Interview with Sandy Skoglund
Sandy Skoglund has been displacing sensory expectations in various media for several years now. Her most familiar construction photographs, pieces that started with the building of elaborate sets, Radioactive Cats, Revenge of the Goldfish, and Maybe Babies are reproduced in poster and post card shops all over the country. Though the installations are occasionally shown, it's her photographs of these stark, jolting scenes that have disseminated into the culture. These tableaux scenes radiate with the neon fix of an afterglow.She has made a very calculated assault on each of the various media she's worked in, stretching their limits. Approaching as a naif so as not to be burdened with restrictions and expectations, she's pioneered her own ground and invented the techniques necessary to bring the medium to the message.
In a series of processed photographs (intricate darkroom manipulation) and paintings called "True Fiction" shown at Castelli Uptown 2 years ago, she took clearly defined scenes that removed corporate men and other suspect types to bombed out streets and playfully, as if with techno knobs, altered the colorization. Hues radiated an unearthly glow as if they'd receive the full impact of a cartoon fallout. In one piece, the walls of an apartment interior were all tinted to a glowing orange, practically eliminating perspective so that all the little signs and supplies hanging from pegs seem collaged to the picture surface.
"I love to get in and render better than a photograph," she told me at the time. "I'm able to improve it. The freeing is ecstatic, of not having to have all those people in the studio. I'm controlling things while I'm making the pictures instead of after."
Her art points out the artifice of situations as in her latest installation/photograph A Breeze At Work, where the boss is caught looking dreamily over at an underling busy at a file cabinet. The surreal hilarity of blue leaves sprouted throughout the scene offsets and, at the same time, magnifies the pretence of office manners. Our bland expectations of the taken for granted gets shaken up, adjusting the attitudes we bring to a scene, as in Revenge of the Goldfish, in which a couple settling into bed are surrounded by an infestation of goldfish "swimming" through their bedroom.
Something is askew in all her pieces but the message is not necessarily terrifying. This is really the fertile ground Sandy Skoglund is dealing with. She's taking familiar objects and scenes but reassessing them with a trans-dimensional overhaul. Covered in shindig dayglo colors, and with unlikely situations being tossed together, these displaced scenarios become altars of consumer propaganda. They're amusement park mirrors reflecting back the image of our culture with a satiric exaggeration.
Having already made her mark in photography, painting and multi-media, her latest work, to be shown at Damon Brandt and Lorence-Monk in September, takes on the medium of sculpture. These newest pieces are like frozen moments from a Balzac novel. Like bronzing a pair of baby shoes, she's taken the ebertday objects of the office-a rolodex, telephone, tape dispenser, a notebook-and cast them a blast of permanence, and, as a touch of poetry, inserted a blue leaf captured as if just flittering down onto the desk. The effect is to transform objects we don't normally desire into an object that we do desire. The most ordinary desk items are given a pedestal-like presentation that elevates them to pop icons.
Finely crafted, the pieces poke fun at the entire tradition of dramatic sculpture. They don't plead for your emotional involvement as does sculpture of the past which depends on appealing to your private memory of whatever gesture is being represented. Her strategy is to replace the melodrama of the past with an open-eyed look around at what's out there in our environment and what forces and fetishes are at the helms.
The following interview took place in her Lower East Side studio on June 13, 1988.
Sandy Skolund: I started out teaching at the Hartford Art School. I spent one year on the streets and that's it. I've been in school my entire life. I started teaching at Rutgers around 1976 and I've been there ever since. I'm chairperson of the department at Newark. It's tough. It's full-time. It's very serious. It does intercede into the studio. The only way I've been able to take on this management role is by allowing people to phone me here. Otherwise I'd be there 4 days a week. I went to the University of Iowa. That was a 3-year MFA program. It was real broad. I got my degree in painting but I did everything. I made films, I could intersect with other departments: philosophy, multi-media. I never actually studied photography formally at all, never took a single course in it. I went after film very seriously. One thing I did when I first got to NY after resigning from the Hartford Art School was I took a summer workshop at NYU and we made a film in May's Department Store. I made documentaries and narratives, things that I wrote and directed. That film is gone.
I went through this thing of severe doubt and hatred of art. My dialog and my ability to engage myself in art has been a very complex one. For me filmmaking was kind of the perfect solution for all the kinds of problems that come up with the making of objects for rich people, the kinds of things some artists get involved in questioning. One the other hand, the feeling of making the film is distinctly different from the feeling of being alone in your studio and completely manipulating and having total control over whatever you want to do. I think for me, having made enough films and realizing how social that enterprise is—you're with people constantly, you have to give and take — and I just came to the conclusion that the kind of films I would want to make were photographed theater. That's the kind of film I like to watch, too. I'm not really attracted to art film at all. I'm familiar with Brakhage, and at one point I was very involved with Michael Snow's work, even Yvonne Rainier to a certain extent, but all of that stuff is just too studied, too self-conscious and really wanting to be something other than what it should be.
So that's how I ended up with this kind of form. It kind of solves certain things for me. It solves the communication thing. It solves a certain kind of experience for me, as distinct from filmmaking.
Greg Masters: You found you preferred working in isolation?
SS: I like working in isolation but I also like having the ability and building in the need to go out into the real world. Take A Breeze At Work. I had to go out into the real world to find the desks. One day I came to the studio and found a dumpster full of office machines which was perfect for the piece, perfect New York. It made me so glad to be a New Yorker. The people that I use are not artist, not that that means anything. It's what people look like. I enjoy inserting the non-art thing with the art. There's a lot of shopping in the work. We almost got arrested gathering leaves.
GM: Did you use real leaves?
SS: No. That's the synthetic component and the issue of control again. I want to have that control and to really study the behavior of leaves. I think they have an anthropomorphic quality that's just very deliberate.
Part of the thing that I'm going for is this business of difference and resemblance. They all look alike yet every single one is different, loke snowflakes. I made these things [showing molded forms], 10 different ones, then I hand cut all the shapes and bent them by hand. You end up with this proliferation and permutation. It's very sensuous, I think.
Barry Kornbluh: Resemblances and difference. That seems to be the key to all your work.
SS: Yeah, exactly. That's what relates the work to Minimalism in a very strange way. I'm trying to make work that is luscious. Where the color and physical presence are very important. But at the same time there are ideas that come from my experience in the 70's, because I am 41 and I went to garduate school in the early 70's when there was a tremendous shift in the art world from Abstract Expressionism. That was never an experience of mine but that reaction against Abstract Expressionism was so profound, towards clarity and an analytical approach away from the chaos that Abstract Expressionism was about. That hit me strongly. As a result I think my work still has that. I reacted against it. I went through a Minimal/Conceptual period. Work that was very dematerialized. That was the early photography work I did, bad photography, snapshots and stuff like that. Big ideas, like a motel series. I just photographed motels and in the process of doing that got involved in how each little house looked alike and, yet, how different, and the relationship between background and the foreground, the little house and the trees around it. I shot like an amateur.
The earliest work in photography that interested me was Ed Ruscha's work, his very early little books, Gasoline Stations and Some Real Estate Opportunities. They're small cheaply made, badly printed books. Each one has a theme, an idea, and they're very Californian in the sense of being cool and idea-oriented but they're hilarious, too. And They're very about culture. For example, 26 Gasoline Stations. Here's a gasoline station, here's another one, etc. They were about repetition. Or Some Real Estate Opportunities was my favorite.
GM: Most writers have trouble pigeon-holing you. They don't know whether to refer to you as a photographer, sculptor, multi-media artist. Do you have a problem with the cross-fertilization? Do you have a role model?
SS: I think it's going to take time. In the beginning I was seen as a photographer. When the work was first seen it was dealt with as photography and embraced in that context. I was a little surprised by that but it was interesting and created a kind of dialog. Photography is more open. All the group shows I was in were photography shows. The work existed primarily as a photograph. I wasn't showing the installations in NY that frequently. It offended the photography world very much. I think that's why it had impact. I wanted that. There was no doubt in my mind that I was making photographs that were completely unphotographic in every sense. Here I was taking a photograph every six months at the most. We're talking about the body of work that most people think about. The visible aspects of my career came about fairly suddenly around 1979, once I started showing at Castelli Graphics. Prior to that I was working, bringing my portfolio around the galleries. I was trying different kinds of things. I was flirting with filmmaking. I did a body of work that were food still-lifes just prior to the installation pieces (they were about commercial food still-lifes). But as far as reviews and a dialog, that really started around 1979-80. I see it beginning with the installations. At the time, I see a whole number of factors that were very easy to target.
Photography was still coming out of this question about whether color was commercial. Everyone had a lot of anxiety about how long it would last. Cibachrome, which is one of the most permanent contemporary methods of color printing, was totally new at the time. It had a very harsh quality to it so not very many people were working with it. So it took a kind of sensibility that was not coming from photography in order to do this kind of stuff. It had to take someone who really didn't care about photography, who didn't cherish the medium.
So my role model is Man Ray. I feel that his photography work and his painting work, now I'm not familiar with a lot of his painting work, the fact that he was able to get in there and make an image with his hand, involve himself with the making of an image, the Rayographs, and he was a Surrealist painter as well . . . having read his writings, they're very disdainful of photography, those kind of attitudes, I do feel I have a lot in common with.
GM: Your fitting into the Castelli stable seems totally appropriate. Your work seems the natural extension, the heir to Warhol and those kind of reproduction images.
SS: Well, it does and it doesn't. I think my work is warm as far as temperature and emotional output ...
GM: I think it's hilarious too. I'm surprised that writers hardly or never write about that.
SS: William Wegman, of course, was a very important influence. He's not much older than I am.
GM: Maybe Babies, Radioactive Cats, Revenge of the Goldfish, are famous, saturated into the culture. How do you look back on them?
SS: I think they're more famous than I am, which is kind of neat. I like them all. I mainly think of how hard it was for each one in different ways. I feel very lucky to have at least survived this long. I think the most interesting thing, the real truth, finally, is time. If we can just be around long enough to observe how everything always changes I think ultimately it validates yourself. When I look at Radioactive Cats I think about how I stumbled on it through completely intuitively wanting to make something with my hands. Before that I had been using found objects.
GM: That was your first big installation?
SS: That was the first installation where I showed the installation. The reason I showed it wasn't for any conceptual idea that I could define in a paragraph. It was really because I had made these things. I made these cats while I was confining my photographic documentation to one photograph, which I've always more or less done. There's only one photograph of Radioactive Cats. I did take a few other shots. The one that I let out is one picture so it has a kind of iconic . . . it becomes also about repetition. As an image it's stronger in people's minds if it's always the same picture rather than "here's one point of view, here's another point of view." It creates greater tension between "is this a photograph or is it sculpture?" Having grown up artistically in this environment of disrespect for photography, sculptors pooh pooh it but at the end they're at the mercy of photographers because most people are actually going to see their work through a photograph.
GM: There's a lot of literature on you. The media's been very receptive to your work. What do you think is so appealing about your work that it can cross past the art market to Life magazine.
SS: That was the precise, exact goal that I set out for myself when I was able to finally focus on making art. You go through this thing of is it worth it, is there something you can believe in so that you can keep working. The thing that I was finally able to single out out of everything was the class relationship between fine art and low art and, tangentially, to realize the success of Warhol in terms of punching through the fine art barrier. Education has a double-edged aspect to it. If in order to understand a work of art you have to have an expensive education, you're really creating something deliberately for people who have access to that kind of experience and that kind of an education. And that makes me very angry. I feel myself bristling right now. I am a person of the middle class. I went to an upper class undergraduate school. Smith College, and I really did experience class there. I experienced my own naiveté within the framework of people that had more sophistication than I did. I believe in that naiveté. It's a certain kind of relationship to naiveté, to direct experience, and to making work that operates on more than one level. To simply go for the person on the street is not enough, not enough of a problem. For me, the whole puzzle, or how I define success for myself is if someone can get something out of it who doesn't have an education. I'm interested in communicating, not in making secret codes that the public doesn't have access to. My intention is not to make stuff for museums and rich people but for everyone. I'm from the middle class and I'm making work for my own class.
GM: How do you see the difference between being a fine artist and the technical similarity to commercial and advertising work? You could be making sets for cigarette commercials or dazzling window displays.
SS: There's a lot of things to address in that. First of all, the word commercial is an important word, and a loaded word now in the 80s. In my opinion there's commercially uncommercial work and uncommercially commercial work. By that I mean, uncommercially commercial work is work that looks commercial but is not necessarily commercial, in the sense of fitting into the economy. That's really what my work is. Why am I at Rutgers? It's because the work is so uncommercial [laughs]. The other kind of work, commercially uncommercial, are things that hang on the wall, that fit over the couch, entities that can be moved more easily throughout the culture. I think that, for me, I'm really much more excited about trying to comment about things than being completely inside of it.
GM: Commercial work reaches more people than any art.
SS: But how does it reach them? Do you think it reaches them in the same way?
GM: When you talk about reaching the people ...
SS: I would love to show my work in a Woolworth's or some Lower East Side store. I'd love to play around much more directly with the context of where it is. It's just very hard to do that, to pull off that kind of thing. When people approach me for commercial purposes, which they do . . .
GM: Who?
SS: A rock star, for example. They saw a piece somewhere and they want me to do a record cover, or whatever. Periodically it happens. They're usually amazed at the amount of time and the amount of money that's involved. Even though there's this display of work, I guess because it's a photograph they think maybe there's a trick. Somehow it can't be that hard to do because it's a photograph. As a result we've never gotten beyond the early stages.
GM: The pieces are so crafted. They're not something that could be thrown together for a tv commercial.
SS: In tv and movies you would have a value system that might appreciate it a little bit more because the camera has to move around it. So therefore, it really has to have sculptural qualities. But for straight-on advertising the budget's just not there. My pieces cost about $20,000 to do, that's just the cost of materials.
GM: How do you make that money back? Just from the sale of the prints?
SS: Yes, right. And occasionally I've sold the sculptures. With Maybe Babies I've sold the individual frames.
GM: How do you feel about the piece being broken up though?
SS: I don't sell the components. With the babies there was a mold so I was able to make extras. I've still got all the pieces. I think it's important to hold on to them because in time they'll look different. For me the installation format gains fascination. It's a very difficult format, economically. And physically it's tiring to actually do an installation.
GM: What are your dreams like? Do they have any influence on your pieces?
SS: No. No. Nothing! I don't dream about the work.
GM: But do you recall imagery from your dreams?
SS: No. I think I'm working in complete lucidity. [laughs] I feel like I'm just looking at what really is around me and taking what's not visible to your eyes and making it very visible. Given say an office, creating the emotional chaos by introducing the leaves, putting them physically there.
GM: Were you affected by Surrealist artists?
SS: If Surrealism affected me it was through osmosis. It wasn't a direct thing. The more direct links are Claus Oldenburg and the issue of American art versus international ideas. Here there are multiple value systems, the system is more accessible. That was one of things I enjoyed about Foucault's thinking in structuralism, his proposal towards a reality that really is multiple value systems, as representing truth. This country is the closest to that. We have no choice because of the demands of trying to live up to our stated intentions. I'm interested in making American art. To me that's authentic, that's what I know. If I can really focus on that, somehow it could explode into something universal if I can focus on it. You have to focus, get in there.
GM: Your last pieces have satirized office situations, or domestic bedroom scenes, or the middle class fetish with appliances and brand-name objects. What's next? Do you see continuing in this social commentary vein?
SS: Yeh, I do. I see myself almost as a sociologist and an archaeologist. The next piece I'm working on is Germs Are Everywhere, Part 2. I'm going to rework that earlier piece [bubblegum stuck like chicken pox on every surface of a common living room scene]. Something about the gum and the whole concept of cleanliness is interesting to pursue in relationship to our culture. Cleanliness in our culture is a fetish and says a lot about our values and I'm very interested in the kind of invisible structures that we live by. I get a lot of enjoyment out of thinking of myself as an archaeologist or as if I just dropped to Earth from Mars and here I am looking at these people: this is the way they like to sleep, this is how they spend 8 hours a day, they all set their alarm and start working at 9 o'clock. I just think it's really interesting and you don't have to step back too far. That's why the work comes more from consciousness than the subconscious.
GM: Do you go out to galleries now to see what's going on? Are there people now whose work you particularly like and/or are influenced by? Do you see yourself as part of some scene?
SS: I do feel a part of a scene. But I feel as much a part of the scene from the point of view of being on the outside as being on the inside. Part of the sense of being in New York is that you're really part of it. I think that's why we're here. I like the Starn Twins work. I think it's a refreshing approach compared to the deconstruction work, which I think is very important. I appreciate very much the deconstruction work. I wish that it would achieve its goals, which have to do with demystification, a little bit more than it has. It's very important to demystify what it is that makes art art, if such a thing even exists anymore. Some people feel that it may just blend in together at some point.
At times I'm comfortable with the proposal that art is just another form of entertainment. I do see it as that. Some people want to see it as a form of research, some people want to see it as a form of emotional catharsis, a process of curing oneself, of getting well. I see it as all of those things and try to have an aspect of each one of those in there.
I do like Barbara Kasten's work very much. She's a photographer. I like Barbara Kruger's work. I've come to appreciate Cindy Sherman's work more as time goes on. I appreciate her commitment to perseverance. Ultimately, that's one of the most fascinating things about being an artist: changing and not changing at the same time. How you sense a greater, inner growth. How you set forth new problems and new forms of excitement for yourself at the same time that you remain committed to a certain kind of truthfulness. Elizabeth Murray has the same sense of evolution to her work. That's what I respond to in work now. For example, my biggest high this year in terms of looking at people's work was Richard Artschwager's work. I really appreciated his show at the Whitney so much. I was happy to see that the work is now ready to be really seen. It had been somewhat buried for a while. It hadn't been seen in its full ambition and scope.
GM: Have you been showing in Japan and Europe?
SS: Well, I haven't actually personally shown any installations outside the US. The photographs have been shown in Japan and in England and France. The French have been very receptive to the work. The Beauborg has 3 pieces and Japan seems to respond to the work's very strong element of design and the color. I also find that both Japan and Europe are not as hesitant to look at negative things. "Maybe Babies" has done better, been seen with a less loaded eye over there. Here the political takes are fascinating on that piece. Some people see it as abortion, or post-nuclear holocaust, or overpopulation. Those kinds of things I really enjoy because from a political standpoint I think the work has the ability to be seen in a number of different ways. From the left or from the right or top or bottom it can make sense. One of my goals was not to make something that had a specific message in it but that was really about timelines, rather than about a particular attitude in the times.
GM: You've made the point that you don't want to be considered a "woman" artist, that the idea of separatism was abhorrent to you. That's certainly valid.
SS: The important thing is to push your way into the mainstream. The early years of feminism in NY had to do with assembling an alternative. You see the same thing in photography. The feminist issue—to try to participate fully or to say if I try to participate I'm fooling myself—is painful, very painful. I could not disagree with a perception that would say that to some extent one is fooling oneself. As a goal, maybe we won't achieve it in our time, but maybe the next generation will. It's going to require a major cultural shift of values. The problem is first of all how do you decide that work is good. Where is it written? If there were just all men you'd have problems. Then it would be the blond men are the ones that are getting all of the recognition and they're the ones that are forming the history of our times or whatever. In global history we have the same sort of thing operating. We're enjoying making the history, supposedly. We're making the history of the Earth. That's why the deconstruction work is important. It says, look, let's try to sort out some of these goals and try to look at it a little more objectively. Unfortunately, when you start taking out some of these components, like the emotional base, then you wonder is it art or is it meta art. Is this a work of art or am I looking at something that is about works of art, as a statement. That seems to be an issue. It must be a satisfying way to go because it works in every area except art. It works in politics. You'll see a woman president before you will see a woman artist being the most important figure of the times. The whole thing goes back to a very primeval, magical belief system where we can't find the truth, we don't know what it is. Where women have entered into areas where it's clear that here is good work there's no problem, frankly. They complain but I don't see any problem. If I wanted to have more power at Rutgers, I don't think there'd be any problem. All of the skills, the way you decide that this is an exceptional person, is very clear. But in art, since Van Gogh, we don't know what we're dealing with. These are very Mannerist times, very insecure, you can see the flip flop. That's what I think we're going through. Abstract-Expressionism: the body the emotions. Then we go into Minimalism: no we have to think, we have to use our heads. Now we have Neo-Expressionism. Now we're back to: no, no the real truth is back down there in our emotions. It's the art object, the object for sale, it's social positioning.
GM: There's something apocalyptic about your pieces but with enough humor that we can just take them as warnings.
SS: I really don't have the solution. [laughs] We have a lot of problems but I know that I don't have the answers so I'm just talking about it. That's all.
GM: What will you be showing next?
SS: At Damon Brandt, I'm going to be showing the installation A Breeze At Work. I'll be going into this gallery and essentially working off of the gallery to some extent and installing a piece there as a semi-site specific sculpture. I play around with it, it's not just exactly as it was set up for the camera. Then at the same time, at Lorence-Monk, which is in the same building, I'm going to have a show which is sort of meta installation, in some respects. It will be focusing on the sculptural element of the work and on the use of the furniture as pedestals for the display of sculpture. To that end I've done all of these pieces which are totally discreet statements. They're not embedded in a total photographic reality. They're sculpture. They're just objects. It won't be the same old formula in the sense that you have this conflict between the photograph and the real thing. The photograph is done, it's been out there, it's been seen. It's not the thing I want to focus on. I've already shown this piece in Minneapolis [at Walker Art Center] and Chicago. The heart of the point here is going to be what I think was embedded in the work to begin with but was never really focused on, which is the sculpture. We'll have the photograph in the back, somewhere but we won't hang it on the wall or focus on it or open up that dialog because it's an old dialog.
(Cover, September 1988)