interview for film
Tuesday, March 22, 2011 at 11:59PM SEAN: Presumably you would have a tape deck of some kind.
MICHAEL: I know. I’ve already captured and got it to Quicktime [Inaudible 0:00:09].
SEAN: Excellent. Yeah, [Inaudible 0:00:11] verbalution, very cool. So what we’ll do here is we’ll talk for 10 minutes or 15 minutes and then we’ll stop and I’ll save that file. I’m recording now. I’m talking to Michael Fox and so all of this will be transcribed so you don’t have to worry about censoring yourself or trying to sound... Don’t worry about that. I’ll ask the same questions over again and stuff so you’re calling me from San Francisco, right?
MICHAEL: Yes.
SEAN: Okay. In downtown San Francisco, right? In the city of San Francisco?
MICHAEL: I’m located in Potrero Hill right now.
SEAN: Potrero Hill.
MICHAEL: Which is now on the border of what’s now called the third street corridor where there are sort of [Inaudible 0:01:01] Potrero Hill has always been semi-industrial. I’m very close to the Anchor Steam Brewery.
SEAN: Uh-huh, okay, the beer brewery and then so where will the physical aspect of your art project take place?
MICHAEL: Right. (Overlay) Well, one particular phase in our project, where sort of the beginnings of the project starts is at the California College of the Arts and the project was in response to faced with needing to create an opportunity for myself when I first enrolled. I showed up at the school that after the first semester they over-enrolled so there was each graduate student only gets a studio space that’s about the size of a prison cell and they’re pretty much built that way and I hit a residency the first week of school so I wasn’t there and there weren’t enough studio spaces and I kind of considered that to be a bit of a blessing because I have been working in a certain way for so many years with this material, glass, and I didn’t want to continue in that way when I got to the school so I didn’t know what I was going to do and it was kind of a blessing that I was able to create a solution for a problem so it’s kind of what I’ve been doing in my practice for other artists all the way long.
SEAN: So did the idea of another working art space come about simply because of the need to have an actual studio space cause you couldn’t get one within the sort of setup of the school?
MICHAEL: Well, yeah, originally that’s sort of the genesis or the idea started there. When I didn’t get one, I looked to all my prior ideas of how I could do it necessarily within around the site itself and looking at the architecture of the building and thinking about other projects I’ve done and sort of my personal interests that have always been a little bit couched which had involved ideas of architecture and design and media projects and things that were more about conveying or addressing issues that may come up and that could be solved in more of a theoretical or social way so as I look at the architecture itself and I saw that the way they had designed the buildings, they had modified shipping containers into bathrooms and anyone who’s seen a shipping container obviously immediately realizes they’re meant to be stacked and I’d always fantasized about them architecturally and so just everything sort of clicked together. I mean, first I thought of a trailer perhaps. I was interested in the idea of mobility because quite frankly, I wasn’t interested in taking a studio at the school because the only thing I could think of to do in a studio was wear an orange jumpsuit, get a cot, and do push-ups or sit-ups because literally that’s what those spaces that they allot for the students are... seem to project to me. I mean, when I chose the school, I knew that I was getting into a situation that was going to transform me in general and it wasn’t about making a bunch of things. It was about figuring out how to what I was considering the next step, basically which meant writing my way into being.
SEAN: Right, so for somebody like me who’s known you for quite a long time, I’m surprised that this route has happened or that this road has happened the way from simply blowing glass so this project of yours does not really have that much to do with the production of blown glass. Is that correct or is that wrong?
MICHAEL: That’s absolutely correct except the funny thing is, I mean the most interesting thing about it is was one of my biggest concerns was to get back to figuring out how to use a material that does conceptually conveys my idea and the container as a thing or is by definition a container quite literally deals with what I’ve been working with all the time so for me, it was a natural progression from, for instance, taking the... I’ve sort of been using the same question to myself with the material which was taking the glass material, and making a literal vessel in the shape of a bag or a literal container...
SEAN: Right, natural glass box in which you put things into so sometimes, you’ve been making things that you actually put stuff into out of glass. You make these things out of glass or containers in one form or another.
MICHAEL: Right, except they were empty. They were creating the illusion that they should be filled by being literally representational of that, although they were completely unfunctional for that...
SEAN: They had [Inaudible 0:07:03]
MICHAEL: Literally looked like a container instead of being a vessel.
SEAN: Okay, and so here you’re in a situation where you’re making these things that look like containers so all of a sudden finding out that now that you want to make a different kind of a project, it sounds like it has a sort of a greater scheme or more open-ended idea about how the actual project will represent itself. Now, it turns out that you actually do need a container that you can put things in, mainly yourself and your thinking process and the whole sort of thing so we’re actually talking about a container, a shipping container.
MICHAEL: Yeah, exactly, we’re talking about a shipping container because it addresses so many things I guess I don’t want to be... I mean, I’m trying to break away and create my own definitions of what I might be doing cause of course, I think I’m the first one thinking this way and so on and so forth but I mean it deals with this coarse use of nomadic or mobility or movement or mapping or I don’t know, it’s basically talks about so many things in the converse sense, in the figuring things out, I mean the whole population of people were put out of work by this actual thing, the shipping container. I mean there used to be longshoremen in the packed ships until someone came along and said, I can do this more... with greater economy which is another great word just like the container. You talk about cutting something out and then use the word economy which has to do in a way was what would seem like [Inaudible 0:08:58] or revenue but it’s really removing something and these relationships like that are what I’m fascinated by and so the container that appeared to me as sort of out of a necessity situation for finding a space to put myself that really opened the door to all these really, really interesting more dense themes that I’ve hardly... I mean I’ve been spending so much time not exploring them and it’s really very open to all kinds of opportunities. Ultimately, I’m working around an acronym that I’m calling COWI, which is creating opportunity without inventory and it’s trying to synthesize these things like design, media, architecture, and culture.
SEAN: And how do you see that... I mean that sounds like a really large-scale sort of schematic socially. I mean, it sounds like you’re talking about creating something that is... changes the way perhaps people perceive how art is a commerce. How does it actually affect you as the actual working artist? I mean, are your hands going to get dirty in this project? Are you actually... will these things be stapled together, glued together? Will there be fumes? Will there be paint? What is the actual construct that you will... or is this container simply going to house you and these new ambitions of yours?
MICHAEL: Well, it’s interesting because the container itself addresses the idea of content as everything is put in this thing so to answer your question, yup, the opportunities are limitless but I personally envision myself obviously being involved although facilitating it in many ways is ultimately going to be a big part of it so part of the process is actually, it could be in one instance an office. It could be for one of the projects I’m working on called agency that possibly it could just be in a conference room or office, to create a think tank where ideas would be discussed and issues would be addressed and the beauty of it is much like a trailer or something that has that type of mobility. We could come up with something, not that we can come in and solve problems in the society or a microculture but we could be a hub or a meeting place where this idea of containerization that they talk about in manufacturing, we could apply these same sort of... what I’m interested in is trying to mimic the business model and instead of because the ultimate definition of a business or corporation is that it provides a good or a service and so by trying to move away from inventory and address the idea of goods and services as artists or as an artist sort of following that emotional response that I had when I was displaced and didn’t have a place and had to come up with one and I chose this idea and I had been going through the minutia policy and all these things to create this situation for myself, I realized that I think that artists or creative individuals I don’t even have to qualify it by saying artist but people that have ideas that think abstractly have the ability to create scenarios that are more spectacular out of what can be considered mundane and so I would like to get back to what you were saying what would happen in the container. For instance, you’d have 40 foot on either side so the one side panel, it could become advertising or convey media messages. They’re billboards. They could be a billboard and the content insight could have addressing some of my interests which is humans as material and we could use the human potential by inviting and sort of having the opportunity to exchange or giving this sense of a gift whether we did an event like we had a green roof for instance and [Inaudible 0:14:20] and canned and preserved inside and gave everyone an emergency meal, a balanced meal in three different-sized cans—red, blue and yellow. You know what I mean? There’s...
SEAN: Yup.
MICHAEL: The ideas are limitless. I mean, so at the same time I’m trying to structure it as a social umbrella too where this sort of... The container itself will act more like a node and have a systemic or parasitic repurposing or reuse, sort of trying to reinterpret what the container has done because it usually just gets filled up with goods to be bought or consumed. I want to actually put into the container things that will be humans to do practices or events or art or yeah, that’s a good question I guess because I’ve been so caught up in the practicalness of the project.
SEAN: Right, well, and so you’re caught up in the practical elements of the project, it sound like you’re caught up in the actual employ or use of the actual container so let me ask the question a little bit differently which is that... Is the container in your film, in the film that’s going to be made about this and in the context of you pursuing a degree or a grade or a theme or a thesis at your college; in those two things—in the film and in the thesis—will this container actually have a date in which the public is able to visit, attend, judge what’s inside the container, see it in any way? Is this a wholly private happening?
MICHAEL: No, I think more than one opportunity. I mean that was definitely was my original intent was to sort of cultivate experiences and to create through experiences or happenings some sense of what I was calling at that point cultural capital. I was viewing it as a business proposition and I was going to broker in this cultural capital but just recently I I’ve decided to change cultural capital into human capital and so yes, I envision there will be opportunity for the public much like a... It will be much like a gallery but I want to try and remove it a little bit from... One thing I’m trying to figure out is how to actually step back because we have had the alternative gallery spaces, and I’m not sure I want to frame it or contextualize it as that.
SEAN: As the gallery. (Overlay) Right, I guess, you can sort of say like okay, well, here you have this artist who is going to do these things with a container and so the big question becomes... the poignant question becomes for the public to judge what the artist is doing or to appreciate what the artist is doing is to answer the question of what are these things so if I understand that a gallery has its own clichéd meaning and its own sort of alternative universe and you don’t necessarily want to just come up with another gallery that is unlike other galleries because many other galleries have tried very hard not to be like other galleries. So if you go to the other extreme in my mind, the picture that I get now and imagine the picture that a lot of other people might get in hearing you say that you’re trying to avoid simply being a gallery doing something different maybe trading in what you call human capital, that the obvious thing would be to have the artist, you, sitting at a desk or sitting at a bench or in some way enjoying or employing the rigors of his craft so in your case, you’re able to work glass at the highest level. Is it possible that we would see you sitting on a bench blowing glass or doing something with glass to some degree in the container itself during a marked period of time which serves as sort of a opening or exhibition space?
MICHAEL: Yes, that’s excellent.
SEAN: Okay.
MICHAEL: I mean anything is possible. I mean, that’s... it’s really...
SEAN: Let’s change the impossible to probable.
MICHAEL: Okay, I mean really I’m trying to address the issues of potential, being a potential reality too. I mean, I haven’t really programmed completely because I mean, in part all we ever really talk about is that it’s turned into a public planning process.
SEAN: Right, the process has become its own artwork, right. But if we just think let’s just say before we switch tapes here, let’s just say with the physical aspect of the thing itself, so we’re trying to define still what goes into it and what goes into it obviously are these ideas of yours that you’re having right now. You’ve already imagined the container. Is there a physical container? Have you actually gone and, like a Christmas tree, have you gone and picked I’ll take that blue one or that pink one. Do you have a shipping container?
MICHAEL: I do not own one yet. I basically, last Thursday, got approval to go ahead to get one and then at this point, I’m still negotiating... Right now, I have to renegotiate my funding which was there before and I did pick out one. I put money down on it in November but I didn’t get to buy that one so I’m going to go out and pick out another one.
SEAN: Okay, and so even in your imagination, you can remember this container so there is a physical container that exists in your thoughts.
MICHAEL: Yeah, definitely.
SEAN: It’s got to be moved somehow right?
MICHAEL: Mm-hmm.
SEAN: Where to? To where? To a street? To a field?
MICHAEL: It will be on top of the building, the bathroom/rest room building which has street frontage at my school, at California College of the Arts.
SEAN: And I think that at the California College of the Arts, I think that you said that those bathrooms are also shipping containers.
MICHAEL: That’s right.
SEAN: So you’re trying to get your shipping container placed on top of the bathroom.
MICHAEL: Exactly.
SEAN: How will people get into your shipping container if it’s on top of the bathroom? So there’d be a ladder? A staircase?
MICHAEL: There’ll be a roll up type aircraft access skyway.
SEAN: Okay, and then I’m sure we’ll get to the process of talking about the actual process here in just a moment. I’m sure that idea of somebody falling off the edge of the roll-up ladder or whatever is a nightmare for the school and anybody else in litigation and all that kind of stuff so your physical piece is sitting on top of these stacks of containers that always serve as bathrooms so it would seem to me that to the people who are running the school that that would be how more appropriate can you get? So I mean it would seem to me that this would be a perfect thing to put on top of the bathroom. Am I missing something? Why would there be any opposition to it?
MICHAEL: Well, I’m not sure that there was an opposition. Originally, the school, what’s so interesting is that basically as with everything in this day and age, it comes down to indemnification and liability and no one individual wants to be responsible and nobody wants to say it’s okay. What you brought up, who knows the potential of what could happen?
SEAN: Right, okay, so before...
MICHAEL: Nobody wants to be liable.
SEAN: Okay, before we get into that, let me stop this.
MICHAEL: Recognize or reckon with where these things come from and how best to sort of these sort of universality of ideas for I guess an art what they’re calling. I guess it’s like a relational aesthetic or what I’m actually thinking is a term like relational literalism. Just trying to reinterpret mayonnaise or whatever... reinterpret the sun or the moon, I mean, come up with... Yeah, it sounds similar to what you’re talking about. It’s like there’s these themes everyone relates to and everyone experiences but how many people actually talk about them.
SEAN: Right. And how many people can afford (Overlay) to examine them.
MICHAEL: Right, I think that it’s what I realized, what the women especially is that they... It’s very easy to not acknowledge anything really. There’s a lot of men who enable that behaviour and actually function on that level much better.
SEAN: I agree, and I think that that’s something that’s very interesting about sort of using the art process to sort of look at issues of identification, I mean, we’ve just spoken a little bit about the [?? 0:01:27], the other projects that I’m working on that have to do with human sexuality and it’s funny that the language always seems to revert back to this very simple, very small, small aesthetic of who is a person? Am I...?
MICHAEL: The gender... (Overlay)
SEAN: Yeah, or...
MICHAEL: The gender politics and identity is... (Overlay)
SEAN: Yeah.
MICHAEL: ...very, very popular.
SEAN: Yeah, but also just the perception of who’s doing the looking? Who is a person? Am I who you see or am I what I feel?
MICHAEL: Well, yes, that’s the [?? 0:02:07]. That’s the spectacle. I mean, that’s the same condendrum of art, right? It’s the viewer or where you try to place the viewer. Are you the viewer? Are you the person [Inaudible 0:02:17] the viewer? Yeah, it’s interesting stuff.
SEAN: Yeah, I think the viewer’s a very interesting sort of thing. So how will the viewer... how would you hope that the viewer would feel in seeing your piece, in seeing the actual, physical container? What are you hoping to get from the viewer? A psychological reading of human capital and cultural capital and the use of containers and the way commerce evolves into greater and greater economy or efficiency. Is there an aesthetic that you hope that they sort of catch their breath on and say, “Wow! Look at this. It’s very pretty”?
MICHAEL: I think that could come up in sort of what would be more of an issue of almost interior decorating but if I could make the viewer the content, if ultimately, the content was what is inside of it and then people are inside, then they are the content, that is the intent, and that becomes the image and it’s all kind of wrapped up in one in that sense but if aesthetically, it came down to it, I mean, of course, it’s going to be clean. It will look good, smell good, and I envision it having many purposes. I feel like they’re sort of a parallel thing that runs along with it which is inviting proposals to design interiors or identifying needs in certain cultures or locations that could utilize one of these things as a physical plan, as a bread bakery, or a barber shop, or a water purification place or a temple or a movie theatre or a mushroom farming...
SEAN: Right.
MICHAEL: ...whatever it would be best... it’s kind of like what happened... whatever solution for a need could be met with this thing, and the idea is to sort of repurpose or reuse a part of society or capital that it’s like a recycling idea in a way.
SEAN: A recycling of the actual physical containers.
MICHAEL: Yes.
SEAN: A recycling almost of the space that’s inside because a lot of these containers are abandoned and left littered around industrial parks and...
MICHAEL: Yeah, that leads right into the other project which not only is located at the site of the school. One of the things underneath my umbrella concept, the not-for-profit idea and one of the other entities or phases of the project is I’ll approach the ports in areas where these containers are abandoned and try and set up artist residency programs where artists can reconfigure and re-contextualize the abandoned container into a sort of urban beautification situation in that local area.
SEAN: But now if you get people to reconfigure the abandoned containers in ports and other industrial areas, isn’t there danger that you cease to become an artist personally and become more of an administrator or a champion of a very, very important and very unique cause or is it possible to say, “Well, listen, the reconfiguration of a lot of these containers around the world either temporary or permanent art expressions is part of a whole sort of idea or a whole movement in sort of cleaning up the world through the artistic urge? I mean, aren’t you afraid personally into being forced into either one of those roles of sort of the administrator or somebody who has this concept of a very large sociological artistic aesthetic that may not actually be the production of art anymore.
MICHAEL: It could be construed that way but I mean, I feel like the material or the nature in the way that I’d like to work is really talking... I think I’m mostly interested in ideas and thoughts being a tangible form that my art-making takes from now on and think that sort of addressing or facilitating and then assigning potentially other individuals or directing other individuals, identifying individual artists that I could align myself with for lack of a better word, or I could be curating.
SEAN: Collaborating with, yeah.
MICHAEL: Yeah, I’ll be cultivating basically more like a farmer. I’ll plant certain seeds which in essence will be humans on my land and I will nurture that and have these people working in collaboration or conjunction with me to facilitate or realize these large-scale goals. So a lot of it will be it’s a bit of a unique way to form a collective without coming out and designing it that way.
SEAN: Right, right.
MICHAEL: And using this sort of business model, it becomes less egocentric and more introspective I think or with a potential of people’s ideas become the forefront of the material like if people have a good idea, of course, I’m going to want to implement it and I’m not going to feel the need to have [?? 0:09:06]. That’s the thing. If I’m not creating inventory, I don’t need the recognition and so if I own the company or I’m the director of the group or I’m facilitating this. That was the original idea. This project, in general, had started with just the simple container idea, is how will I, as an individual, own my ideas and so the best way for me to do it that I saw was to start a corporation or a not-for-profit organization that I directed so that anything that came to fruition, any artistic entity that was formed and become realized, I would have the cultural capital or credit for making happen, whether I was the actual artist that went out and painted it or lifted it or glued it or photographed it, I realized that there’s a larger practice involved in... I just don’t feel that I’m the person who’s going to sit back in the studio and wait to be discovered. I’m going to have to build an environment to make these things happen.
SEAN: Right, so let’s talk briefly here before I... We’ve got about 7 or 8 minutes left on this track here and I want to send these both to Margie Miguel and then get them back to you probably within maybe 48 hours if it’s how quickly she can do it. The process, you got sort of waylaid by the process of permits and permitting, permissions to get this entire vision of yours put together. We’re talking about the practicality of sticking a container atop several other containers on a college campus with the issues of liability and all this kind of stuff so I understand that when you first tried to do this, you were told that you would have to get a building permit and you couldn’t qualify for one. It wasn’t going to happen. Forget it and then you very artfully found some loophole in the code that allowed you to perhaps put this container on top of the other containers as long as you treated the entire process as a movie set or the making of a movie so tell me a little bit about what happened as briefly as you can and just sort of what actually happened to you in trying to get this whole thing together and how did the process itself become perhaps more interesting than the actual art piece.
MICHAEL: Well, originally, as we started off the conversation. I just wanted to stack a 40-foot shipping container on top of another 40-foot pre-existing shipping container and everyone agreed to it and all they wanted to do is have me go down to the building inspectors and ask if it was okay. When I went down to the building inspector’s desk, it was okay. They couldn’t say it was okay and they didn’t really understand what I wanted to do and that was just the beginning of a project that I realized public art is and how complicated these processes are just to do something very simply. So much research and time has gone into sort of documenting my conversations with people and learning to interpret the building code, finding out about structural engineering, and added loads and occupancy uses and really scrutinizing these things and with the gentleman who posed the original question to me that is responsible for whether or not I could do the project, he originally agreed to it and then said, “Well, wait a minute, I need to have a letter folder from either the... either a permit or a letter that says you can do this. And he chose his words very carefully. He says, “You need to have a code compliance strategy.” And at first, I just thought, “Oh, well, God, this guy’s just not going to let me do what I wanted to do” but he was very clever. He was an architect and he said, “What you need to do is figure out a way that you can do this.” He was like, “You have to come up with a strategy.”And I kept trying to figure out what that meant and I was upset that I had to do all this extra work to just do something as simple as get a studio which was part of my right as a grad student and why wasn’t the school doing it for me and why don’t they go figure it out? And he posed the thing back to me, he says “This is what you need to do. You’re an artist. You should figure this out.” And again, I got more upset at him but I realize now he gave me the opportunity to learn how to figure out these situations so what I did was I just started looking at the code. I went down the building inspector’s department. I fought with them once and realized it was best never to show my face there again or I’d never get my project done but originally, my first reactions were that I could make it a storage space or utility shed and those things were viable but yet, you still have to go through the permitting process and I started talking to architects and the architects started telling me about, “Well, your problem is occupancy. If you have occupancy, you need egress and fire and all these other things that go along with occupancy.” And finally, I got to the point where I was like, “Okay, I’m going to address the occupancy issue. I’m going to get with an engineer. He’s going to calculate the load and I’m going to try and figure out that it’s not actually occupied space because it’s a transient space, bathrooms and stairways and things of this nature when you’re doing calculations on a square footage of space don’t have the same occupancy as a room with a door for instance. These are all minutia details that most people don’t ever think about but then I had to try and conceptualize and when I started working with the engineers and architects, they were thinking in the same language that they thought. Occasionally, when they would talk to me and they would explain something like, “Well, you’re dealing with an occupancy situation here.” Then I’d say, “Well, wait a minute. An occupancy situation, well, is an occupancy in a bathroom actually an occupant because there’s no one actually in that space very long?” And he would say, “Oh, well, that’s true. They’re not calculated... The calculation for square footage in a bathroom and a stairway is different than a room or conference room. You’re right.” So they wouldn’t come out and tell me information. I had to sort of mine the information because I just didn’t want to take no for an answer and finally, when I met with an engineer and he was again telling me, “Oh, occupancy this and occupancy that.” And I say, “Look, we’re not occupied and we’re just use this as storing here.” And all the time, my ideas about what was going to happen in the space kept changing because of what was actually going on with the process of so every time I realize, “Okay, well, I don’t care anymore about if anyone can ever go inside so let’s just not even occupy it. Let’s just call it an imaginary museum and oh, just we stack there and nobody can ever get in and we’ll just think about what’s inside.” And that’s when the ideas of using the outside as a billboard or curatorial space for a gallery, that played in and people liked that idea and couldn’t quite sell let’s just keep it empty. But I tried to and so when I met with that last engineer and he was willing to take on the project and I said, “How much time will this take and how much do you charge?” He said, “I’m $150 an hour and it’ll take about 10 hours” and he said, “Well, I don’t know if I can get this permit.” That was the kicker for me. I realized I’m in trouble here and I’m still dealing with the wrong type of people, that I’m still dealing with people that I’m trying to get to be creative by teaching them how to think outside “the box” and that’s another pun about the container itself, right?
SEAN: Right.
MICHAEL: And so I actually turned to my mom. I gave her a phone call and “You know, this is all going horrible blah blah blah.” She said, “Wait a minute. Let me see if I… So what’s the problem? Why do you need an engineer?” And I said, “Yeah, I need an engineer that I can talk to, like just a regular person.” And she had been in real estate and says, “Well, let me call this guy who manages one of the real estate offices. He’s kind of like you. He used to play in a rock and roll band.” And so, lo and behold, by whatever six hours later, I was on the phone with this guy Jamie Howell who was a rock and roller guy and we were just talking and talking and talk and he says, “This is an amazing opportunity for my friend, Duke, who likes to solve problems.” And so he called him on the other line and I ended up talking to him the next day and I spent about four hours with him strategizing this thing and we went over and over and over with the building code which at this point, I had read a bunch of these sort of appendixes like looking for some loopholes in the code and I was going to try and pursue a permit based on the provisional or conditional permit for a temporary art sculpture and that’s what I was explaining to him. He says, “That’s a good one. That’s a good one. That’s a good one. Hold on. Hold on.” We kept looking through and he says, “What about…?” you know you’ve got to the back of the appendix and the Appendix 1 Book 2 of the California Building Code Section 105.2 is “Work Exempt From Permit” and the “Work Exempt From Permit” in Appendix Chapter 1 Section 105.2 “Work Exempt From Permit as a Building” and line 8 reads “temporary motion picture, television, and [?? 0”20:05] stage sets and scenery.” And when he read that out loud, I said, “Bless you. You’ve just given me back the content of my project.”
SEAN: Right, right, very funny.
MICHAEL: Because I realized that what I had been caught up and which I’m, is definitely not my skill, this documenting and minute’s meetings and this that and the other thing which is everyone kept telling me, “This is your project. You’re like Cristo and I’ve been making these books and I’ve got books and documents and this and that and everything that show everything I’m dealing with. That wasn’t my interest necessarily. My interest was actually achieving this.
SEAN: Right, uh-huh.
MICHAEL: So when we found that line, I realized that it was really doing kind of what you were originally asking, “Is there going to be anything actually happening?” And I realized that the happening, the documenting was the happen and to make a film kind of Michael Moore-esque, edutainment, documentary about this thing especially using the humans as material including myself was not a stretch in any way because documentation is part of the process in any art form. It’s ultimately all you’re left with and it just seemed to be a perfect fit and upon further research by contacting the film commission, I realized that there’s a permitting for films, student filming… Students don’t pay permits for films so it’s also funny. It turns out that these two sort of strategies almost offset each other. You don’t need to have a film permit if you’re filming on private property. And now, I’m more interested in doing this film especially and then when I started thinking about Bad TV and Betapunks and all the projects that sort of the unearthing of the natural that’s sort of has been your motif basically from that blinded alley days, you’re kind of like… I’m interested in this urban archaeology so to speak and whether it has sociological manifestations or philosophical manifestations or commercial manifestations, and I’m trying to sort of, I think it goes back to the thing I said about writing and sort of the preparedness of the presentation and the idea that inventory is changing its definition for me now. That the material of artistic process for me is about the ideas, the thoughts, the sort of working more like an architectural model of an unrealized projects in the sense that when it does come to fruition, there is a tangible thing but yet the idea of the concept or where it’s going is salient too, that it’s not just the object. Something like that.
SEAN: Right, and so it seems like after this conversation here, it seems to me that what I would expect going, walking up there, playing steps and into your piece is that I would expect to see Section 105.2 of the California Building Code hanging up on the wall and a very detailed logged blow-by-blow account of everything that’s happened to you in getting the piece up there and it would be almost perfect to focus on nothing but the actual piece getting up there and I just think that I mean, it would be first of all, be amusing and I think that that’s a fundamental responsibility of the artist, you’d be actually providing entertainment and it just seems like you don’t really have to do very much work in doing any interior design. You can simply provide the documentation and some [?? 0:24:58] paste and you’re done. You have the whole thing up there and I think people will put in the newspaper and say, “This is a brilliant work of art.” You really…
MICHAEL: Well, that’s definitely the truth and still again, addressing these ideas of the viewer and the spectacle and this film in general and filming people and trying to actually give people what they want which possibly could be an image of themselves. I mean, I could use part of the container as my own studio with a two-way mirror for instance with a camera that’s set up behind where I invite people in. They don’t know I’m working behind it on that side in my office and they’re interacting and I’m filming… Limitless sort of things that… it’s just the opportunities are open-ended. I just feel the need to want to involve people somehow.
SEAN: Right, right, great, great, great, man. Well, listen that was a very good interview. Let me just stop this.
[End of Transcript]
