100a forsyth street, new york, ny 10002
toomer labzda talks with JERRY BLACKMAN / featured in birds, bodies and bricolage STUDIO IMAGES 1 2 3
from / studio : brooklyn / bushwick medium: wall-based and free-standing sculpture
what do you use most often in your studio?
power drill. attaching things, putting things on the wall, cutting holes in things–the power drill is the center piece of all tools.
and i name all my tools. [steps] so my power drill is [clatters] samantha. she's red. all the tools are named after women. there's betsy [the kiln]. i had this one day–it was a slow creative day–and i named all the power tools. after women. unknown women. i don't know a betsy.
what is your favorite part of the creative process?
i guess a lot of the work happens in the sketchbook. at least it used to more so. i'm starting to turn the walls of the studio into a sketchbook, so i'm making a lot of half-gestures and mistakes in real time and space, which is beneficial.
there is no “ah-ha!” i'm more building something and seeing it through, and that will lead to the next piece. there is no eureka-event with these process-oriented pieces. some of the conceptual "a, b, equals c" visual puns have a eureka moment, but these are so invested with building that there is no real start or finish.
if i'm going to talk [about building processes], then pulling something out of a mold. like folding away the rubber after i've molded something or cast it, and then seeing the replica in a completely different material. that is a special moment. i don't know if that's a creative moment. when you say "creative process," i think intellectual or thinking process. this is more of a building process. or maybe they're part of the same.
what is your earliest memory of art?
my dad would take me to the MoMA as a young child, and i would see a lot of art. i remember seeing Bruce Nauman's Clown Torture. we both didn't get it at the time, and we both laughed at it, this clown sitting at the toilet.
and i remember at the Whitney, i remember having seen an early Tony Oursler piece, and that was horrifying. it was a little head
with a video of a human face making these obscene nursery rhymes. it was this panic thing of nightmares–i probably had nightmares from seeing that. so just those trips, those gradeschool trips with my dad.
how did you start working in your current medium?
drawing was always the beginning. and drawing turned into a collaging of moments in the drawing. or different mediums and different kinds of brushstrokes would coagulate into an image. those moments where marker-met-pencil became more isolated and eventually came to totally different materials and moved away from representation entirely. there are a couple of milestone pieces, but i would say that it's all derived from my earliest practices of just a totally pleasure-oriented, tactile gestural drawing on a small scale from when i was in high school.
with [using] MDF, it's a logistical question. it's light and durable. it's a surface. i have a lot of it floating around. when painted or treated, it's anonymous. and it is just matter for an event to happen on top of. you can ask a painter what material they use the most often, they might say the oil paint but the truth is probably canvas.
what was the last exhibition you saw?
Loris Greaud at Pace. it's a french guy, very young–29 or 30. just kind of catapulted into fame. interesting ideas, a little [pause] egotistical. a little heavy-handed. but he uses elements that the situation offers him to make these abstractions. like there's a text he's interested in, and he abstracts the text by having two motorized fans correlate to the speech of reading the text. so one system of representation indicates another system. that's a gesture that happens a lot with his work.
is there an artist you’ve always wanted to grab drinks with?
[pause]
i'm not very good at drinking and socializing to begin with. [laughs] there are artists i admire. i don't know that there's a specific artist…i don't even like talking about art when i drink.
i'm trying to think about who would be fun to have a drink with. it seems like Jason Rhodes would have been a fun guy to have a
drink with. he's dead now. he was a partier. and his sculptures were like a big party, inside the sculpture. and the sculpture was like the party after everyone was done partying. he seems like he'd be a good guy to get a drink with.
if money was no object, what artwork would you acquire?
i think it would be Bruce Nauman's 100 Live and Die. if i have space for it. if money's no object, it means the big wall in the big house is included?
but it's in so many ways it is the perfect artwork to me. it's so complete. it's deadpan. it's funny, it's beautiful, it's sad, it's scary. it's everything and nothing, and that idea is even in the title. it's such an open-ended and closed system at the same time.
it's a tough question. it would have to be contemporary. other people might say old masters or something. if i'm going to have one
piece, it's going to be something that relates to my journey as an artist, my understanding. him and Paul McCarthy and a few others
have been major influences. there isn't one Paul McCarthy piece i really want to own, but that [Bruce Nauman] just sits on the wall so
perfectly, like the way an elephant might sit in the room. that piece sits on the wall the way that this unspoken dread would sit in a
room. it'd be a really interesting thing to have in the home.
is there one thing you wish you could do?
yeah. i wish i could manifest an object just by thinking of it. i mean i have the power of manifest, but it takes a longer time. and it doesn't come out as perfect as my vision. i'd love to be able to just snap my fingers and just create that way. some artists have it, but they need an army of assistants and a lot of money. and i have it but it just takes a long, long, long time. i just want the power of instant manifest.
i mean if you're talking about superpowers, i'd love the power to heal. to touch someone and heal them. i'd also love the power, or to develop the technology, to teleport. that would change the world. no more oil or gas, no more war–i mean there'd be war but for different reasons. space exploration would open up. but those are kind of pointless answers.
interviewed by Serena Qiu on june 9 , 2012 at Jerry Blackman’s studio / for more information contact gallery@toomerlabzda.com