Dan Crosby One of the aims of your work is to analyze social and ideological conventions We would like to ask you if in your opinion Art could play an important role not only in analyzing but also in facing social questions, even steering people's behavior.
One of the issues which surrounds my work is the collective reading of a narrative, my aim was to take ‘clippings’ from culture, objects that separately are recognizable – and to take them out of context to simulate irrelevance (I don’t think it is possible to create something completely meaningless). I am interested in communication, and found that once it is disrupted or confused, it can become isolating. However, I stumbled upon a great quote by Mikhail Bakhtin from ‘Rabelais and his world’: “ The [grotesque] body swallows the world and is itself swallowed”. One major part in my work focuses on the function of an art work – or at least an art work which sets out to mimic or parody culture – as it will one day become part of culture (whether or not it develops that culture). I hope to create works which are completely irrelevant. We can recognize that a recurrent characteristic of some of your artworks is experience as starting point of artistic production: in your opinion, is experience an absolutely necessary part of creative process?
I think by experience, it is wise in regards to forming and expanding (or reinventing ideas). The last two sculptures took me two years worth of studying to understand and to argue my point before I even built them, and I am still developing them and refining them. I don’t think personal experience is necessary, I always aim to completely isolate my life experience from my work and aim to keep it conceptual. I actually dislike a lot of art which incorporates personality, I find it apathetic and an easy way to disregard true concept.
the holes I made when I crammed the hotdogs rock in ‘bench’ has bits of chicken wire tearing out. These are the parts I focus on, I love the intimacy of having something seem unfinished or rough and poorly made. It adds to the disappointment and the impact is much slower when these problematic elements appear. 75