comments. How do you deal with this certain prejudice?
Chris: Do people say that? I have a hard time answering this question. I can't define a style or look that's particular to the Midwest. I guess I don't think about it a whole lot. There is a lot of art created in places around the world that should have more attention. I wanted to be a part of the larger conversation so I crossed the border, took my work out of the Midwest hoping to be a part of that conversation.
Sönke: Has there been any artist you adored and any art movement you have primarily been interested in?
Chris: I love the series of photographs of Pennsylvania coalmine tipples by Bernd and Hilla Becher. Coalmine tipples are these amazing, crude wooden structures that are made roughly and quickly to illegally extract coal out of the earth. I love the immediacy of this type of building. I can't imagine that the bootleg miners made drawings of the structure before they started building. I also love the short stories by the Southern writer Flannery O'Connor and the writings of Franz Kafka. They both have an amazing ability to make the extraordinary seem commonplace. They also have a great way of developing their characters not by who they are but by what they do. I still am fascinated with the Surrealist sculptures of the 1930s, such as Giacometti's 'Suspended Ball' or 'Hands Holding the Void (Invisible Object)'. I discovered the sculpture 'Hands Holding the Void' while a MFA student at Yale University. I would regularly visit this sculpture in the gallery, it was the plaster version, beautiful. Lately, I have been looking at the work of Paul Tech again. I wish I could have seen some of his installations. Amazing.
Chris Larson's spaceship sculpture
Sönke: I know that your film production takes a lot of your time, but still you are doing a lot of performing, sculpting, photography, and drawings. How do you see this all together, and what is the evidence of this different media in the body of your work?
Chris: I began my career as sculptor, but it seemed necessary or expedient to use these other mediums. I don't tend to separate my work out between mediums; mediums feel like tools to me. I find it exciting when a new body of my work begins to have a life of its own. I don't have to push hard anymore, it grows on its own, starts to live and breath in whatever media it wants to.
Sönke: When did you start making art?
Chris: I was attending college in Chicago, studying literature and playing on the tennis team. I was enjoying myself. Toward the end of the semester, I got a call from a friend who was taking art classes at a college in St. Paul, Minnesota. He began telling me about all the things he had been making in the studio. It sounded exciting to be making things. At the end of the semester, I moved back to Minnesota and enrolled. I started taking the basic art classes, beginning drawing, printmaking, and painting. I quickly discovered that working two-dimensionally was not enough. I wanted to make things that felt like they could have existed in the world or that could be mistaken for something real, non-art. Straight-up painting felt too removed. I started attaching objects to the surface of the painting hoping to make it something other than a painting. Someone showed me Rauschenberg's bed painting, and I loved it. One night while making a stretcher for a new painting in the woodshop (a place that was new to me, as I had never taken any woodshop classes in high school nor did we have any tools around the house), I picked up a large chunk of wood from the scrap bin and started cutting it with the band saw. It was amazing. I cut and shaped that piece of wood for hours. I made an odd hand tool with a hook on the end.
Sönke: How do you invent these complex sculptures? Are they just coming out of your mind on the spot? Hard to believe.
Chris: I will go back to the first object I made in the woodshop. I knew I wanted to make something that could be used in my hand, and I wanted it to look sinister. Is this way of thinking or building hard to believe? When I began working on the set for the ice house film, 'Deep North', I knew I wanted to build a shotgun shack; I was interested in the idea of this particular type of Southern architecture. The term "shotgun house" comes from the saying that one could fire a shotgun through the front door and have the bullet go out again through the back door. I was intrigued by the idea of a force passing in through the kitchen and out the back through the bedroom. I knew I wanted to fully furnish the house, and I also wanted to install a machine inside as though it had grown up out of the house. Ultimately, what the machine did or looked like, I did not know. As I began building the machine, I slowly started to understand its function. It was to carry ice tubes from the front of the house to the back of the house. It is all based on needs. How do you move an ice tube from one end of the house to the other? These machines do not exist, so I invent as I go along, adding dysfunctional, absurd, odd ways of transferring an object or liquids from one place to another. This is a task that could easily be done by picking the thing up and carrying it to the other side, but the characters in this house do not work this way. They labor, performing mundane tasks with rapidly fading preindustrial machines. This is how they work, this is what they do, and they know no other or have forgotten other ways of how to do things.
Still from Chris Larson's 'Deep North', 2008, 8 minutes
Sönke: Objects like musical instruments, pianos for example, appear often in your work. Could you tell me more about your relationship with these objects? What content do the instruments symbolize and how important is music in general for you?
Chris: I have played music as long as I have made art. I like to think about musical instruments as tools or weapons or machines--the smashing of a punk rocker's guitar, or how Fats Domino would bump his piano across the stage with his belly while he played, or how Woody Guthrie painted on his guitar "this machine kills fascists." There is something about the way you interact with an instrument or wield it that transforms it into a tool of another kind, something beyond the music. I love the piano as an object in a room. I like the way you approach this object and then sit down in front of it as if you were sitting down at a table for a meal or at a workbench ready to build something. A wooden piano on rockers was the first object I made as I began working on the film 'Crush Collision'. In the film you find a house floating on the water, a family sitting around a table praying before they eat, while upstairs, a man sits in front of a piano as if he were sitting down at a table waiting for something to happen. As the family starts to sing, the man starts to play the piano, not in the usual way but with his foot on the pedal, rocking the piano back and forth, following a rhythm, keeping time or trying to make an attempt to understand something he once knew. A piano is an object that is still, heavy, and hard to move. I wanted to alter this reality.
Still from 'Crush Collision'
Sönke: Beside musical objects, music itself also plays an important role in your films and performances.
Chris: In my live performance 'Shotgun Shack' at Creative Electric, I used music to dictate the actions of the three characters. The set for the perfomance was a large shattered wooden shack; inside the shack were a piano, three working stations, and a small stage. The music that played throughout the performance was loud punk rock music. I liked the dichotomy of something new mixing with something old. In that collision--sometimes literal--I played and then smashed the piano and guitar underneath the abrasive sounds of the music; a collision happened and out of this collision of the old and new, something new was created. Music was my entrance into art. As a teenager I was blown away when I picked up the record London Calling by the Clash and realized they had borrowed the look for their album cover from an early Elvis Presley record I had as a kid. The Clash swapped out the image of Elvis singing with an acoustic guitar with a photo of their bass player in motion to smash his guitar on the stage. There was much more than music going on here, and I wanted be a part of that conversation.
Sönke: For me as a European, I see actually certain American stereotypes and parts of American culture in your work. How much would you interpret your work as being American? How much distance do you feel yourself to this question of having the identity of an American?
Chris: Everything I do is a result of being an American. The way I think or see things, the way I build, or the tools I use. It is like when I first picked up a gun, not to go hunting or whatever, but when I picked up a shotgun as a tool for making art. It is in some ways the quintessential American tool. A gun is a farm implement; it is necessary to have one around to eat or put down a sick cow, but it is also a tool, the tool that made the conquest of this large country, or manifest destiny, possible.
Sönke: What is intriguing in your work is this junction of the high-tech world you produce your work in and then, on the other side, the odd and rough way you produce your sculptures and dress the people that play in your films.
Chris: I guess you could think of the machines I make as a kind of crude technology. In the new ice house film, the rough machine grows out of a home, a large waterwheel in the living room next to the stereo and TV. The machine is just as real as the appliances in the house--maybe more real. Perhaps I am commenting on the technological world that I live in and make my work in. I might be talking about current technology, but it is necessary for me to use mechanical technology--like a wheel or a hand crank or even a piano--as opposed to electronic technology, because you can see it working or not working, you can see how it is supposed to or could work. When I look at an iPod, it is hard to see it working: Does it move? Is it supposed to? Can you tell if it is broken by looking at it? Sometimes when people look at my sculptures, they ask me, "Does it work?" It is funny; no one ever asks if a painting "works." I like getting asked that question.
Sönke: In your films you often depict black and white people in opposite functions. How much do you refer to a black and white conflict in your work?
Chris: I don't use black and white people in my work to talk about a conflict, but I understand why you may say this. I am aware of the ways this could be read. I guess I use the people I use in order to talk about a conversation or collision that is or is not happening between my characters. They have a relationship with each other, just not in the way we think of relationships. I think, maybe, if there is any way that I think about it, it is that I am looking for people who are different from me. Race, of course, is a very real issue, but I am not thinking about it in any global way; I am thinking about characters and people in a personal way. The people in my work--black people or women--are people who are physically different from me, people whose life experience is different from mine--but they are people with whom I have formed relationships, and that is the kind of collision I don't understand but am really interested in.
Sönke: A lot of times, sculptures you created get destroyed or shot. Even though it is a very destructive act, it never appears violent to me. What is this fascination of yours with destruction?
Chris: You are right, it is not violence. I am not thinking of violent destruction--I am thinking about collisions, like conversations, juxtapositions, that inevitably change both things. Like when I collide a machine with a house, something new comes out of that.
To purchase a copy of Chris Larson: Failure published by Hatje Cantz at € 29.80 visit their website. 'Chris Larson: Failure' is edited by Sönke Magnus Müller, with texts by Kris Douglas, Marc Glöde, Wayne L. Roosa, Tamatha Sopinski Perlman, and an interview with the artist by Sönke Magnus Müller.
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