Oliver Herring in “Play” - Season 3 | “Art in the Twenty-First Century"

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 images 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,

ot is really the learning 
experience of making these things

that give me in my life, meaning.