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From FrogWorld to
ShadowLand:
A Conversation with David
Gilhooly
©1999 by Roxane Gilbert
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
As a freshman at the University of California at Davis in 1962, David Gilhooly enrolled in two art
classes: a drawing class taught by Wayne Thiebaud, and a ceramics
class taught by Robert Arneson. During Mr. Gilhooly's time at the
university, the teachers and students he worked with included William
T. Wiley, Roy De Forest, Manuel Neri, Ruth Horsting, Chris
Unterseher, Peter VandenBerge and Steve Kaltenback, among others.
This was the crucible from which "funk" art emerged.
While arguably best known for his ceramic sculpture, David
Gilhooly has also worked in bronze, plastics, paint, and various
printmaking media. I had the opportunity to assist him in 1987 and
1988 in printing woodcuts, lithographs, intaglio and monoprints at
Magnolia Editions in Oakland, California. In later years I worked
with him in his studio in Oregon. Recently I asked him to discuss his
new assemblage shadow boxes and reflect back on his earlier work.
What is the FrogWorld? Who is Frog Fred, and did he ask you to
leave?
The FrogWorld is /was a planet just like Earth but
where, when we arrived some 65 million years ago, decided to use frog
bodies rather than these protopig ones we are currently using. Since
these frog bodies respond and configure the environment rather
differently than pig bodies, today's Earth is wetter, more swamp
area, but a lot fewer insects. I am not saying that contemporary
frogs eat insects; to the contrary, they eat not at all but take
their nourishment directly out of the very rich and humid air and
from the solation hitting the surface of their skin. Food is only
used in Art. FrogFred is the frog body that I am currently using in
the recent FrogWorld, but as you suggest I "lost touch" with it
several years ago through no fault of my own. Something happened, I
know not what and when I check now, the frogs are all gone and the
cockroaches have taken over their environmental niche. I can still
sense frogdom, but only on other planets; indeed I sometimes feel
that they have become planets and stars as well as other heavenly
bodies. It's almost as if they have "gone on" to a higher state of
being.
Assemblage is not a new medium for you. "Arcimboldo's
Hawaiian Shirt" (1990), and "Ducks Descending a Staircase"
(1991) are two examples of your sculpture which incorporate
assemblage with sculpted forms. Why the shift to the Shadow
Boxes?
I no longer feel the urge to make things out of the
Demon Clay. It was a religious revelation "regresse a su
juventud!" or something like that; sometimes I can't remember how
to speak Spanish. (I am sorry. I always get my revelations at least
partially in Spanish.) Now this actually may be a god request to go
back to mass but I have taken it another way and have returned to my
lifelong love of shopping and collecting things. Now I put my
collections in boxes and sell them to people. I will not return to
Canada because there are no good places to shop there. I have,
anyway, saved nothing of my old dim dirty life. I burnt all the
studio furniture, sold the kilns and the potter's wheel. Gave away
the glazes and would do almost anything to sell the last 16 pieces.
In the past some of your art has served as humorous and often
biting commentary on work by other artists (including Marcel Duchamp,
Sam Francis, Jackson Pollock). You have also engaged in broad social
commentary (e.g., "The Weight of the World Hangs Heavy on Our
Insurance Companies" (1988)). And of course there is the food,
frog and animal art. Are you addressing specific themes with the
Shadow Boxes? How would you characterize them?
I have always wanted to do assemblages. The first
things I really loved were Bruce Conner's doll and wax and nylon
stocking collages and the objects that Claes Oldenburg would just
"recognize" in the gutter or an alley. I cared not for or knew of no
tradition, Dada, Cornell. I did very much know about popular objects,
paintings, souvenirs even, from Mexico. The first Art I did were
assemblages of objects burnt to a crisp while being cast into bronze
(after being covered with wax) but I got sidetracked by the Demon
Clay. But true, the Plexiglas works which began in 1983 featured a
lot of found plastic objects. But I was still limiting myself to the
one material again, plastics, just as I limited myself by doing clay
'cause I like to respond to the media, let the media direct me to a
piece, a finished object. But I was still in control. I love the
challenge of being directed and now I have almost no control compared
to clay. I respond first to a found plastic frame then to a certain
found object which I just happen upon as a response to CHANCE. A pile
grows around that object along with an idea and eventually a full
meaning. I then even respond to that finished object and let it help
create, drive me to the next piece. It is like the Jackson
Pollock's Dog, slaps of paint completely random, it's automatic
writing (I know, that goes back to the surrealists just as
"recognizing" an object goes back to Dada or rather what we think
Dada was, but which it wasn't). Really recognizing comes from
Duchamp and Man Ray who were
neither Dada nor surrealist or rather both or none. But it seems to
me to be the pure essence of what I think (know for sure) art is, the
THOUGHT, not the object, which just proves to you that I had the
thought. The perfect piece? I find something, just perfect, and sign
it. No work, no bother. I am just extremely lazy. I can live a long
time just like Duchamp on selling other people's work if I have to.
I like doing work about art, I can't help it. I like rich stuff
and art is the richest, better than treasure and power. I like to
respond, again as before, to what people think of as art, what they
know is OK art, Mona Lisa, The Last Supper,
Nude Descending the
Staircase, Pollock
anything. Then I can tell people what I like and what I think about
them and at the same time sneakily tell them what they should think,
what garbage they should dump from their minds, etc. The broad social
commentary, Rox, you have got to remember is only parody of others'
social commentary, especially how it is expressed in art but also how
it is expressed through movies and other media. I have gotten much
deeper now into Christianity, especially as expressed through the
Roman Catholic Church (Protestants are so dilute and guilty). I
touched it before in the FrogWorld but it seemed so remote at the
time , translated into cute froggies. Now I like to revel and revile
it at the heart. But again show what I love, what people should
really see in it, what I think they in their hearts want to see in
it. I want to establish a whole new iconography but grow it out of
the old and bring it up to date with the best of the old. Reestablish
the cults of St. Ursula and St. Christopher as well as the Buddha.
Anyway, I was really gratified at people's reactions, especially
at a museum on the campus of a Jesuit University, to the
religious things. Of course not all
the pieces were religious even the one's sometimes obviously so, i.e.
"The Last Supper" pieces are
still usually about art, not the last seder. They spoke of
"absolution" even revelation! I felt I could go on with them and I
am. I have added at least two pieces to
"The Cure," a series about a
man, Sam Francisco (and I am truly sorry if that seems like a double
pun), an alcoholic who sees Jesus in a mug of beer and thus an
epiphany, he eventually becomes a saint. There are so many sightings
these days, especially seeing Mary (check the Mary websites). It
seems people are looking for something more relevant to their lives.
The nonreligious (they would say they were nonreligious at least) see
Elvis or aliens. I am trying to give them some of that relevance.
Are jigsaw puzzles an important component of your Shadow
Boxes?
I don't know why I am working more and more with
jigsaws. I like the fragments; I like putting them together to make a
new whole. I like associating formerly unassociated things -- but
isn't that what I've always done? I just have found a much better way
to do it! Again the randomness comes into play. I like the random cut
puzzles best, those organic irregular shapes. How you can lift out a
patch and it becomes something totally different. How up close and
from a distance can be two completely different views, how the image
of say Mona Lisa is broken up by the lines of the puzzle. I'm
just getting into it. Years from now I will have "the story" all
worked out and as always it will have nothing to do with the piece
but it will give the public a lot of satisfaction to have me
"explain" it!! The fools!
I also love the idea that jigsaws are so antiart in the
intellectual's conception of art. They are the lowest of junk, the
lowest of art reproductions. Odd that something that so often depicts
art is considered so nonart. I love to recycle with the shadow boxes
but I also like to use valuable collector's items to annoy
collectors. I love using the plastic frames because their production
in the New Jersey plastics factories are what polluted NJ. An EPA
worker recently joked to me that if I love the production of frames
and wall "art" objects turned out by these factories during the last
four decades, then maybe they should send me the two billion dollar
bill for the cleanup!
You are best known for your sculpture, but in the 1980's and
into the 1990's you worked a lot in various printmaking media,
including lithography, intaglio, relief and monoprints. How did the
relative immediacy of printmaking affect your sculpture?
I just like the nice destructive thing of grinding a
line into an aluminum plate with an electric engraver and starting
from one point on a plate and letting a whole picture and an idea to
go with the picture form as I work along, almost completely at
random. It's the luck of the line! Lines are wonderful things, which
is why I like coloring books and why I like engraving, 'cause they
are coloring book pages and it's OK to have the lines. Can't have
lines in a painting, the illusion just has to sort of float there,
ugh! Lookin' for a home........(the boll weevil song is now sung).
Hasn't had a lot to do with the sculptures except they sort of
overlap sometimes but not always. Sometimes a print suggests a
sculpture which I later do. Never the other way around.
Are you still working in printmaking media? How have the Shadow
Boxes affected the imagery in your latest prints?
Sometimes. I want to do "fragments of old SAM to
kick around" pieces of Sam Francis paintings (they are actually
selling unsigned fragments of uncompleted canvasses SAM left around)
and there was something else but I can't remember what it was. I have
a bunch of ideas saved up for photo process prints saving images on
Zip to assemble on these giant printing computers/presses in the near
future. I dream of crosses made up of image fragments just as you
sometimes see crosses made up of flowers. I dream of the farmer's
daughter made up of vegetables and a dog made up of fragments of maps
so he can find his way home the long way.
I remember what the other print is that I need to make. The guys
(my sons) want me to do another version of
MM and DD descending the staircase
fighting (that's Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck) called "MM
and DD descend the staircase kicking the shit out of each other,"
literally of course!
Are the Shadow Boxes meant to be hung on the wall or displayed
on a pedestal?
Hang the suckers! As you well know all houses are
constructed with walls but few have pedestals (except the fireplace
mantle) I wish to cater to the wishes of houses for their walls to be
covered.
How do you know when you are finished with a Shadow Box?
When at that moment it is complete. It started with a
central idea and lots of others ideas got hung around it and they all
look good together and they all talk together. I heard David Lynch
say that that is how he makes a movie. Believable. There is then a
giant idea that never existed before that has grown up, suddenly
appearing around in front of all those talking ideas. Sometimes I
miss making sure that idea suddenly appears (the idea is a new
reality) so I have to go back later and beat them into something or
just destroy them. If I don't want to show it, don't want people to
see it, I know I've gone wrong. I can get sidetracked. But I always
get back on eventually.
What's next?
Who knows? I now dream of abstract puzzle pieces. I
dream of a painting of the crucifixion that becomes more and more
obscured by seemingly random abstract fragments, so that it ends up a
palimpsest just as a painter will work on a canvas gradually
immersing his original imagery. Many things hidden underneath,
obscured, invisible even but still there and influencing what came
later.
©1999 Roxane Gilbert
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This article may not be
reproduced without permission from the author. E-mail
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