William Corwin

Artist, sculptor, teacher, writer – William Corwin is a man of many talents. He has been exhibited in a splattering of shows across the world since the 1990s and has strong connections to the ‘underground’ art scene in America. Will is also no stranger to the British art scene (having trained with YMB Richard Patterson). He says the city is like a “catalyst” for his work and inspiration – he also met his girlfriend there.

Here, I asked Will about his hometown New York, his ‘alternative’ career and his attraction to unusual materials.

Can you tell us about what it was like growing up in New York? Has it had an impact on you as an artist?

I think New York is what made me an artist. My dad is a playwright, my Mum was a writer, tons of their friends were artists, writers and actors, and I just remember running around in old Soho lofts when I was a kid, seeing all this funky art and thinking how cool it was to be an artist. I think when your family is in the arts, you often end up doing that yourself – everyone thinks it’s a really rebellious thing to become an artist, but it’s really like a family business a lot of the time.

What influence has your ‘underground’ work and experience had on your work?

It’s very simple – alternative and “underground” art spaces take the pressure off selling your work. That’s key to making sincere and philosophically probing work, not having to worry about the dollar! The spaces are also often funky – in both a good and bad way! – and really challenge you to create something that works within a weird space.

As a sculptor, what is it about the structural aspect of art that interests you?

I like site-specific projects; that’s why the show at George and Jorgen Gallery was so cool [this was the artists most recent exhibition in London, March 2011]. The whole idea was to build something into the space. When the gallery told me to build whatever I wanted, and preferably make it big, it was like a dream come true! I like the process of figuring out how the materials and objects will inhabit the space, and then constructing a framework for the ideas.

What was it that interested you about the Last Judgment mosaic? There is clearly a theme of cataloguing in this work – can you expand on this?

My installation came about through the idea of ranking a lot of the objects and materials I make and produce as bi-products of my work. There’s plaster rubble, little cast plaster objects, and these wooden panels I build with or paint on. I thought it would be cool to apply a sort of moral filter to these objects, displaying them on shelves, and giving them a sort of cosmic hierarchy, which is also a theme in the Last Judgment.

Why do you like to use bi-products of your work in your art?

I don’t particularly like art stores – the materials are pricey and there is way too much selection. There are too many colors of oil paint, acrylic, watercolor and tempera. I think that the magic in art resides in the fact that looking at a Frank Stella Black Painting or in a simple stone piece by Noguchi, or a box full of stuff by Cornell, there is magic and there doesn’t need to be artifice, that’s why I like wood and plaster – it’s basic and yet you can represent the universe with it.

Any ideas or plans for your next project?

July and August I’ll be doing a residency at the Clocktower Gallery. I’m going to keep following this lead with the shelves and hierarchies that I’ve started at George and Jorgen. I think I’ll create an inaccessible library, of layers and layers of shelves that can’t be reached, laden with objects and pieces of things. It’s a residency, so there will be a time aspect. The thing will grow over a few weeks, and I’ll eventually build myself into the space.

Robert Mangold

With over four decades of experience as an artist, and having been exhibited widely across America and Europe, Robert Mangold has always produced original and interesting work. His art is carefully considered, with particular attention paid to composition – including his use of shape, line and colour – to create abstract pieces that are usually informed by his interest in structured art.

His latest project, Ring, is no exception to this tradition. The exhibition, being shown at The Pace Gallery in New York for the rest of this month and most of April (and his 13^th at the gallery), showcases a series of paintings on a circular shaped canvas, as well as a selection of related works on paper. This showing is the culmination of three years work on this particular project.

Can you elaborate on why you chose to use a circle shape in this collection?

I’ve been working with the circle and circle parts as an image off and on since the mid 60s, and these Ring paintings are a continuation of that. However, the new paintings, for all the enclosure a circle signifies, the central area is empty, a void.

Why have you used two halves of a circle instead of one whole canvas in a circular shape?

The paintings are constructed in two pieces with a split or vertical seam, which has both an aesthetic as well as practical purpose. I work alone in my studio and the way the pieces for this series are made, with a large amount of plywood, it makes them very heavy. If they were in one piece, I wouldn’t have been able to handle them alone.

What role does colour play in your art?

Often a series of works or individual paintings demand certain colour or tonal restrictions, because of the nature of the piece. For instance in the Ring series, if I only used dark colours, all you would see is the ring. An intense colour might also be too much for them.

Any ideas or plans for your next project?

I don’t really know what route my next works will take, if they will be an offshoot of the current paintings or move in a different direction. I feel lucky that there are still some ideas floating around in my head that I want to pursue though!

Diana Thater: Chernobyl (DazedDigital)

The renowned film fanatic and artist presents her new video installation about the tragic nuclear accident in northern Ukraine.

Image: Production Still; ©Diana Thater

Growing up in New York in the 1960s and 70s was bound to leave its mark on self-confessed film fanatic and artist, Diana Thater – most notably in that the word impossible doesn’t seem to register in her mind. Constantly pushing technology to its limits, this acclaimed video installation artist has just tackled her most difficult project to date: an abstract look at the post-nuclear landscape of Chernobyl.

Chernobyl – a village in northern Ukraine – is today a shell of it’s former self. Twenty-five years ago, in the midst of a bustling purpose built Soviet city, Pripyat, a nuclear power plant exploded, registering level 7 on the International Nuclear Event Scale (the only level 7 event in history). It allegedly released 100 times more nuclear debris than Hiroshima did and is responsible for the deaths and illnesses of thousands of its former inhabitants. Today, the area stands completely deserted of humans, but in a remarkable feat of nature wild animals are slowly settling there. This is what attracted Diana Thater to the area – her interest in the conflict between human life and the natural world meant Chernobyl was the perfect place for her and her camera to explore.

Dazed Digital: How did you decide to become an artist?
Diana Thater: I honestly don’t know! I just was an artist. I didn’t make any conscious decision to become one. I grew up in New York and went to the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art from when I could walk. I always loved art from when I was really little.

DD: Where do you get your inspiration from?
Diana Thater: There are two things I love, one is art and the other is film. I take inspiration from wherever I can – I read, I watch films, I look at art. I’ve made work that was inspired by Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, John Ford’s Westerns, shots of Dolphins – literally any number of places. I get ideas from everything.

DD: You’ve said in the past how interested you are by the relationship between the human and natural world. What is it that you find so fascinating?
Diana Thater: The natural world is the only true unknown. There is always this discussion of the Asian person, or the black person, or the-this-or-the-that person being the ‘other’. But they are not ‘others’ at all. The only ‘other’ we actually have is animal. They are completely unknowable – we don’t know anything about their consciousness. We can speculate, but we don’t really know.

DD: Is this interest the reason why you decided to do a project on Chernobyl?
Diana Thater: Yeah, of course. Chernobyl is the only post-apocalyptic, or post-human landscape on earth. Today it’s falling into ruins, but it still looks like a city; there’s stores, apartment buildings, schools. And even though it’s completely deserted and falling apart, animals are moving into the city. So, on the one hand you have this perfectly preserved Soviet city from 1970, and on the other hand you have this post-apocalyptic landscape where animals are living.

DD: How long where you there filming for?
Diana Thater: Seven days, and a preliminary visit of two days in the summer.

DD: While you were there what kind of feelings did you experience?
Diana Thater: It was one of the hardest things I’ve done. I’ve worked in Central Africa, I’ve worked with tigers and done things that people consider ‘dangerous’, but this was the hardest. When you go to Chernobyl it’s incredibly depressing. It has something of a concentration camp feeling because there are things like piles of children’s shoes and rusted baby beds in maternity hospitals. My assistant had to leave – it was too much for her. She was living in Chernobyl in 1986 when the explosion happened, and we went back to her apartment and found a calendar from that year. She remembered it all.

DD: Is this piece political? Does it say that something good can come from such a horrific and terrible event?
Diana Thater: I think it’s both political and cultural. Chernobyl represents the failure of lots of things – a massive political system, a way of life, of science. Yet even with the human failures, nature continues to persist. Not because it wants or chooses to, but because it must.

DD: Is the video trying to say that nature will always persist then?
Diana Thater: That’s a hope!

DD: Why do you choose to convey your art through video and motion picture?
Diana Thater: I think that film is the only place – other than music – where you can experience duration, and I am very interested in that. I also like to invent little techniques and make cameras do what they’re not supposed to. When I think of new work I’m thinking about what I’m going to do with a camera or edit system that I’ve never done before.

DD: What’s next for you?
Diana Thater: Have a long nap! No, but seriously, I’m always thinking about the next thing. As soon as a piece is done, I’m always thinking about what’s next.

Chernobyl shows at Hauser & Wirth London, Piccadilly, 28 January – 5 March 2011

Interview for Recognise Magazine's Winter Issue