STOCKHOLDER

I had mentioned jessica stockholder earlier today. here is a link to the art:21 website about her. she has a wonderful interview there, in which she talks about the interrelations of pleasure and the social. at last, a beakerfull of pleasure that does not find its basis in wally stevens. i mean, i love wally's things about pleasure. but it's a maker's pleasure. it's religious pleasure, which there is, a course, but, this pleasure here, is a meander of pleasure, a rivulet of the zambezi in my cup.

let me just excerpt a bit from an interview that articulates a whole bunch of my feelings about art:

ART:21: Anything else you want to debunk?

STOCKHOLDER: People often describe my work as being concerned with trash or garbage. I use castoff things and new, bright, and shiny things. My work is not about a particular kind of object so much as it’s about stuff in general. I’m not interested in having the work be caught in one kind of stuff.

ART:21: There’s a kind of classical way all of this stuff is arranged.

STOCKHOLDER: I think my work is very classical which is sort of ironic to me. It started out as a kind of elbowing the art institution, being upset at how art’s muffled because it’s precious and packaged and put on a pedestal.
My work participates in a shared history of poking at the container of the gallery. Of course we need art institutions—we don’t communicate with one another and have a place to share work if we don’t have galleries and museums. But I think their particular nature needs to be addressed, understood, and played with in people’s work.

ART:21: Can you expand on that?

STOCKHOLDER: I think that my work is classical but also very contemporary. I do a lot of shopping at Home Depot. I don’t know how much I want to give credit to all those different big conglomerates, but stuff is cheap and easy to buy and I participate in that. I use material that’s inexpensive, readily available. It’s really a pleasure that we have all this stuff around us. I love plastic, I think it’s gorgeous and I love it. All of these objects are full of design and other people’s thinking and I ride on the backs of that. I think that my work engages the means of production that we live with even while it embodies things from a long time ago.