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DIY:
Joe Scanlan Interviews Joe Scanlan

Joe Scanlan: All of your work has a rather matter of fact attitude. The bookcases, the snowflake drawings, the fake forsythia, the coffins‹all seem to be equal entries in the flow of art and products, with no differentiation whatsoever. Do you feel that way?

Joe Scanlan: I do. The best compliment I've received lately was at a slide lecture where someone suggested that I was trying to achieve subjectivity through capitalism. It was a good suggestion. The most effective way to be an artist is to find out what you are best at and then try make a living at it. I'm very committed to quality and believe that everything that I make is the best product available in the marketplace. If I didn't believe that, I wouldn't make anything.

I'll put my snowflakes or my fake forsythia up against anybody's. Of course, I'm the only artist I know of making snowflakes and fake forsythia, so there's really no one for me to compete with. But that's the point of DIY: if you really focus on what you in particular have to offer, then it's likely that no one else in the world will be able to offer the same exact thing, so automatically you are the best at what you do.

JS: Are their some parts of yourself that can be farmed out to others? Or do you have make everything yourself?

JS: No, it's just worked out that way so far. I'm interested in a lot of things, and that curiosity often draws me into learning different skills when the time comes to make something. I love making things, but I hate doing the same thing day after day. So it just feels right to draw snowflakes one day and cut mortise joints the next day, write an article the next day, work in Photoshop the next day, and so on.

However, if I have an idea that is beyond my technical ability, I have no problem farming it out. A couple of years ago I invented a product called Catalyst, which was a small packet of artificial tears, and the package was produced by Burton Packaging, Incorporated. They do work for all the big cosmetic companies‹Estee Lauder, LancÈme‹and I wanted my package to be on the same level. The funny part was that, in the end, my run was so small that it wasn't worthwhile to recalibrate their machinery in order to produce my piece, so they ended up making it by hand. So even when I hire a factory, my work still ends up being made by hand.

The return of the hand‹it's like a severed body part in a cheap horror movie. The more we try to obliterate personal scale and individuality, the more it comes back to life in some other form.

In the case of the DIY coffin, the monster that returns is simply the desire to go shopping and buy what you want, rather than having to accept only what the store has to offer. I like the autonomy of buying what IKEA is selling and then transforming those products in such a way that they no longer seem like IKEA at all. It means looking at a given situation and being able to turn it to your own advantage, no matter how limited the situation might seem. It is a kind of ingenuity. Where I come from, being a ¥jack-of-all-trades' is held in very high esteem.

JS: Where do you come from?

JS: I grew up in the United States, in rural Ohio. Most of my friends were farmers but my family didn't farm, we just lived in the country, my mom and dad and six brothers and one sister. My oldest brother is a Marine Leiutenant Colonel in South Carolina. He's currently working at the strategic command center for the war in Afghanistan. My youngest brother is a sociologist at the University of Memphis. He studies food security and military unrest in developing countries. Which is kind of funny, given that when we were growing up, our family was practically a developing country in itself!

JS: I'll say. With that kind of background, how did you end up being an artist?

JS: It wasn't that big a deal. All my friends were going into whatever they were best at‹farming, banking, law, auto repair‹so I went into art because that is what I was best at. It was a practical decision, even though I really didn't know how it worked and had no role model to refer to. But that has been a blessing for me, going into art without any preconceived notion about it. If art is suffering from anything right now, it is an overdose of preconceived notions.

JS: I saw your most recent show at D'Amelio Terras. It had a rich, layered charm to it‹somewhere between a Route 66 gas station and an Soho boutique. The centerpiece was Store A, a replica of your storefront studio in Brooklyn where you sell your work and publish COMMERCE magazine. You were already showing in a gallery‹why build a store inside a store, so to speak?

JS: I wanted to assert the idea that my primary reason for being an artist is to make a living at it. I refuse to live in a society where skilled people cannot earn money however they please, regardless of their resources and skills. Being an artist means doing what you want and still getting paid for it, rather than doing what other people want. Doing what other people want is the most basic definition I can think of for what it means "to work." And, like Rirkrit says, an artist's job is to "never work."

I don't accept the notion that art is a rich man's game. That's just propoganda designed by the people in power to keep the competition down. Like in The Godfather II when Al Pacino says ¥Contempt for money is just a trick of the rich to keep the poor from having any.' Art is the same way, but if you know about the trick or just ignore it then you can waltz right into the art world on your own. All you need is time and space: time to make stuff and space to show it. The rest is mostly status and pretense, but if you don't care about those things then you're in the game as much as anyone else is. Of course, not caring about status and pretense is very difficult in art right now.

Building the replica of Store A inside D'Amelio Terras was also a way to take advantage of having my store be in Chelea, right across the street from Commes des GarÆons, without having to pay the rent. It was a kind of parasite. My dream now is to have it travel to different locations and continue to function that way, making the most of whatever commercial opportunities each location brings.

JS: That sounds counterproductive. Aren't we supposed to be moving away from "bricks and mortar" type stores and towards a more virtual kind of retail? Or did that concept burst with the dot.com bubble?

JS: No, I think there was going to be a bricks and mortar renaissance regardless of the dot.com collapse. We're physical beings, and not only physical beings, equilibrium-based beings. The more technology and pharmeceuticals remove us from the consequences of our actions and supposedly improve our lives, the more we crave real, direct consequences from what we do. I think that's why we have vices‹as conscious beings we can't stand the idea that we're not, in some small way, killing ourselves. So we smoke and drink and have unprotected sex and start our own businesses.

To me, having a store, having to develop the products and deal with fabricators and customers and shipping, is the ultimate form of death. I think all shopkeepers feel that way to some degree, and yet your store is your identity and your source of income.

Self employment is the most sophisticated form of suicide I know, because it can happen over the course of forty or fifty years and entail millions and millions of dollars, and fame, and awards, and magazine spreads. And yet all the time you're killing yourself. DIY is just one way to be aware of that fact, take control of it and maybe even profit from it. There is a kind of liberty in that awareness, and that liberty is what I'm after, however small scale it might be.