Robert Therrien At Inverleith House

It’s been a while since I posted an inter­view to the site, so it seems fit­ting to return with some­thing of an exclu­sive. LA-​based artist Robert Ther­rien doesn’t usu­ally grant inter­views, but kindly agreed to answer a few ques­tions via email for a pre­view of his first solo show in the UK, at Inver­leith House, Edinburgh.

(My apolo­gies for the simple nature of ques­tions - I never quite know how to handle inter­view­ing people via email, with­out the to-​and-​fro of a live conversation.)

Motifs and themes - domes­tic and famil­iar objects are often the sub­ject of your work. Why? What prompts you to trans­form or inves­ti­gate this sub­ject matter?

The famil­iar and the unfa­mil­iar both have fascinations.

In the bigger world, some objects may appear domes­tic. In fact, they’re my own things I use every­day, for exam­ple Table and Chairs is directly based on the table I’ve had for­ever and the plates are what I eat off of everyday.

A good exam­ple of the unfa­mil­iar would be the beards. I don’t have a beard, and in fact I don’t know many people who do. Some­thing inter­est­ing devel­oped while work­ing on them. They’re essen­tially cos­tumes. They’re an attempt at the unfa­mil­iar. In fact, they’re fake beards that ended up not even nec­es­sar­ily being male.

Also, the motifs and themes change from day to day, but over longer peri­ods of time it becomes clear they inevitably always repeat. For exam­ple, the chapel turned into the oilcan. It’s still a chapel actu­ally - a chapel of oil.

Scale - much of your work plays with scale, call­ing to mind Alice In Won­der­land, and fairy­tales. How did this aspect of your prac­tice develop? What makes it a con­tin­u­ing source of inspiration/working method?

The artist’s point of view - from the small world - could be viewed as a large ges­ture pub­li­cally. The prac­tice is cre­at­ing some­thing both large and small.

Pub­li­cally, Table and Chairs is per­ceived as a big object, where it actu­ally orig­i­nated from a small detail-a corner bracket sup­port­ing the table leg. Instead of crawl­ing under­neath and pho­tograph­ing an actual table in order to see it, why not shrink your­self and take a normal snapshot?

Also, by chang­ing their envi­ron­ment (size of the room), Table and Chairs is capa­ble of being small - in a large depot, for instance - or large, in a res­i­den­tial room, like the one at Inver­leith House.

In the end, none of this really mat­ters because Table and Chairs isn’t such a big scale issue anyway. It’s only three times the actual size. A better exam­ple is Key­hole which is prob­a­bly one of my small­est sculp­tures, but it’s fifty times bigger than an actual key­hole. I don’t even know how much the teardrop might be blown up in scale.

Bal­ance - broadly speak­ing, your work seems to find a bal­ance between the con­cep­tual and the visual/physical. Is this some­thing you aim for? Is there a con­flict between the formal aspects of your work and their con­cep­tual basis?

There is a bal­anc­ing act - per­haps that’s true. There’s a huge con­flict between what an object ends up being and the idea which started it.

Things dupli­cate and replicate.

For exam­ple, pho­tograph­ing under the table branched off and turned into sev­eral objects.

Also, in my sketch­books one sub­ject directly or indi­rectly on dif­fer­ent levels unfolds. Archi­tec­ture, male, female, oxygen-there’s all kinds of sub­jects in there.

In fact, a person could become unbal­anced if it weren’t for sketchbooks.

A shift in prac­tice - it seems as if your recent work is, again broadly speak­ing, more rep­re­sen­ta­tional than ear­lier work, and tends to return to/revise/refine var­i­ous themes. Is this indeed the case, and if so, what prompted the shift?

People my age grew up with abstrac­tion. Many of us worked our way out of it, where abstract artists had worked their way out of the rep­re­sen­ta­tional. Some­times I think maybe we should work our way back - maybe we were better off.

Also, project after project, the capa­bil­ity of rep­re­sent­ing the real nat­u­rally improves, while over 25 years the same forms and themes inevitably persist.

At the same time, I don’t aspire uncon­di­tion­ally to rep­re­sen­ta­tional work.

More infor­ma­tion: Robert Ther­rien, Los Ange­les County Museum of Art, Min­i­mal­ist Fan­ta­sia - a pro­file by Hunter Drohojowska-​Philp, Robert Ther­rien - a pro­file at The Broad Art Foun­da­tion.

Posted at 1pm on 29/07/04 by Jack Mottram to the interviews category.
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