Broadly on my Practice
Art has served people as a ‘medicinal vision’ used to examine and ‘heal’ the collective condition for centuries. My work, built using the technologies, materials and economies of my era, seeks to function in a manner akin to this ancient tradition. I seek a complex mix regarding complex societal realities— I presume our collective condition is best described collaboratively yet from individual perspectives. Slippery poetics allow us to laugh at ourselves and celebrate the contradiction-laden whole of being a human family.
So my studio practice most often begins with the recognition of a personal or social ailment some ‘tick’ that irritates a path towards something principled or enlightened. I try to conjure and create experiences that are parallel to what I or we are already doing–Reconfigure these acts as to allow me to see their bones thus allowing them to slip away from where I am blocked by vested positions–avoid the traditional taxonomies that define ‘issues’–we can then slip away from our habits and acts that normalize the absurdities of: technology without direction, disparity that accompanies privilege, self as island, morality as club, homeland security, structures of racial and cultural supremacy, dominion over the fate of species.
The resultant constructions are usually as much event as object and unlike most traditional ‘Western’ art my works reside as ongoing participatory projects—they are unfinished when they leave the studio and are launched evolving in both content and form as they are augmented through interactions with the local or a series of locals. I’m always thinking, exploring ways to invite participation–How might sweet treats, wiz bang technology, riots of color and an effort to accommodate each viewer’s thoughts in the work by way of discussion, on-board archives and performable scores broaden relevancy. Can such strategies allow the opinioned content of viewers to more democratically alter the work— freeing content from my own ‘tyrannical’ single voice, while still preserving a role for myself as the work’s creative initiator and discursive catalyst?
I am interested in objects, objects that are the locatable-homes of experience and point us towards less charted paths. In an interview of a shaman healer, its reported the healer said its not the rattle or its sound that produces the medicine these things just mark its presence—I feel quite similarly about locating the art within my working, there are object markers of its presence but these themselves may not actually be the art or even what is sculpted.
Put with brevity: I am engaged in an act of abracadabra, where startling clarity may appear out of non-sense language. I am committed to the inclusion of, contradiction and paradox for these conditions are prevalent in human experience. The language I utilize is primarily evocative and associative—hopefully inclusive of culturally specific and transcendent touchstones
Influences
Contemporary art practice produces much work that I deeply love however, It would be disingenuous to discuss specific art-centric influences without first acknowledging that the indigenous arts of many 1st nations peoples, and particularly the ways these function within a cultural context–as this is likely more influential upon my thinking and making strategies then contemporary practice itself. That said, I also owe a great deal to those artists who have pressed art to new or rediscovered frontiers and have expanded our sense of what art is and where and how in functions as contributory to unpacking the difficulties of being human. Those who cross boundaries, speak from un-illuminated corners, and thoughtfully exert change have effected me and my desires as an artist greatly. Dadaists, Fluxus and Situationist work all have contributed to my own sense of how art might best shed rigid reasoning to function in the complexities of culture. Then there are the artists Christo + Jean Claude, Dennis Oppenhiem, Dominique Mazeaud and more recently Amy Balkin their pressing art into remote yet public space and out of fixed permanence has freed my own practice. The AID’s quilt, and early performance artist Gerry Allen, Cildo Meireles for making the social political discursive act into a new kind of non object art form empowers me. Self construction has been served by a broad genre of Feminist artists including Linda Montano, Jana Sterbach, Eva Hesse, Ana Mendiata, Carolee Schneeman, and Else (twin) Gabriel who along with others collectively opened the range and definition of what is a ‘shapeable material’ and blurred the space between the shaping of form both external in the world and internal within the body and self. All these artists who have influenced me adding here Edwardo Kac, Wolfgang Laib, Stellarc, and Roman Signer I can see as manifestations of a shamanistic tradition and prominent in this role is Joeph Beuys who on a plurality of fronts has inspired challenged and blazed ahead of my own inquiries.
On shunning
I have certain wants—aspirations in conflict with my own beliefs–as a conflicted person I think a lot about my hypocrisy—about harboring dearly held yet mutually exclusive and contradictory beliefs.
I once spoke to millions upon millions through television adds encouraging the buying of frozen pizzas…and urging visits to an ice cream queen–where there is no milk on the premises. This became distressing despite my fiscal bottom line– I moved my ‘talents’ towards the service of smaller and less lucrative audiences. I have since for close to two decades pleasurably engaged in a fairly obscure artistic practice
It seems now we in the art vanguard purport an interest in ‘community’ –but too often we use this term the way in my add-man days we used dairy. So lately I have been working on pieces for individuals—works invested with my labor and and left for those at edges and outside of boundaries of prevailing comfort
Many of our Arts Institutions institutions have the rhetoric right and thus armed press into demographics defined as underprivileged and under served–here we deliver the same or worse watered down art products and agendas with which we have long served an oft called elite audience. It can be easy to feel satisfied with this tactic, this degree of ‘rightness’—but I am uneasy.
Who is under served in community, how might art serve here—in asking this I find my self forcibly drawn towards those shunned by the conventions of dominant culture (i.e. communities)—and that most often means those who harbor some distasteful behavior or attribute–sometimes aspects are concealed
(with no pride, I must mostly count myself among the shunners not the shunnies, for I who shun am nice and clean and polite and primarily engaged in building, interested in advancement and care about the happiness of children—while the shunned can be situationally dirty, scary even threatening, hostile towards me and more broadly the institutions that support my comfort–law, civility, benign methodologies of dissent, prevailing paths of opportunity, and divisions of property and wealth–coherance, logic and linearity may be abscent )
Interestingly to me is that my sited artworks reveal that sometimes the shunners and the shunned actually share the same human bodies though reside alternately in differing communities–at other times the shunned and the shunners live proximinal shoulder to shoulder in community but one side is invisible- and kept boundried in the outside
Searching for sites of the outside has become the nexus of much of my work–the How can we sleep project and mismatched drapes projects in particular. In the latter I identify a site that has fallen out of ‘regular community use’ and has been re-occupied by an unrecognized use or clandestine-community—one that is squatting or trespassing on the site but for whom the site is home or unconventional club house. I seek to produce a work for this site and its new constituency— often individuals that in truth my deficit-self presumes I’d just as well not engage with–so these interventive works are designed to take place in secrecy be executed as lonely perhaps cowardly acts–but they keep going awry and I discover mostly beautiful human siblings–this sculpts me in a manner I welcome, I am finding medicine for something ailing within me
The question is who is family, and what is the structure of that family–unconditional love and inclusion, hierarchical pack? Biological family includes cancer survivors, special needs children, the incapacitated, it might have also include drunkard mothers, perverted grandfathers, addicted brothers, stripper nephews vagabond nieces and bigots–How do we set the table when we love heirloom china, a good pinot noir white upholstery and art-deco mirrors–non conflictive discourse
duane mcdiarmid 