[Jerome Deck] What is your earliest recollection of an interaction with art?
[Oliver Herring] It's hard to remember exactly what my earliest recollection was. There are maybe two things that jump out. One of them is not a traditional art experience, but, when I was, 12 or 13 or 14, which would have been ‘76, ‘77 —probably ‘77— I was in London for a day. I'd never been there on my own and just walked around without knowing where I was going and ended up on Carnaby Road. Carnaby Road back in that day was one of the hearts of the punk movement in England. I think the punk movement started in ‘76 or so, so it was right at the beginning. I had never heard punk music. I had never seen a punk rock concert, not even a picture of one. Punk Rock hadn't penetrated the media in Europe much or at all. I was suddenly in an environment where I was so out of my comfort zone. I was both terrified, but also kind of overwhelmed by all this visual sensation: the clothing, the hair, the colors, the makeup, the accessories. It was just all mind-blowing. I tried to bleed into the background as much as possible.
At some point, a boy, maybe a year or two older than me, came up to me and asked me for a quid, a pound. I'm still proud that I had the courage to ask him in return for a photograph that I could take. That photograph hung for the next decade or more next to my bed. I should mention that to my eyes, he was the most beautiful boy I had ever seen. He had a Mohawk, a leather jacket, and there was a pet rat on his shoulder. He was the exact opposite of me. Somehow seeing this alternative beauty and this visual way to counter culture had a big impact on me.
The second experience was going to an exhibition by the German artist, Joseph Beuys, maybe a couple of years later. I had heard of him, but I hadn't seen his work. At first, I really couldn't make sense of what I was seeing, but he was there and eventually grabbed the microphone and started to talk. He kept talking and talking and talking about all kinds of stuff that seemed to have nothing to do with the work at first glance: the environment, politics, education. What struck me about that experience was first of all, how straightforward his language was. I thought that if he could reach this very skeptical teenager, then he could probably reach anybody. I felt like he was talking to me, and suddenly these little pieces of felt and fat and butter and chocolate transformed into these portals of possibility. It was the first time that I was able to connect art with something that impacted life. I thought that this was an example for me, Joseph Beuys's work, as something that had the potential to change people and change society. That was a huge eye-opener.
[JD] I liked what you said, “portals of possibilities:” these alternative things were overwhelming and very stimulating and just really triggered this creative part in your brain. In addition to these experiences you described, are there other artists that have significantly influenced the way that you work or the way that you see the world?
[OH] Yeah, of course. There have been many such experiences and they're not all artists. I mean, they're all artists in a way. They're all creative agents, all visual artists.
One of them was Ethyl Eichelberger who was a performance artist and drag queen. I saw him perform when I was a student in England sometime later in the eighties. He just blew my mind. I'd never actually seen anything like that. I saw his rendition of King Lear, a solo performance, where he played both the male and female parts. So he was both in male and female drag and it was utterly liberating because in the end, all the stereotypes surrounding gender just sort of collapsed. The only thing that remained was his personality and brilliance. And that was transformative. In fact, I went after studying in England to the States, to New York for an MFA in part to expose myself to people like him.
Also, while I was in England I was swept away by a guy named Leigh Bowery. You could consider him a club kid, but he was much more than that. He made his own fashion and his fashion was outlandish. He started his own clubs, hosted nights, and was a larger-than-life person. He started to merge into the art world and fashion world that way. Seeing him in these crazy outfits, not just in clubs, but also occasionally on the streets of London in the eighties taught me what was a social sculpture, but without a safety net. I think that he is the one who coined the phrase, “social sculpture.” Leigh Bowery on the streets of London in those days, that was a whole other level of taking something crazy and highly personalized and idiosyncratic onto the streets. That was another very impactful person.
[JD] Were you drawn by all these creative agents to a point where you felt like you needed to also be a creative agent to become more involved in a creative community?
[OH] I would have gravitated towards these kinds of people one way or another even if I had studied medicine or if I had become a hairdresser. I think I would have always been a creative person. In the end, I gravitated towards art, not so much by design, but by circumstance. I continued to take one step at a time. I don't make long-term plans so much so that I am able to allow what's around me at the moment to impact my decisions.
[JD] It seems like you're putting a lot of emphasis on people and how people have influenced you. Do you think that working through art is an experience that should be pursued as an individual or as a community? And which is more preferable to you?
[OH] I think there are profound lessons to be learned under different circumstances. Soon after I came to New York, Ethyl Eichelberger—the guy I told you about—committed suicide, because he had AIDS. This was also at the height of the AIDS crisis. When I went to New York I painted. When Eichelberger killed himself, because he had AIDS, I radically changed my work practice. I started to knit. Because his work was very gender-bending I thought that knitting, in those days at least, seemed like a very gendered process. Knitting was instead a female craft as in I didn't know a single guy who was knitting. So I taught myself how to knit. And anyway, long story short I made that same stitch to make different types of sculptures and ended up doing that for 10 years. 10 years is a long time because there was very little variety in what I was doing.
I ended up making that same stitch 10 or 12 hours a day for 10 years. That's like running a marathon right after a marathon. It was intense. There are a lot of lessons that I learned from this. First of all, I learned that I have the stamina and endurance to do something like this and to keep something that, on the surface, is so mind-numbing and mundane, interesting. The mind is infinitely flexible, and I could always change, at least in my head, the parameters for how to frame this for myself. So at one point, I looked at it and approached it as an homage to Ethyl Eichelberger, but then I looked at it for a while and I approached it as a sculpture, or as a form of performance, or as a form of activism. I would continue doing this infinitely, but like anything excessive, it became unhealthy. So I changed out of that towards something that was more open-ended and social because that was the other thing about knitting, it was very solitary. But I learned a lot from that. I would not trade it.
As for working with other people, there are other lessons to be learned: how to build trust. I would find shortcuts to very unusual levels of intimacy to build community. Like any person, I have many needs and many interests, and I use my work to cater to everything that I feel like I need to cater to. I would work both on a very solitary project, where my voice in my head is the only voice but then simultaneously also work with an institution or a lot of people where multiple voices contribute to the creative outcome. I treasure them all.
[JD] You once said that people are the most difficult medium to work with because they're utterly unpredictable. How do you utilize or welcome unpredictability in your work?
[OH] My work includes a fair amount of flexibility and openness towards the people that I work with, the environment that I'm in, and the conditions and the framework under which I work. Sometimes it's very specific. For example, when I'm working in another country with a very different cultural sensibility, I have to adjust everything so that I do not offend. I tend to not go into a project with any sort of set goals. I will spend a fair amount of time independent of how long something is. Sometimes it's a day for a session or sometimes I'm in a place for three months and then the initial phase might be two or three weeks. I usually am open to not imposing any sort of expectation onto this process because I have none. What I do is create an environment where everybody has a lot of agency to express themselves, explore, to set their boundaries and thresholds. This gives me a chance to listen, watch, and learn. Once I feel like I have a more nuanced understanding of who I'm working with and where I'm working, then I will start to narrow the focus a little bit. So I usually never really assert my parameters. Part of what I love about working with people is that my perceptions are so easily and so potentially radically challenged. When I work with other people, with different bodies, personalities, sensibilities, and expectations, I can understand that it can be mixed, played with, and utilized towards something that surprises all of us. We might be able to do something new that exceeds our expectations. Not having a plan before we start is key for that because we collectively have a sense, even though we don't know what we're working towards, we know that we're working collectively towards something. And that is exciting because it creates the sense of a shared experience of an adventure that we're going through together.
That process tends to shed a lot of inhibitions and it pushes a lot of comfort zones naturally. There is nobody who asserts anything. It is more like a mutual sort of shaping of the situation towards something. And then at some point, I will take more charge. It tends to be transparent throughout independent of what I do.
[JD] Are there any methods you use to create momentum? Are there boundaries that you wish could be pushed a little more?
[OH] Anything is accepted, but people are a lot more interesting than they appear to be. You just have to figure out a way to scratch up the surface and ask the right questions. In the video that brought us together, Incidental Music, what you see is the way it unfolded. It's pretty chronological. The very first scene is a boy and a girl in my studio in a classroom, and they were the first two people who showed up. When I go into a situation like that, I make myself accessible. I try to give talks. I'm out there. I'm hoping to inspire somebody to volunteer and to throw themselves into something even though we don't know what it is.
So, they showed up and none of us knew what to do. There were language barriers and I didn't want a translator around to cut out a filter. So it turns out, one of them was taking gymnastics and juggling classes and the other one was really interested in making music and also moving. So we started to move. I ended up choreographing a little dance for them. It was also a really beautiful way to connect physically without having to resort to language. It broke down immediately all kinds of barriers.
It kept growing…Each group that came in or each individual that crossed my path, I tried to adapt to what they wanted to do, and see what they brought to the table. I figured out a way to celebrate that on their terms. So there never really is something I want to push.
There's no comfort zone or boundary that I've ever wanted to push beyond what somebody wants to push themselves. The people that I work with are very dear to me. I'm very grateful to them. So their well-being is paramount to what we do. If there is ever a sense like, “Ooh, let's do this, you know, this crazy thing” and I think that might be potentially physically dangerous, I will suggest alternative ways of going about it so that we can have the same sort of experience without risking somebody's health. It's a transparent negotiation throughout, but I take my cues from the people I work with, and frankly, limitations or boundaries are fine with me. I like that. Whether they're institutional or legal or whatever. I've had to negotiate contracts when we do something in a public space when it's extraordinarily complicated to do anything. That's fine with me because there are always ways to work within limitations, you just have to think around the problem. I think a lot of these limitations are actually in your head. So I don't push boundaries because to me that’s insignificant because I'm happy with boundaries. I can work within them infinitely, expand from within them, and make art pretty much under any circumstances, with anybody, anything, and in that sense, I'm pretty independent. I've learned that.
[JD] I feel like I can relate to that. Because as architects, we're given a lot of codes that we have to abide by. These codes or boundaries ultimately influence and shape the project itself. After this negotiation or this product of your project, whether it renders as a photograph or a video, or maybe it was just the interaction itself, what happens after? What would you ideally like to see this person do after the project?
[OH] I don't have expectations. If you want a relationship with somebody, would you ask that question?
When I ask people to volunteer for a project with me, independent of what it is, there tends to be no money involved. Everybody has to have their very own reasons to participate. That makes us very equal. My risk is that somebody, after I invest a huge amount of time and effort into that person, could just walk out and the entire thing is ruined. It is in our mutual interest to make this relationship work. That's a beautiful starting point. So I don't do something with the expectation of that person to take a particular experience away from it, but because of how these experiences are shaped, we tend to get very close in the process. It's like having had an extreme adventure together that has also been extremely and unusually intimate. It doesn't rely on the usual marks of intimacy or on how to get to know one another.
That tends to be special. It's a luxury in this life where things tend to be quite streamlined. At the very least the experience is something that we'll share. I'm still in contact with so many of the people that I worked with independent of where they are in this world, we are still in each other's life somehow. If I see somebody 10 years or 15 years after we did something together, there is still that crazy bond that we have because we shared that experience. I've heard from many people who after something like that have changed certain aspects of their life. They made decisions about what they wanted to do, how they wanted to expose themselves to similar situations, how they wanted to open up their lives to different kinds of experiences, and how to interact with people in slightly different ways than they used to. So there is that, but it's not something I would want to control.
The work itself can have an impact sort of beyond me as well. Task is a good example. It's a simple structure that is self-generating but takes on a life of its own. I very rarely am directly involved with a Task Party at this point. Most of the Task Parties, and there are literally hundreds, are taking place in classrooms from kindergarten to higher education and all over the world. I'm lucky if I even find out about a Task Party, but to me, that's a great example of how a piece of art like Task can take on a life of its own and then be useful beyond what I did at a certain point with a group of people which also changes my role in relation to it. Now, I try to just let it do its thing out there. The most useful thing that I can do is to make it as accessible as possible.
And I listen to teachers, I listen to educators and students and help in trying to tailor certain aspects of the structure so that it becomes as useful for a kindergarten class as it is for a group of psychiatrists who experiment with this or even a tool for higher education.
[JD] You're so involved socially and you emit so much energy to get people to be so creative. It's like you are passively building this community of creativity around you, which I think is special. But, I would ask, is it exhausting? You've maintained so many relationships, you go to so many talks, you have so many meetings, and you're still creating so much work. How do you keep on going?
[OH] You know that’s a good question because it's so relevant. I hit a dead end. It was a time before the pandemic where for about seven years or so, I spent nine out of 12 months on the road, simply going from one project to another. As grateful as I am that I was able to do this, It burnt me out. The hardest part of this wasn't my stamina, but getting extremely close to people, forging these insanely beautiful bonds only to then say bye-bye and have to start all over again.
I think emotionally that exhausted me. There was a point where I thought, “okay, I cannot do this, I need a break for a while.” Domestically, I am married to a beautiful person and I love him, and I saw him only on Skype twice a day. I wanted to have a little bit more of a domestic life and also a studio practice in my actual studio. I was starting to be referred to as a post-studio artist, but that wasn't correct because I have a studio here in Brooklyn. Even when I was back for two days only, I would make work here. I was on the road for various reasons, but I decided to take a break.
So for an entire year, I postponed or canceled everything. Then the pandemic hit and bit me in the ass. I had brought people into the studio for the previous year, and we did these one-on-one projects, these beautiful life-sized drawings where the person that I was drawing directed me in every aspect. They set the terms for everything that was taking place: the props, the pose, the color, the style, and even the music we were listening to. They were in complete control of how long I was able to draw them. They were in control and that was so beautiful. But then, the pandemic hit, and everything was dead.
And this is what brings us into the very present. I'm still in this space.
[JD] The pandemic has changed the way of life completely. It seems now that my peers and community are tired. We don't know why though. That's why I wanted to ask that question because the effect that you have on people seems like it takes so much energy and a lot of motivation. I think that's something that people are lacking right now is staying motivated to keep on trying and doing new things. I don't think it's laziness.
[OH] It is not laziness, It's people being completely overwhelmed by the situation. I told you earlier that I pride myself on being able to make something out of anything. But I think it was the pandemic, after years of political turmoil in this country, not being able to connect with people physically, which I really, really, really missed. I got super depressed and felt very lonely like everybody. It is really difficult. I've been in situations that were dark before, not like within the circumstances of COVID, the circumstances are different. Somehow I have always managed to make something during that time, that afterward proved to be more meaningful to me than a lot of the stuff that I made during the good times. Maybe because I allowed myself to risk different things because the terms under which I worked were different and I had less to lose. Some of my best work was made during an extreme darkness. To experience it once, and then again, and then again, provided me with enough of an experiential foundation to not despair during a moment like that.
Even when I felt down, I put one foot in front of another and worked my way through it. I did this during the pandemic as well. It took a while, but I'm working on things that would have never happened without that pandemic. I'm proud of that. It makes me feel empowered and it also provides me with some sort of blueprint for how to approach life outside of the studio.
[JD] How were you able to remain hopeful during that time? How do you return to a state of hopefulness? Personally, I think it's very easy for me to create work that deals with death and hopelessness. It's very easy for me to create that gesturally and almost instinctively.
[OH] What did you say? Death and hopelessness?
[JD] Currently my thesis is about the creation of a death ritual that involves us undergoing a material process to sacrifice ourselves for the geology of the earth. But I'm implanting these ideas of hope within it.
[OH] But you don’t need to here, that's the beautiful thing. I think the mere fact that you found a platform to deal with it, to address it, and to work through it in some way to come to some sort of resolution that, to me, that very act is what is hopeful.
I don't think I'm making hopeful work right now, nor have I ever. It's hard to make anything good and it should be. I want to take shortcuts when it comes to life because I think this pursuit of happiness is kind of infantile. There's so much more in life that is worth acknowledging and living even when it's really difficult. But I think that's what makes a happy moment or a hopeful moment resonate properly. I'm trying to not resign myself at all to moments of darkness, but I see the potential in the experiences that can be gained from it. The important thing is to simply address it and which is what you're doing. You're going there and that's a really brave thing to do. I think that's what ultimately generates hope because you're not defeated. You're actually working through it.
[JD] I appreciate everything you just said because it has been hard. I told my mother and my grandmother about my thesis and its topics regarding mortality and they see it as a cry for help, but I reassure them that it's not. It is just how I am processing everything. So again, it really means a lot for you to say all those things.
[OH] I'm so grateful that I have the space and I give myself the time to deal with that. During the pandemic, on top of everything, I had to deal with some health issues. My body started to fall apart. I found out it’s Celiac. Do you know what that is? It's like an intense, crazy gluten intolerance. I didn't even know before, but because I didn't know it, my body started to fall apart and I thought it was something much worse. So I was struggling on top of everything else with extreme existential issues.
What do I do? We live for a short amount of time on this planet in this beautiful life. What's important? And so I came to certain conclusions with that and I feel like it's changed the way I look at my work. It has changed the way I look at life and it has been incredibly positive. Despite the very difficult time that I went through, it turned into a very positive experience. I'm also lucky that it was just celiac and nothing worse, but I'm just so grateful right now. It's like when there's a gun to your head there's an amount of sudden clarity because you have to cut out all the bullshit and everything sort of narrows down to an essence.
That doesn't happen very often, and for me, it just happened. As scary as that was, it was also cathartic and regulatory. I'm very grateful for that experience.
[JD] How would you say your current significant influences are impacting the work that you're creating now?
[OH] If I work with people, I think the way I work is I allow for all this external information and energy to come in and then to a large degree shape where we’re moving. When I'm on my own, like during the last two years, I allow my mind to go crazy and I try not to filter myself. I indulge any stupid impulse in my work without filtering myself. After a while, certain things rise to the surface. Then, I start to hone in on that and invest in it without any expectations. I am not trying to make art, I'm trying to learn a new language and then try and make sentences with that.
During the pandemic, for example, in the midst of the lockdown, I came upon a video of a piece of choreography from 1912 by a dancer-choreographer named Vaslav Nijinsky. He was considered the most important dancer male dancer of his time. This particular ballet was considered the first modernist ballet, perhaps. He was inspired by Greek and Egyptian frescoes and vases. The figures are very flat. He choreographed a ballet that radically emphasized flatness. All the movement happens linearly. It's all flat. Without really at first being able to put my finger on it intuitively or instinctively, it rang so true to me that I watched it again and again and again, and again. I couldn't stop watching it. It just profoundly moved me. And then it dawned on me.
Of course! I can't move. I can't move. I'm in this cage. I feel so claustrophobic. This movement is, in a way, the opposite of what ballet is, that's all about bodies moving in space three-dimensionally. But here they were curtailed to moving flat. So, I suddenly thought, I know that I'm not a dancer, I'm not a choreographer, I'm not 20, and I'm not even 30, you know?
It gave me something to do during a pending pandemic. I worked to shape my body to be able to do this. And then I taught myself the choreography with the help of a friend who is a dancer and cut out all the other parts so that it's a solo from beginning to end. It's just the central protagonist that was originally danced by Nijinsky. So I taught myself this ballet and that is now going to be a performance. I don't have a venue for it yet, but it will be shown. Then that took on a life. Suddenly it just sort of turned into its own thing, into its own language.
That's how I work in general. I don't go into it with any idea or expectation. I just let it happen. I don't filter myself or whoever I'm working with. And then eventually there is a little spark or something that happens and it might be because I'm adequately sensitized to the situation or because I just run out of cliches that clutter my brain and eventually some beautiful accident happens that surprises me and then I suddenly see potential that narrows down the process. And that happens with groups and that happens when I'm on my own. So during the pandemic, it was very nice that I was able to utilize my own body after having utilized so many other people's bodies.
It felt almost cathartic. I've always been looking for that in other people, and now suddenly I'm in a situation where the only thing that I can do is exactly that. It feels fair. It feels good and very empowering to feel my body do that.
[JD] This reminds me of your work, Howard street, where the child was being lifted in the back of the truck. There are people in the back of the truck carrying the child, it's like he's flying. I wonder if this empowered position you were in had this similar feeling to flying with all this support carrying you.
[OH] Well the process is worth talking about. I had a show in 2007. I had all kinds of objects in there, but part of the setup that I didn't advertise was that I'd be in the exhibition every day and I'd say yes to absolutely everything. There were a few things that I wouldn't do, but I made myself open to any sort of creative or even non-creative experience that wasn't too expensive or dangerous or whatever.
That video came about because two students that just graduated started to chat with me. By the end of the conversation, I had promised to go to their studio in Philadelphia, in a pretty underserved neighborhood. They told me that there were all these problems among their little contingency of mostly white students in a Latino neighborhood. So they signified to a lot of the people their gentrification and different values. Meanwhile, these guys were there because they couldn't afford any other place. So there were a lot of issues. They thought maybe I could do something through my work there, but I didn't know what. It seems that it was another situation that was way out of my comfort zone.
I showed up one day with a camera and we just simply started. It was a Sunday morning so people were a little sleepy. The street was kind of empty. I just started with the two guys that had brought me there and then eventually what we were doing was more interesting to the people who were on the street than a lot of the other stuff that was happening, especially kids.
Once I finally managed to talk a kid into helping me with a trick, the ice was broken when that kid worked with us, other kids started to come in, and then suddenly everybody on that street started to help. It was such a beautiful icebreaker. And for example, when we held that young kid in our hands we had the consent of the parents who were right there.
The father was even in the video a few scenes earlier. It was such a positive experience that a lot of the people wanted more of that. So I went back a few weeks later, we made another video, and then the question was what to do with it. I didn't want a regular art opening because it felt too tribal. I thought, let's do something in that place right there. We worked for months to try and get the neighborhood to become part of the planning team for this. In fact, it was also the transition of Task as an organized event with a pre-determined set of people that was curated to Task Party. I wanted it to be a party, but then I thought, let's impose Task on top of that and turn it into a Task Party and see what happens. We got maybe 350 people to come during the outliers of a hurricane. So the city was flooded, but the art crowd came. Half of the people who were there were people from the neighborhood.
It was the most magnificent experience because people who wouldn't ordinarily intimately work with each other did. All kinds of barriers were broken. It was such a positive and beautiful event that we all, despite being absolutely utterly exhausted and then having to deal with the insane mess the next day, decided to do the same thing again a year later. It turned into a thing that's happened I think three times. I got exhausted, but by the end of it the neighborhood turned it into their own sort of neighborhood party where they would have oil drums, roast pigs, and god knows what, and the art crowd was there. I think the third one had over 600 people. So it got too big in the end. I'm still in contact with those guys who invited me and with the people from that neighborhood, they're my dear friends. It was wonderful. In fact, I went to one of the guys' weddings who just got married to this beautiful woman, and some of the people that are in the video from the neighborhood were at the wedding. So that's beautiful.
[JD] It is interesting how everything sort of connects like that just naturally. It's just like a flower that doesn't stop growing.
[OH] It has to deal with finding common ground. I've deliberately exposed myself to a lot of different demographics and that can sometimes take me way out of my comfort zone. I've worked with Evangelical colleges, Mormon institutions, the military—I've worked in China, and certain Arab countries where there were serious limitations on what we were able to do. I'm an openly gay guy and somehow that through working together we've always found enough common ground to get beyond the rhetoric and realize that we have very similar general goals, which is to try and be decent people and make something meaningful out of our lives and enough to bond us together. We trust each other during this and then the rhetoric sort of falls away and you can start looking at each other as human beings.
[JD] I think that is a really beautiful place to bring this conversation into one final question that I always like asking people. What is your rose, bud, and thorn? Your rose is something that you're currently happy about, your bud is something that you're excited about, and your thorn is something that's been bringing you down lately. You don't have to say them in that order, but just those three things.
[OH] Maybe not in relation to rose, bud, and thorn, I'm just very grateful to be alive quite honestly, as basic as that. I'm still very content in my much smaller life than I was before the pandemic. At this point, I could go back out and adopt many habits of what I was doing before, being much more social and doing stuff. But, I don't because I'm extremely content right now with what I'm doing in the studio and what I’m doing, being inside my head. I'm very excited about my work right now. It fuels me. It keeps me up at night. I’m fired up by that.
What I'm looking forward to…I am taking one step at a time. Nothing else like these last two years has taught me that there is a lot of value in not planning, being present, living every moment to the fullest, being productive while doing so, and then seeing what happens out of that. I don't want to make plans.
The thorn aspect…I don't think there is a thorn. I told you earlier that I sincerely believe that the limitations that come my way or are in me are also opportunities. Sure, I obsess about Ukraine, the environment and the social justice movement, and all of that. Of course, I pay attention. I'm freaking out about the midterm elections and all of that. Sure. But that's not what we're talking about.
[JD] Presence. I appreciate that I got to be present with you here.
[OH] Likewise!
