Jessica Stockholder in “Play” - Season 3 | “Art in the Twenty-First Century"

JESSICA STOCKHOLDER: Can we mix 
some abaca with this yellow?

Well, I was invited to make 
some paper here at Dieu Donne,

something I’ve never done before.

The experience of it is deceptively simple.

It doesn’t feel highly technological.

It’s also something that would be very hard to do

without the help of the people in the paper mill.

Paul has a lot of experience with paper

and with all the techniques and 
the history of paper-making.

The whole paper-making 
studio is filled with water.

So it’s a very clean and fresh feeling.

There’s a possibility nevertheless to make things

that are bright and sharp and crisp,

you know really plastic colored.

You know part of me would like to make stuff

that’s minimal and very well organized

and neat and clean and quite comprehensible.

I love the chaos, which is why I do it.

I don’t make minimal controlled things,

but I always feel kind of embattled

and it takes me a while to really know

which ones I like best after I’m finished.

Cause I think there are lots 
of different kinds of thinking.

Um, you know your hands learn to do things

that you could spend a whole day trying

to write about and articulate.

What’s intuition?

You know it’s a kind of 
thinking, it’s not stupidity.

Um, and uh, so, so I think there’s a discomfort
associated with trying to um,

put all those different ways 
the brain works together.

You know so I kind of like to 
avail myself of that discomfort.

You know I, Like being in the studio alone.

I don’t like (LAUGHS),

I don’t, I don’t hire people 
to help me in the studio.

And you know when I do the installation

I have to work with people to get,

to get things done on time

and to do things that I couldn’t do by myself.

And in here I like to be alone.

I, I mean part of the parameters I work within are

that I can carry the stuff up here by myself

and do everything by myself.

And um, and, and it’s odd to be in the studio

and not know what your going to do.

You know it’s, I think 
being an artist and choosing

to put yourself in a circumstance where

you don’t know just how 
things are going to work out

and what you’re going to do is uh,

is very exciting and rich and also difficult.

These pieces are more like pieces of furniture.

You know they’re not furniture

but they’re of the scale of furniture in the room.

They address the architecture as furniture does.

And furniture is also built for the body.

And these are like that too,

though they don’t serve any 
particular function most of the time.

And I love plastic.

I also just love color and they’re 
a really great vehicle for color.

And they embody color.

They’re colorful all the way through.

Plastic is cheap and easy to buy.

And my work participates in 
that really quick and easy

and inexpensive material 
that’s part of our culture.

In that way my work engages the means 
of production that we live with.

At the outset, my work was about 
as nonverbal as you could get.

Because I had two very verbal parents,

I needed to find a place to kind of ascertain

the nature of my experience 
that wouldn’t be argued with.

To work with the physical 
world was a place to do that.

But now having grown up,

I find it interesting to put 
words parallel to this work.

When I make these pieces I don’t 
have a, a literary story in my mind.

I mean I’m thinking about what things 
are going to look like visually.

And then afterwards can put 
words to what I’m doing.

Drawings are a way of 
planning what I’m going to do,

a way of putting myself in the space

and thinking about being in the space

and mapping out what’s of 
interest in the space for myself.

Maybe they’re like recipes for action.

In the studio I don’t have a plan,

but for the installation work I need to

have enough things planned
so that I can make use of the time I have.

And then I feel sort of prepared 
to go and do the installation.

But, but it’s always a kind 
of uncomfortable feeling

because I can’t do any more work 
until I get there to start work.

I mean this pile of light bulbs here,

I’ve done that before and
have some sense of what that would be like.

It’s a nice color.

Lower, lower.

All the way down.

Right against here.

There we go.

Being responsive to what’s there.

Or what materials we actually were able to find.

The sizes of everything, 
what the colors look like.

I mean it’s like setting myself down

with a bunch of different 
color paints and starting work.

Many things could happen.

Went shopping last night to find something blue.

You know I didn’t want another cooler,

there’s a lot of colored plastic 
geometric shapes um, in coolers,

but I’m using all those coolers out there.

And I wanted something blue and plastic,

something that had this color,
that wasn’t very specific.

You know that was like uh, you didn’t 
right away think, oh it’s a....

And this seemed kind of perfect.

So I was lucky.

Refrigerators and freezers, I’ve always enjoyed

because they are the place of food in a house.

And food and cooking has to do with
loving and giving in a family.

But, but also freezers and 
refrigerators are cold and frozen

and that has to do if you 
have an emotional mirror,

that has to do with withholding and not loving.

So for me they kind of embody that duality

which is probably also in the gallery.

The gallery and our institutions of art are both

full of possibility and extraordinary feeling.

And they’re also, they also 
put art in a place of remove.

So it’s...it has less power in some 
ways than if it weren’t removed.

In my work I’m interested in systems.

And how things are geometric 
or systematically organized.

How a thinking process can 
meander in unpredictable ways,

in contrast to a system that’s been planned

and that’s shared amongst people.

I wrote a little text about this piece,

it’s some kind of poetic text.

Referred to the “Yellow Brick 
Road” and the Wizard of Oz.

I think all of those kinds of fantasy fictions
have resonance with what I do.

My work is about posing this
possibility for some other experience,

world than the one that,
that we experience as mundane.

Even while this is made of mundane things.

My work’s really about pleasure.

It’s not always pleasurable to make it,
sometimes it’s excruciating and it’s hard.

And I think that pleasure matters a great deal.

I mean I, I think what kids do that’s play
is a kind of learning and thinking.

And uh, it’s, it’s a kind of learning
and thinking that’s um,

doesn’t have a predetermined end.

So I think that I’m involved in that.

It’s an ancient technique.