From Fluxus to Fringe
PHP: So you’ve worked with some pretty big artists—Nam June Paik, Brian Eno, Shimon Attie—and you’ve worked with lesser known artists. You know a lot of people within the art world, seem pretty firmly positioned in it, and yet in your own practice you’re very quiet and discreet.
RS: I’m thinking about what you mentioned once about my slow gestation process. I think that I don’t need to be visible in a certain role. I’m also a person who observes a lot, and often I observe through my activities. So I observed while working with Nam June, but while I was doing that I was also still making set designs with my theater friends. It just happened to be one those friends was Aaron Beall who went on to co-found the Fringe Festival
Aaron and I collaborated very well where he would say something and I would immediately (snaps) see it and realize it—this was a creative outlet for me. He eventually invited me to be a curator of outdoor events. He posed the challenge: Why don’t you wrap the Lower East Side and I said “Okay, why not”. So then I had to meet the challenge and live up to my work. I built the outdoor activities for the Fringe Festival which then became Fringe Al Fresco and it ended up drawing a lot of press—New York magazine called it the “Best New Project of the Year”. It was just this huge success. That was completely grass roots with no budget. It was a really fascinating social adventure.
At the time I was working 12-16 hour days, drawing on my 27–year-old power and enthusiasm and doing all these projects at once. So literally in a week I had the openings of the Fringe Festival, of Shimon Attie with Creative Time and all the while working in Nam June’s studio and making his sculptures—this was all happening at the same time. In fact, Art in America had articles about both the Creative Time and the Nam June projects in the same issue.
PHP: Do you ever feel protective of your ideas when you’re working collaboratively?
RS: It’s fascinating to see how an idea will get completely changed. The Perpetual Art Machine is a really good example. Aaron Miller, Chris Borkowski, Lee Wells and I all met in 2005—and each one of us came to the meeting with a very different idea of what was going to happen. At the end of a marathon conversation we had literally come up with most of what the Perpetual Art Machine has been for the last three years. Originally what I was looking for was to create a piece—a finished piece—that was video sculpture, and then the contribution of Lee Wells with his experience as a curator brought in the idea of many artists. Chris Borkowski’s web and IT experience brought in the idea of a web-community and then Aaron Miller with his experience of Gary Hill and interactive art brought in the idea of interactivity. So the four of us with our different points of view changed what I was hoping for. It’s this hybrid thing which ended up being very interesting because all of the players were very strong contributors.
PHP: Is this how you prefer to work—personal as well as collaborative practice?
RS: I think so, just because there’s so much wealth that comes from sharing with other artists. Right now I’m working on a project with this group that’s called Artists Meeting, which actually grew out of PAM. One of our artists, GH Hovagmiyan, actually worked a lot in the 60s with other artists such as Gordon Matta Clark, Laurie Anderson and a lot of really interesting people, so he’s very theoretically and conceptually driven as well. He started this group called Artists Meeting, invited PAM members and then a bunch of other artists that he knew. This is the most eclectic collaboration that I’ve ever been involved in. It’s almost self-cancelling—the collaboration is about how to collaborate and what is a collaboration.
PHP: Which can be incredibly irritating and precious but it could also be invigorating.
RS: What’s interesting is that we never put in rules. So we all get together and there’s this basic idea that we’re going to do something and then we all sit in a room and realize that we all have such different ideas that there’s no way we can do anything, and so we just ponder about that and, well, that’s what we do. But then, in the midst of that, we had a few moments where we were able to create work together for the DUMBO Arts Festival last year and this year we were invited to the do something for the Conflux Festival in lower Manhattan. It’s sort of like a new-media festival based on psycho geography, a concept that Guy Debord came up with. Basically, it’s a map that is based on a psychological perception of space rather than on streets and geography.
So, the Artist’s Meeting we kind of looked at the idea of the psychogeographical map and said “Hey, somebody’s come up with a map of lower Manhattan that’s based on all the public and private spaces in corporate buildings.” We all started riffing on it and it became bigger and bigger, to the point where right now we’re in my studio producing a massive quantity of waterproof pillows from the same brown vinyl that Gucci uses to make very expensive bags which they sell on Madison Avenue. It’s just going in these mad directions that a single person wouldn’t have come up with
PHP: Do you ever feel like an anachronism? The art world is pretty career-oriented and you’re in so many different and varied creative communities and really taking time to explore your interests and create a strong body of work.
RS: That I would credit to the French and that background of Southern France and also the influence of my great uncle. He had a really great sense of history—the Gauls, the Greeks and the passage of people through the different parts of Europe and how that influenced geography and architecture. The French really gave me this sense of history and the importance of art as a form rather than a means for social positioning or returns—more just art for Art with a capital A.
