On Sandy Skoglund - some notes from some books

Back to Sandy Skoglund, this time with more information.

In an interview with Robert Rosenblum

Notes about her life: She went to University of Iowa and was interested in "Hollywood narrative structure"

She talks about how it has to do with prejudices in the culture - against snakes and scaly, hard surfaces "reptilian" "as well as Jungian or Freudian yearnings for things soft and cuddly." Her "Walking on Eggshells" has snakes and bunnies in it. AHHHH.

But then there is this shift "for example, the purpose [with Radioactive Cats] there was to undermine the stereotype in our culture of the cute, domesticated pet. The cats are meant to dominate the scene as survivors in a postnuclear situation because they've adapted by turning green."

This is really interesting to me for a few reasons, One is a little dumb, I'm fascinated by this convention that bright lime green is automatically this science-fictiony, radioactive, creepy.

This idea of things taking over, crawling, something inocuous becoming a real problem, is something I love, and she has one called "Atomic Love" where RAISINS are covering everything. And that is so great. Because a raisin is so cute and small and actually kind of funny to me, and then there are thousands of them and they totally make me want to scream and run away. The interviewer in this book describes it as "the kind of horrific conversion of infinitely small things suddenly blotting out humanity . . . it's such a fascinating mix of supermarket abundance and the extinction of us poor individuals . . . " (emphasis mine). This is so fascinating to me that abundance, which I have previously talked about as being safe and secure in it's plentitude, actually becomes horrific at a certain point. I love when it becomes threatening.

She said something about drawing a line between an art installation and a fun house. I LOVE THE FUN HOUSE. So creepy. :) I kind of secretly wish I could create things like that, a room full of the balloons, mirrors, floating up to the sky. Loosing your balloon, or being overwhelmed by other balloons. This also has the do with a stalker thing - "YOU ARE SO SPECIAL." So much so that i bought you 900 balloons. CREEP.

She did one called "Sock Situation." I think this is FANTASTIC. She talks about how the objects in the photos break up the space, almost crawl across the surface, which I can totally see in this one. The best part is the guy trying to vacuum one up. :) She did this for a display window in Barney's Dept. Store, by the way.

Her choice of color, she says, was about rejecting the black and white photography of the 70's and "just wanting to be bad, in poor taste, and make something that was aggressive on the wall."

They talk about how her work has to do with horror, science fiction, and Suburbia (!)
"Science fiction presented a landscape that reflected the depth of my experience of suburban life in America because it's a landscape of openness, of empty space, and a lot of anxiety going on in that open space."

"To me, terror is more terrifying if it relates closely to ordinary life. If it's more plausible, its more terrifying."

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Carol Squiers:
"Throughout her work Skoglund sets up a series of disquieting oppositions, among them visuality versus content, celebration versus critique, whimsy versus horror, the banal versus the extraordinary, the dream versus the nightmare." I LOVE THIS.

This author also talks a lot about what the photograph means as it is displayed next to the installation. Which makes me think about what a painting might do next to a thing, or how one might not have to abandon painting things in order to utilize other media. Because the relationship between the two (even trying to figure out what is different -- in her case the presence or absence of actual humans is pretty huge-- is really interesting.) The photograph is the lens through which she composes the whole installation, though, which is really cool. She makes sure none of the animals overlap or obscure eachother from the camera's viewpoint.

She did an early performance piece where she kicked "colored candies" (jellybeans and gumdrops) around the floor and swept them up in a "parody of abstract expressionism" which the author calls her first experiment in what she calls "the inappropriate use of food." I like that phrase too. Candy is an untapped area here. To me anyway, because the kid fantasy, and even an adult fantasy, is to have just TONS of candy, so much more than you could ever eat -- the whole thing with saving Easter bunnies a whole year just so there is another one to replace it. So . . .

She said she was "trying to make something that my relatives could understand."

They mention how "orderly repetetivness" can give a "nightmarish quality." Like marching bands? :) [ much of my previous work is about marching bands ]

On why she sculpts the animals herself: "I didn't want to critique 'catness' as seen by our culture, which is what would happen if I went out and got a found-object cat to photograph; using found objects is inevitably very toungue-in-cheek, coy, kitsch. So I decided to make a cat." I like this too.

They talk a lot about her flattening visual space with the colors or the pattern.

Revenge of the Goldfish is so great because they are floating. How aresome is this??

And now, here are just a deluge of images of her and her work:

Also, I am constantly amazed that people don't bring her up more often, either to me because I'm really into repetition, animals, weirdness, etc, but in general. People don't see to know who she is, yet I find all of this to be fantastic and great and overflowing with content. 

Connections: Specialness, balloons, and yes, Carl Sagan

OK. CONNECTION. The balloons of my previous work are about SPECIALNESS. Scratch that. Maybe ALL OF IT is about specialness. :) Things that are special and making you feel special. I think that is why the things that make me want to cry, make me want to cry. Special things mean they are the only, it means they are set aside and there is just that one, and there is such a HUGE desire in each of us, I think, to be special. But this is in total conflict with so much about what we know about the world. There is no privileged position because even "special" people are ordinary, and even special people get into car wrecks or plane crashes or get cancer. They are not protected from losing the things that are truly special, to them, their family and friends. And we are supposed to think that people are special, so then the only way to deal with things like knowing that 100,000 or however many people died in the earthquake in Haiti is to assume that the number of them makes the individuals less special, they seem less significant. That's what the numbers do for us. There is this extreme tension between wanting to be special, knowing that each individual is unique (a snow flake, if you will. . . which you shouldn't) and knowing that we are just one of a million species on earth. And now for the Carl Sagan connection (because you've been waiting and of course there is one). At the beginning of Pale Blue Dot, he goes through a very similar set of "demotions" that Robert Kruhlwich does on another episode of Radio Lab which recounts the history of humanity's place in the universe as we have seen it. It goes through a long list, essentially saying, "well, if we aren't at the center of the solar system, maybe our SOLAR system is the center of the galaxy!" etc. ad infinitum . .. down to our species being the only one that can do X, which we periodically change so that we are the top species, most important one, on the planet and ideally the ONLY one in the universe. But we are both heartbreakingly small and unique in that there might only be this one version of us anywhere, and horrifyingly mundane, just another planet around another star. Carl Sagan seems almost obsessed with teaching us this fact, that we are nothing, a speck on a speck on a speck, a "mote of dust" and that our egocentrism or earth-centrism or human-centrism is disguising reality. Every culture on Earth has believed that it was the chosen one, selected by God or even just by nature, as the pinnacle and most important. Even scientists fall prey to this desire to be SPECIAL. (All of this is illustrated much more eloquently, of course, by Carl Sagan). The point is that there is a very delicate balance, a struggle perhaps, between wanting desperately to be special and the heartbreaking knowledge that we are not. That there are "billions and billions" [sorry]. . . of human beings teeming on the planet but as each one of us is extinguished, it isn't really all that significant. It makes me think about this idea of pests and pets - the fine line between them - and the comment someone made in a critique which has stuck with me - that whenever we try to justify the killing of one particular group of people, we cast them as non-human ("cockroaches" often) and when we keep something as a pet, we make it more human, like our dogs. The more special something is, the tighter we hold to it, and the more plentiful, the easier it is to wipe them out, as a whole rather than individual, special parts.

This is, by the way, that famous pale blue dot photograph:

And here is an audio story of the anniversary of the "famous photograph that almost didn't happen" from NPR: An Alien View of Earth.

Also, here is an audio slideshow talking about those very changes in our perspective of ourselves from NPR: Views Of Earth From The Middle Ages To The Space Age.

Profusion. Repetition. Delightful.

This image is one that stuck in my mind ever since I first saw it, so the other day, I decided to figure out who on earth made these things and what their deal was. :) It didn't take long to find Sandy Skoglund and a whole series of other fairly famous images of profuse repetition of clay animals. I remember seeing an installation somewhere. . . maybe at the Des Moines Art Center, though her work is both the installation and color photographs.

Then there is this photo, which I came across the other day while looking up an artist who has had an exhibit at the Memorial Union in Ames, Iowa, named Mark Kochen. According to a postcard, "Mark Kochen is a self described “serial artist” living in Sioux City, Iowa. His works focus on everyday objects presented in a whimsical and repetitious manner. Brains, televisions, mice, blenders, sheep and many others are painted by the hundreds, exposing minute variations in a seemingly identical array of similar objects." The rest of his work is paintings, but he had a handful of images on his website, this being one of them, referred to as a serial photo.

And then this:

Chris Van Allsburg's book Jumanji. I couldn't find the pictures of all the animals in kitchen, but I have this memory of a room where there are a whole bunch. Not to mention the mysterious magical quality of his illustrations.

And now to point out the obvious. I see a visual intersection here that I am really interested in and want to explore.

I am extremely interested in these types of images for a few reasons. One is that I think excess is on the one hand delightful - repetition and profusion are inherently a little funny to me, though probably less so if the profusion was a hoard of cockroaches or something. Also, excess is so related to American-ness. It seems gross and a little out of control to have a whole bunch of something, even a whole bunch of tiny somethings, and yet having a whole bunch is really secure and safe, like you can just loose them or break them and no matter, you always have more. It decreses the value of the individual things to you, but increases your value by having so many.