Purpose Shaping
SIMON CASTETS A lot of your work stems from
chance encounters—with an object, a material, or
an image. In the same way, you seem to have started
working as an artist almost by accident.
NICK VAN WOERT You’re right. I’m from Reno,
Nevada, which is famous for gambling. It’s a city that
promotes a lifestyle of luck. I feel at home in that
frame of mind. I also grew up surrounded by the
ornamentation of that culture: the billboards, the fauxfinished architecture, and the neon lights. Reno is a
pile of architectural accessories with no real structure
underneath it. This never made sense to me because the
city is surrounded by a very raw, unadorned landscape.
It’s located at the base of the Sierra Nevada mountains
in the high desert, where there is no ornamentation,
only exposed rocks and dirt with very few trees. I spent
a lot of time out there and it’s clear that nature leaves a
lot up to chance.
Which natural elements interest you most?
Rock formations, icicles, forest fires, and how those things
are made (fig.1). The erosion and accretion of natural
materials in the American West is so much easier to see
than in the East. When things fall apart their anatomy
is exposed—it’s a form of dissection. It’s like the Nazca
Lines in Peru, where the Nazca people made drawings
in the Earth’s surface over two hundred meters wide by
simply displacing the reddish rocks on the surface to reveal
the white stone underneath (fig.2). That way of treating
materials has had a great influence on me.
This reminds me of your sculpture Haruspex, in which
street debris is ossified in colored layers (cat.15).
The idea for Haruspex came from Vitruvius’s Ten Books
on Architecture. He writes about the haruspex as a
soothsayer who determined the health of a particular
region by dissecting animals found in that area. He
would study their entrails, as they were assumed to
mirror the environment in which they lived. If the
animal’s entrails were healthy, then the land was
healthy and suitable for occupation. I wanted to apply
this logic using the city as a surrogate body; to dissect
my surroundings to reveal something about me. To
make the sculpture I took a fiberglass statue, a cast
from a 4th century Etruscan warrior, and broke it in
half. I stuffed a garbage bag inside it and filled it with
the discarded energy drink cans, ceiling tiles, cigarette
butts, broken glass, gravel, bricks, and plastic bags
that accumulate outside my studio each day. I used
polyurethane, a material found in almost everything we
buy and build, to set the trash in place, and then I peeled
away the garbage bag to expose the cast. The guts of the
figure were made from the guts of the city.
Your architecture background influences and inspires
your work in many ways. What did you focus on as a
student in that field and how does it translate to what
you do now?
My father is an architect and his library was always
at my disposal. I was drawn to the buildings that
mirrored the way I saw materials being used in nature.
Buildings with no ornamentation, or structures
on which the ornamentation was an unpredictable
byproduct. Modernist architects like Mies van der
Rohe, Louis Kahn, Le Corbusier, and Tadao Ando
were my school’s primary focus. During this time,
in the late 1990s, my interest shifted towards the
architecture coming out of Los Angeles, where design
was true to materials, with an added influence from
industrial architecture. Morphosis and Wes Jones
were doing amazing things at that time (fig.3). They
have a severe way of treating steel and a manner of
exposing the guts of a building, like it has been broken
open, or like it was patched together with remnants
of a grain silo; they accomplished it without being as
straightforward as the Lloyd’s building in London, by
Richard Rogers, or the Centre Pompidou in Paris, by
Rogers and Renzo Piano.
This attitude towards materials and construction
has been a major influence on my work. Materials are
what they are: there is no reason to disguise them, and
they naturally accrue meaning. I like to hijack that
meaning. Now I’m more interested in the architecture
at the opposite end of the spectrum, especially
buildings that have been modified or marginalized.
Before Paris’ Centre Georges Pompidou was built, its
team organized an exhibition called “Architectures
Marginales aux U. S. A.,” which focused on
Americans building their own houses as a means of
self-realization and opposition to social order.
Exactly. That show sounds amazing. On the extreme
end of that movement, in 1981, the MOVE organization, a black liberation and “back-to-nature” group
from Philadelphia, took a townhouse on 6221 Osage
Avenue and turned it into a bunker, boarding up the
windows and preaching to the neighborhood through
a bullhorn at all hours about civil disobedience and
anti-technology. In 1985 they were asked to vacate the
building because they were not paying rent. When they
refused to leave, a gunfight ensued, which only ended
when the city of Philadelphia dropped a bag of C4
explosives on the roof of the building from a helicopter
(fig. 4). The bomb not only burned 6221 to the ground,
but also sent the entire block up in flames. I am working on an architectural model representing the various
stages of that building’s life.
fig.1
fig.3
There are “back-to-nature” groups, and there are also
legends and anecdotes of people coming from nature,
feral children…
That’s one of the things alluded to in She-Wolf (cat.14).
The story of the founding of Rome describes a wolf
that resuscitates feral twins, Romulus and Remus, and
in doing so becomes the unwitting mother of Western
civilization. The piece is a human-scale steel structure
that combines aspects of billboard supports with the
iconography of skyscrapers.
fig.2
fig.4
How did you transition from studying architecture to
studying art?
I grew up skateboarding and drawing. Both have been
a part of my life from a very young age. Skating instilled
a certain comfort with risk, and when I wasn’t skating
my friend Gordon and I drew photos from skate
magazines. I guess I’m trying to say that my interests
were initially artistic, but at the same time I was always
architecturally aware, and I’ve always considered the
two as one and the same. So when it came time to
apply to college I flipped a coin—heads for art school
and tails for architecture. Tails it was. It didn’t matter
to me which one I studied, and it turned out to be a
meaningful experience.
And then you went for the opposite side of the coin?
I knew I wasn’t going to pursue architecture as a
profession by the time I graduated from college. I
didn’t want to pursue anything. I wanted things to just
happen. So after school, I had four odd jobs, which
lasted six months each over the span of two years.
By the end of that time, I decided to go to art school.
The whole time I was in college, and after college as
well, I had been making paintings and sculpture. In
2005, I came to New York for graduate school. I’d
never been to New York before then. Once graduate
school ended, I had to unlearn everything I was
taught, and here we are today.
You titled one of your works—Ned Ludlam (cat.11)—
after the legendary figure from whom the Luddites
derived their name. The Luddites were British textile
artisans who joined together to protest the consequences
Industrial Revolution, often by destroying mechanized
looms (fig.5). Are you as interested in the political
implications of sabotage as you are in the Luddites
embodying the struggle of man versus machine in a
more abstract way?
Yeah. The Luddites, Ted Kaczynski, Henry David
Thoreau, Earth First!, and anarcho-primitivism are
all interesting to me in relation to man versus machine.
I made the sculpture Ned Ludlam by taking a massproduced plaster cast of George Washington, chiseling
the finished surface off of it, making a mold of that,
having a bronze fabricated from the mold, smashing
the bronze to pieces, and then welding it back together
inside out. I was interested in reverse engineering or
unmaking the original cast. I thought it paralleled the
intentions of the Luddites. It also puts the focus on
how the piece was produced and hopefully away from
what it simply looks like. I think things need to be held
accountable for the way they are made.
More generally, change results from pressure, a real
physical pressure. You can see it in nature and you can
see it in social situations. The Grand Canyon is a massive
tear, a mountain is a pile of earth, and both were made
possible through excessive force (fig.6). Riots are the same
way. Smashing up stocking looms is brilliant.
You recently mentioned a 2006 exhibition at the
Hirshhorn Museum called “The Uncertainty of
Objects and Ideas,” saying how inspirational it was
for you at the time. What about that show made the
most lasting impression on the art student you were?
The show was very physical, almost completely
devoid of images. Nothing was theatrical. The works
fig.1 - Icicles, From the Robert N. Dennis Collection of the New York Public Library. Used with permission. fig.2 - Nazca
Line (Monkey), Copyright 1953 Maria Reiche. Used with permission. fig.3 - Primitive Hut, Wes Jones, Copyright 1985 Wes
Jones. All rights reserved. Used with permission. fig.4 - Bombing of MOVE Headquarters, Philadelphia, 1985, Copyright 1985
Philadelphia Inquirer. All rights reserved. Used with permission.
were kind of sloppy in that they weren’t interested in
concealing the efforts that went into their production.
Franz West splashed paint on paper mache blobs,
Rachel Harrison was placing readymades into her
work in a very straightforward way, Mark Handforth
showed a giant light pole that he bent a couple of times,
and Isa Genzken exhibited these raw, inhospitable
totemic piles of objects (fig.7). I admired the honesty
of the works. In hindsight I have a problem with
the context in which the title of the show places the
works. It seemed to say, “Here’s some weird stuff.”
I suppose it speaks to how slippery meaning can be.
But I’m more interested in what the military calls
“purpose shaping.” It presumes the shape of an object
is the result of a set of rules. The F-117 stealth fighter
aircraft, for instance, has a faceted surface to fragment
beams from scanning radars, making the plane
invisible. That’s an amazing sculpture. A sculpture
that’s hard to see. In nature, the shape of an object is
also the result of a set of rules.
In his essay “Art and Objecthood,” Michael Fried
discusses the hollowness of minimalist sculptures—
“the quality of having an inside”—as evidence of
their anthropomorphism. Works like Hollow Core or
Ned Ludlam seem to reference a similar issue, as both
works are incarnations of a flawed notion (cat.18 and
11). In the case of the objects you use, mass-produced
reproductions of antiques, how would you describe
what they stand for in their “natural state,” and what
they undergo through your intervention?
It’s impossible to make something void of anthropomorphic references. The way we make things reflects how
we see ourselves. We use the same language to describe
ourselves as we do to describe everything else. Buildings,
for example, have a skin, a bone structure, and ducts and
pipes run through them like veins or nerves. Visitors
move through the structures like blood. It’s easy to apply
that same thinking to sculpture.
The statues I use reflect the deception and fiction
we are surrounded by, like billboards or buildings
made from styrofoam and given a faux finish. Cities are
turning into grand stage sets. This is why I’m interested
in a return to nature, where everything is exposed. A
material language and the semantics of material can
develop in that context.
When I look at objects, I look at how they are made.
The fiberglass statue used in Hollow Core was cast from
a bronze 4th or 5th century Etruscan warrior found in
a shipwreck off the coast of Sicily. The reproduction,
ignoring what the sculpture is made of, is only interested
in preserving a visual likeness. The material history of an
object should be treated the same as its image, making it
inseparable from both its meaning and physical presence.
Works like Untitled are so visually compelling (cat.16).
You fill the interior of a statue with polyurethane
and sometimes other materials, let it dry, chop it off,
and display a number of its extremities. The result
is very unexpected. Instead of ultra white like the
exterior, you see black and grey. In another work,
you see vivid red with white chunks (that one makes
me think of salami). I thought you hadn’t filled them,
just exposed their actual inside. I guess the linkage of
these objects to art history and the “noble” materials
their referents are made of trigger these expectations.
Yes. We expect objects to be hollow imitations. I wanted
to give guts to these things. If you fill them up and cut
them open they come to life and the materiality of the
objects are brought back to the foreground.
Robert Smithson described his place of birth,
Passaic, New Jersey, as a “zero panorama” of “ruins
in reverse.” He wrote, “The suburbs exist without a
rational past and without the ‘big events’ of history. Oh,
maybe there are a few statues, a legend, and a couple of
curios, but no past—just what passes for a future.”
Smithson’s description of a suburban lack of history
(or ignorance thereof) reminds me of your choice of
materials. The faux antique busts and statues come from
places where the historical timeline is ignored in favor of
dubious aesthetic groupings. In choosing what statues to
work with, do you replicate that indiscrimination or do
you have a rigorous selection process? Do the historical
aspects of the works come into play?
Styrofoam buildings covered in plastic sheathing don’t
decay well and they are a kind of “ruins in reverse.” It’s
the anti-aging cream of architecture, but none of it lasts
more than fifty years. The statues I use are the same way.
The luxury they stand for is an illusion. When I get them, I
replicate the indiscrimination because they are all the same
to me, piles of plastic masquerading as sculpture. I get one
of the store’s employees to pick them out for me.
What type of store sells the statues? Gardening stores?
I buy some from gardening websites, but most are from a
casting house on 26th Street in Manhattan. They inherited
the molds when they bought the company. They make
fig.5 - Luddites (Frame-breakers) Smashing a Loom, 1812. Public domain image obtained from Wikipedia Commons.
fig.6 - The Grand Canyon, Copyright 2007 Luca Galuzzi / www.galuzzi.it. Used with permission. fig.7 - Untitled, 2006,
Isa Genzken, from “The Uncertainty of Objects and Ideas: Recent Sculpture,” The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture
Garden. Copyright 2006 Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Joseph H. Hirshhorn Purchase
Fund. Photograph by Lee Stalsworth. fig.8 - un-color becomes alter ego, 1984, Copyright Haim Steinbach. Courtesy the
artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York.
fig.5
fig.7
fig.6
fig.8
casts from the molds but it’s not how they make their
money. Most of their time is spent doing custom jobs
for artists. I think I’m the only one buying the statues
and busts. Before me, they rented the statues as props to
Martha Stewart, who films her show right down the street.
These plaster and fiberglass impostors are out there
in the world but have no intention of participating in
any kind of artistic dialogue. I’m bringing them into the
conversation.
Like in Haim Steinbach’s work, when dog chew toys
or Hulk gloves end up in museums (fig.8.)?
Exactly. Except Steinbach’s work is more about considering these mass-produced objects as sculpture, where
my interest lies in the objects pretending to be sculpture.
fig.9
fig.10
fig.12
fig.11
fig.13
Works like Every Thing Must Glow, We’re All In This
Together, and Dead Load make me think of São Paulo,
which, in 2007, decided to ban billboards along with all
other forms of outdoor advertising (cat.4, 24 and 6). The
city was full of it before. Did you know about this?
Yes. It’s beautiful. What shocked me most when I
looked it up was that they left all of the billboard
structures intact and just peeled the vinyl away (fig.9).
You see all of these elegant structures, which are almost
minimalist sculptures, all over the city. All three of the
works that you reference quote billboard structures or
signage. Every Thing Must Glow falls apart every time
it’s moved. Dead Load has an almost deep-fried finish
to it. We’re All In This Together abducts its title from one
of the billboards in Edward Abbey’s book The Monkey
Wrench Gang (fig.10).
Tell me more about that.
Abbey was interested in reclaiming and preserving the
American West at whatever cost. He saw the untouched
landscape as one of the only real things we have left.
The Monkey Wrench Gang was a random group of
individuals brought together by this preservationist
ideal. They did their part to derail the forces that
were trying to develop what was left of nature. They
burned billboards, which is what We’re All In This
Together references. They destroyed tractors, bridges,
dams, trains, and anything that was contributing to the
degradation of the natural landscape.
The book, although fiction, is filled with practical
information and served as a kind of cookbook for the
group Earth First!, a radical environmental group.
When Earth First! formed, one of the first things
they did was drop a three hundred foot long triangle
of black vinyl down the face of Glen Canyon Dam
to make it appear cracked (fig.11). It’s an amazing
sculptural gesture that refers to the opening chapter of
The Monkey Wrench Gang. The book is filled with these
kinds of gestures. This is where I learned about mixing
HTH Chlorine and hair gel.
Is this experiment what caused your studio to almost
explode?
Yes, it is. I wanted to mix polyurethane with chlorine
to make a relationship between common building
materials and The Monkey Wrench Gang. However,
chlorine is a highly reactive material. I mixed the
two together and before I knew it, I had this boiling
cup of chemicals in my hand. The smell was putrid, a
chemically sour odor you could taste, and the amount
of smoke it was pumping out was unmanageable. I ran
to the door, threw it outside, and just started throwing
snow around because I couldn’t see anything. In that
short period of time, the studio filled up with smoke
and outside there was a plume of smoke five stories
high. I could smell my brain cells dying.
Tell me about the title of your current show, “Breaking
and Entering.”
Rembrandt’s painting The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes
Tulp shows the doctor dissecting a corpse, pulling at the
muscles and tendons in front of an audience—a surgeon
explaining man to men. He’s showing his audience
something they have never seen before, yet it is something
that has been there the whole time playing an integral part
in the way they understand who and what they are. A
constructed environment is the same way. It’s anatomical.
But the title also has to do with a burglary, correct?
Yeah. My studio was broken into recently. The window
they came through is the interface between the outside
world and my studio, my studio being the manifestation
of what’s going on inside my head. So, in a sense, they
broke into my head, frisked the place, and left with a few
things. The burglary remains significant to me because
it reflected the way that I want to approach making art.
In what way?
Whoever broke into my place hijacked societal
conventions—they broke both written and unwritten
laws. When you do that it gives you permission to steer
things in your own direction. The Luddites did the
same thing. Sometimes physical force is required to get
where you want to go.
fig.9 - Empty Billboard in São Paulo, Copyright 2007 João Pedro Perassolo. Used with permission. fig.10 - Cover for The
Monkey Wrench Gang by R. Crumb, Illustration by R. Crumb, from Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang.
Copyright 2011 Ken Sanders & Dream Garden Press. All rights reserved. Used with permission. fig.11 - Earth First! Cracking
of the Glen Canyon Dam, 1981, Copyright 2007 Toby McLeod. Used with permission. fig.12 - Silurian Orthoceras Fossil,
Copyright 2007 Jonathan Zander. Used with permission. fig.13 - Man with Petrified Tree, U.S. Library of Congress.