JON KESSLER INTERVIEWED

Lynne Cooke

Art Monthly, June 1987 (Pp. 5 -11)

Lynne Cooke: One of the things I wanted to talk about is the enormous variety of ways you seem to make reference to tableaux, models, or things which relate to modes of visual display, such as dioramas. Is this a very conscious strategy?

Jon Kessler: Nothing I do is a very conscious strategy. But I am drawn to the mechanisms of the spectacle. This includes trade-show design, theatre, museum displays, and even shoe-box dioramas. What I make are models for possible or virtual worlds.

One of the other things that's characteristic of all these forms is their tendency, with few exceptions, to be small. The components are, if not miniatures, nonetheless the size of toys. Miniatures seem to operate in a world in which time is altogether different. It's not the time of the real world but of reverie or fantasy: they have their own dynamics.

I'm fascinated with scale shifts, with that suspension of real time that happens and, well, the more suspension the better. I'm reading a book now by Philip K. Dick about this drug that people take in the presence of a very sophisticated doll's house. For a time, they enter that world as Barbie and Ken types of perfect persons. It's totally twisted. But, anyhow, that's why I like science fiction: it offers worlds in miniature.

Unlike William Gibson, or others of the more high-tech science- fiction writers, Dick always seems to be just a step away from the world we live in now. With Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, for example, the borderline between what he's talking about and where we are currently is almost imperceptible.

Yeah, that's what I try to do too - a parallel universe that still generates new fictions.

The pitfalls you might run into would include nostalgia and sentiimentality. Where sentiment does enter your work - I'm thinking of the piece with the sunset and the old wagon - it's pushed so it becomes maudlin. It's a parody of itself. Yet you don't point out the horrors that face us, there's no moralising.

I'm not sure I have enough morals to be moralising. Maudlin, though, is a good word: I think of one of my sculptures that plays the song Feelings. My works are more about the mechanisms of sentimentality, the buttons and strings that trigger it, than sentiment itself.

Poignancy is also a factor, as in Bird Runner where the stuffed sparrow goes up and down as if in an elevator situated on the exterior wall of an inverted city. Or in the piece with the clown's legs coming out of the white minimal box: they flap and turn in this endlessly disturbing, disabled way. One laughs callously and yet also catches oneself, somehow implicated.

But it's also a way of taking the temperature. It suggests some form of medical record of this pathetic, martyred thing that can't help itself.

Right, an incontinent sculpture. No self respect, either! Now I'm getting into other expressions of self control. Some new pieces are visually very disturbing because the images start going through a color separation. I want the viewer to feel like a robot with some engineer with a screwdriver fucking around with his or her vision hardware. I'm really interested in the clunky, beginning stages of virtual reality, the gloves and goggles.

It's endemic of a turning point. There's a parallel with some of the early deep sea diving equipment, which was "humanized"; shapes and forms were found which anthropomorphised it...

...otherwise it would be too scary. Similarly, industrial designers tried to build a passenger plane without windows. Airplanes really don't need windows: it's just that human thing. Anyway, people freaked.

In the late 19th century some of the devices that immediately preceded the invention of the cinema involved diverse ways of changing perception: some were like tools, others more like toys - the phenakistiscopes, kaleidoscopes etc. Sometimes I find echoes of them in your work, perhaps because we seem to be at that kind of moment again, when many new devices that somehow will change perception as the cinema once did are appearing. But until one type comes to dominate we will have ten or twenty different models for revisualising experience.

Well, the more the merrier, really. I love seeing all the kooky inventions from the past. Inventors don't have the same status in society that they once did. Think of Edison or Tesla. Dr. Kevorkian is pretty well known because he made that home-made death machine. Anyway, our relationship to machines is very different than it was. Now machines come with an invisible technology. They just look like seamless black boxes. Take television: no one watches a whole program anymore. Now people channel surf, preferring to be bathed in bites of visual and sound info. Just wait until fiber-optics are laid and digital compression gives us 500 channels. We'll have gone from surfing off the coast of New York to the north shore of Oahu. In my own work there is a relationship to the mechanisms. I want the viewer to get the feeling that the pieces are trying to invent themselves.

It's a bit like the Swatch "Jellyfish" where you can see all the inner and outer parts at once.

I love the "Jellyfish". That see-through device is as old as clock- making itself. There are lots in the Arts et Metiers Museum in Paris.

Was there a big difference for you working in Paris from here in New York?

There's an enormous difference. France isn't a service-oriented nation, so getting materials was a total nightmare. In New York, if you need some steel at closing time on a Friday, you can give the guy working in the yard 10 bucks and he'll sell it to you and probably even load it on your truck. What's more, he'll whisper to you to come back on the weekend when the yard is closed because he's got the keys and for 50 bucks he'll give you whatever the hell you want. I love that! Then there are the rewarding vis­ uals that exemplify a late capitalist economy like New York. The decay, the grunge, the "Blade Runner" aspect, if you will. I was probably the only American in Paris who preferred hanging out in the burbs and La Defense to the Ile Saint Louis. Another problem was the junk- there wasn't any. In New York, there's always good junk being thrown out: in Paris the same stuff would be for sale in the flea market. In the end, I left Paris pretty bummed. I made some really good friends there but there was never much interest in my work.

Paris is becoming an image of itself, a bit like Venice. Do you think it really matters where an artist lives now?

Absolutely. I realised this coming home. The production of the work can happen anywhere but the site of the idea bank is very specific to each place. The most important thing is to feel that you are adding to the cultural pool of a place. That's something I never felt in Paris. The French have a huge problem right now culturally. Deep down they know they are no longer the leading force in the arts that they once were. This is why they spend so much money on the arts and on cultural spectacle.

On the other hand, there's a relationship in daily life to older things as a matter of course, this is an incredible generalisation, but people do seem to live with older things and don't have the same impetus to replace them with newer models or maybe don't feel comfortable with newer inventions as here in the U.S.

Oh, no: the French love their techno-toys. The portable toilets, the automated ticket-takers in museums and subways ... computer shops are opening everywhere.

So it becomes precious to look at something old?

Everything in France is precious.

And Japan?

It's an inspirational place, a constant high: land of the super stimulus, a present day cyberspace ... I think it would be impossible to live there though.

Because one never stops being a foreigner?

I don't mind that. I like hamming it up, so I don't mind being stared at. No, it's the crowds. I think I'm developing claustrophobia.

There must be vast cultural shifts when one of your sculptures goes from being exhibited in New York to being exhibited in Mexico City, say, or Japan. How does that affect your plans to teach and exhibit there?

Well, in a funny way the work shifted very little when I exhibited in Japan, probably because they are so comfortable with machines and automata. My God, they have talking vending machines that dispense whisky on the street. That's my kind of place! There was, however, an enormous possibility for cultural shift had the Japanese chosen to do a show of my "Asian" works. They didn't. This will happen someday, and be very interesting. I don't know how I'll teach in Japan this summer. I'll wait and see how and what the students are like. Teaching for me is very intuitive.

Do you think there is currently some level of - I wouldn't say internationalism or globalism - but some kind of commonality in art that can be plugged into very easily wherever you are?

When I saw the work of these young Japanese artists I was struck by the commonality of the issues crisscrossing the continents. Technology is the net that envelops the culture pool, so there's a striking commonality between the work of my generation and the younger ones there. My generation was on the tail-end of the post-war suburban dream, united by TV, sex, drugs, and rock and roll. The emerging generation is linked globally by common computer games by day, and machine dreams by night.

I've always thought of you as someone who's very singular, not that you're not connected to what's going on but nonetheless, almost by default, your work seems out of sync with what's current. Do you feel a connectedness with issues of the 1990s ?

With some of the issues of the nineties. I'm interested in what the Yale bunch - Michael Joo, Michael Grey, and Matthew Barney - are doing. And, in England, by Damien Hirst and Marc Quinn. France has a similar generation equally comfortable with technology in Philippe Parreno and Pierre Joseph. And then there are these Japanese whom I wrote about in "Documents" - Noburo Tsubaki, Kodhai Nakahara, Kenji Yanobe ... Other issues like the art about art that dominates much of the Cologne and New York scenes now doesn't interest me. I've always held a position just outside of the line of fire. It's a good place to be: it's a front row center seat.

Looking across the body of your work it changes from period to period but it doesn't evolve in the sense of going from A to B. It goes in circles or spirals: it's still in touch with where it started out. It seems that it emerged mature and that it's somehow still finding new avenues to keep exploring some of the same things.

Thanks. I think you're right. You once said how it's only possible to understand the development of my work if you're looking down on it, like flying over a landscape. Now I feel I'm sort of going back to things that I never really exhausted years ago. I'm not a chess player. I don't make art that way, and I never know where a body of work will go until I get there.

There's always the feeling that what crosses your path can change it, and that isn't very often another work of visual art. It's more likely to be a book or a movie or a visit somewhere or something you saw in a hardware store.

True. I suppose I'm very intuitive in picking up on things. I'll get the ideas from anywhere. It's after the idea gets into the shop that I feel more like a garage mechanic - or, maybe, more like a garage inventor. Robert Longo calls me Gepetto. I like art when you see the struggle of the invention. Forget the blood of the artist: I'll take a work that has a few brain cells lying around as a record of the battle. No strategies, no chess moves, just guts. That's what finally attracted me to the work of the Japanese artist, Tsubaki. When I first saw that monstrous yellow blob I hated it. I mean, it was the ugliest thing I'd ever seen in my life. But, it broke all the rules. And it had just the right amount of dumbness and, well, it stuck with me like a bad haircut. When I met him and asked him why he named it Fresh Gasoline, he said: "Don't you remember when you were a kid and you opened up a car gas tank and you put your head into it and smelled?" Well, hell, I do remember. It was the first drug I ever took, I guess. Those were probably the first brain cells that I destroyed. Inhaling that gas made me feel like a machine.

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