On Spitting, Knitting, and not Quitting
buck ellison interviews oliver herring
Brooklyn-based artist Oliver Herring wanted to become a doctor but studied art to avoid conscription into the German army. He took his BFA from the University of Oxford and MFA from Hunter College. Though Herring studied painting, his work spans many media. In his early works, Herring knitted packing tape into garments and furniture. His more recent projects have incorporated stop-motion video and photography, as well as the participation of strangers. Herring has invited people to make videos with him, to spit food dye on themselves for hours, to flood their backyards. He has had solo exhibitions at the Hirschhorn Museum, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Museum of Modern Art, among others.
Why did you start making art?
Originally, I had planned to study medicine, but I also knew that I wanted to live abroad. In Germany before the Wall came down all young men fit to serve had to serve either two years in the army or do community service. I didn’t want to do that because I knew I wouldn’t live in Germany anyway, so to buy some time, I went to a language school in Oxford, England and eventually wrote the army a nice letter that asked: If I get into Oxford (which is a big deal for a German), would you postpone my service? I thought maybe the cachet of Oxford could postpone my service somehow. To my surprise the army said yes, as long as I was able to prove, each semester, that I was still enrolled. Now I should mention that I really couldn’t speak English beyond crude high school English. So I decided to perhaps study something with an emphasis on less-verbal forms of communication, the best I could come up with was art. I had my parents send me some of my drawings (one of my outlets), which became my portfolio. Long story short, to everyone’s huge surprise, I got in. I don’t know what was more surreal: that I was suddenly making art 24 hours a day or that I had gotten into Oxford without speaking English.
Why did you start knitting transparent packing tape?
Things changed for me after I heard that Ethyl Eichelberger had killed himself because he had AIDS. This was in ‘92, when I was still a student at Hunter College. Up to that point I painted, but I was also restless as a painter. Ethyl’s work had been really meaningful to me, still is, and his death had an impact on me that took me completely off guard. I had some packing tape around the and just started to mess around with that. From this tape I made this big transparent flower that would hang suspended and backlit in the air. I called it A Flower for Ethyl Eichelberger. Ethyl was a larger-than-life figure, gender bending and brilliant and also very romantic in my eyes. I am not big on symbolism but his flower somehow encapsulated all of that. I also don’t think of myself as a Romantic, nor am I sentimental, but I just had to do this flower, it just poured out of me. The piece was by far the most meaningful thing I had done up to then, because it needed to exist.
However even though I was very happy with the Flower, it’s success sent me into a crisis. The reason this piece existed had little to do with what I had done up to that point. I thought of it as a freak accident. I thought that if I wasn’t able to make meaningful art within the context of what I had learned and within the context of art school then there was obviously something very wrong with my overall approach to art making. (I now know that I had probably been sensitized in Art school to respond the way I did, but that was very unclear then). And just like with the army, in order to sort out another big “existential” dilemma, I tried to buy some time, hoping to eventually come up with a solution. In this case I decided to knit. Knitting is slow, rhythmic, incremental and most importantly, mindless. So I learned how to knit. But instead of yarn I used the same type of transparent tape I had used for the flower and knit it into blank sheets and coats. I clocked in time and while these mindless but meaningful objects grew very slowly, I had the time to think and figure things out.
You said that this year you have been saying yes to all requests. How has this influenced your work?
It further opened up my process, something I have been fighting for since I stopped knitting. To say yes to every request has led me into very interesting creative territory and sometimes truly adventurous situations (for example my TASK-Parties). Perhaps the most mundane yes-project was to work with a young guy who asked me to consider making a “photo-sculpture” of him. I said yes despite never having responded to such a request. I usually look for people with a very particular experience in mind. But ultimately his story was very unusual and compelling and above all I liked the idea that he would use me for his agenda just as much as I would use him for mine.
Tell me more about your photographic sculptures of humans.
I talk someone into coming to the studio almost always without pay, That’s important to me because I like the idea that whoever I work with has to find his or her own reasons to be there and to make a sacrifice. I then rent a very good camera that gets a lot of detail and after we decide upon a pose (I usually let whoever I work with choose the pose) we, my assistant and I, carve a polystyrene likeness of that person and eventually I photograph close-up every inch of that person’s body. After that I cut up the hundreds of close-up images and apply them again to the appropriate place on the polystyrene armature. It’s a fascinating process because at the end of the day I know their exterior bodies better than they do. Think about it, you never actually see your back. Our notion of ourselves is so dictated by two-dimensional mediums - film, photographs, the mirror - that we never actually see ourselves as a whole in three-dimensions. So it’s actually a crazy experience for these guys to see themselves as three-dimensional objects. I actually did a self-portrait as well, so I know what it feels like. Although ironically, or perhaps not surprisingly, the piece is of my lying on my back. For my first show with this kind of work I made a man (Patrik) and a woman (Gloria), Neither came to the opening. I think were just too freaked out to see themselves like this in a public situation.
These knitted works and photographic sculptures take months or years of painstaking work. Would you characterize your work as devotional?
I stick with things in general. I stick to a medium, process. If I meet people and I like them, they can’t get rid of me. It’s one of these things when you make art, you can learn a lot about yourself. And this amount of discipline that it takes to do what I do, this sticking with things, seems to permeate through everything in my life.
Perhaps it’s because I don’t mind limitations. I’m perfectly content with what comes my way. That is not to say that I am not ambitious but I can explore endlessly from within a tight set of parameters. For example, I knit tape for almost ten years and I found ways to push the work forward, learn and keep it interesting and meaningful. That’s another thing I have learned through my work, that there are no limitations, that there are just parameters that you either accept or you don’t. I tend to roll with limitations and work from within their parameters to prove them meaningless. It’s all in your head. As I said: you can expand from within any parameters endlessly, unless of course you have a nine-to-five job!
Have you ever had one?
Yes and no, nothing lasting. The worst was a summer job at a milk product factory. It was during a really hot summer and for this job I was clad in this thick rubber suit, standing on a conveyor belt, packaging hot, exploding yogurts. Needless to say I was covered in boiling hot, exploded yogurts. Because I was pretty good at this mindless job, I was “allowed” to take these yogurts into the freezer. So I went from this really hot, sticky, tropical, yogurty environment straight into the arctic. It was just hell.