OLIVER HERRING: I like things simple.
I like to boil things down to an essence.
Might have something to do with the fact that
English is a foreign language to me and that I have to...
And as I learned English I only was able to express myself in,
in crude ways, but that forced me to make my point clear.
The reason I started to knit was,
it was in reaction to the suicide of someone I very much admired
as an artist.
Well my work up to that point was very colorful and expressionistic,
I from...really one, one day to the next
took all color out of my work
and all of that expressiveness
and really subjected myself to this rigorous, monotonous discipline.
It wasn't a conceptual decision,
it was an emotional decision.
Knitting can be very meditative and uh, monotonous.
But exactly that quality gives you time and that time was actually of,
that was the crux of the matter.
I never made more than one kind of stitch.
I never got into patterning and any of this
because it was never about knitting, it was about performance.
Going through a certain motion repetitively, in this case, for ten years.
People only witnessed the,
the outcome of the, of the performance,
the legacy of that time spent.
And its sculpture was um,
something that kept me so isolated for so long in the studio.
Once I committed myself to a piece I had to follow it through
which could easily take two, three months.
So once I started I was locked into an idea.
And the only thing that could really move was my mind.
And I felt that these early video pieces were a way
for me to express what was going on in my mind.
One of my first videos, EXIT,
starts out with me sitting in the chair that I usually knit in
and then it just turns into this flight of fancy.
Certain fantasies that I dreamt about while I was knitting.
The videos were a way for me to,
to be flamboyant.
In my first few videos I am in it because I try,
I had to try stuff out.
But eventually I replaced myself with other people.
My thing is sort of to bring mostly strangers into the studio,
not always, very often it's friends too.
But even with my friends,
there is this sort of need there to do something out of the ordinary.
I don't think of the people I work with as models or as actors.
They're not.
They are people who are willing to sacrifice their time.
Well in the end these things are collaborations.
The two people that are here today are my two old reliables.
I really got to know them very well through making videos.
HERRING: Now.
Actually that didn't work.
Well I like this.
Now.
Oh that was just swell.
HERRING: I don't care too much about the medium.
I don't even care so much about the object.
I really care about the pro... the process.
HERRING: Try and get as much in your face as possible.
Oh this is red.
It's amazing, keep going,
That's a beauty.
Close your eyes for a second.
Okay.
HERRING: You know these guys don't react in the way they would
ordinarily react to a situation where they meet a stranger.
It's because of, of, of the circumstances
and the eccentricity of it that it becomes,
you, you, you sort of short-cut a lot of formality
and it becomes very, very soon, informal.
I don't just mean the fact that these guys spit food dye for hours.
It is a very intimate experience
because it's unusual and because you have to
really give a part of yourself to do it.
It's, it's um, it's exhausting.
While these two image formally or in terms of the process are similar,
the emphasis is very different.
And I usually wait for a moment that is,
that brings out some kind of vulnerability and it usually ha...
I, I never know when it happens,
it just happens at some point
and there's this very personal connection there that happens
and that's what I'm after.
It's this personal connection with somebody,
some stranger in a way.
The focus when I work with a person for one of these sculptures
is a very quiet focus,
which is much harder to, to endure,
especially when you do this on an ongoing basis for two or three months.
I think maybe the intimacy of the process
is somewhat disturbing to me
because um, it's not the kind of intimacy that I generate when we,
when, when we make a video,
where the focus is on fun and action.
The focus when, when I work with a person
for one of these
sculptures is a very quiet focus.
Hmm, I'm trying to match the image
with the actual place on her body.
Here is um, I place this part
and I matched it against her body.
With this figure over there I didn't have that luxury.
He came in um, usually at night because he had to work during the day.
Throughout the process when I attached the photographs
he wasn't here at all
and I just sort of had to imagine what it would look like.
I carved the structure and then I just took it from there
based on some photographs that I had.
THE SUM AND ITS PARTS came about
after an accident where I slipped a disk in my neck
and I could literally not move one of my arms.
I felt the only thing I could do was work with one person
because that seemed manageable
since I really couldn't maneuver around.
(MUSIC)
HERRING: Was actually quite happy that
the conditions under which I had to work
were radically altered because it made me think differently about what I could do.
One guy who I had worked with in a,
in a video before, every week,
two or three times we met over the course of three months.
It was really an extended project.
And we just improvised.
I, I decided that it might be interesting to cut his hair,
for him to shave his hair.
And um, of course he didn't want to do that.
So a lot of that time it was about me trying to convince him
that he would look much better without hair.
And then in the end he uh, he, he agreed.
HERRING: Most people are much more unusual
and complicated and eccentric
and playful and creative,
then they have the time to express.
Play.
It's a thing that we put on hold
because we get distracted by so many other things.
We have to make money.
We have to pay the bills.
We grow up.
And these roles that we play, they're not real.
But after a while they become real, they become us.
Play is, is sort of a reminder of what that was like to be a kid.
And um, we in the end never lose that,
I think it's always there.
I mean you carry your past inside of you,
that's clear, so why should it ever disappear?
I think whether it's video or performance or uh,
these sculptures,
it is really the learning experience of making these things
that give me in my life, meaning.