Fred Wilson spoke at the Nasher Tuesday evening as the annual Semans lecturer. The artist deals with museums and objects relationships to such spaces. Before his lecture, I spoke to him about his artistic philosophy, art and more.
First, could you tell me about your work in general, because I know that it falls somewhere in between curatorial and more physical artistic production
Well, just to give you the global story, I make sculpture, and photography and I’m a conceptual artist, so, whatever media, material, or way of doing things suits me is what I am doing. So there’s all that crap that I do in my studio and it gets paid and sold and so that’s one side of what I do; and the other side is working with institutions – well, I also do public commissions too. But the other thing that people really know me for are these museum projects that I do. And having both is great, because one is very much, I don’t want to say collaborative, but I sort of immerse myself in a place, and the other is, I’m in my studio just doing what I want to do. And so it allows me different kinds of experiences and a way to make art.
But the projects that people know me for are these museum projects, which I kind of came to because I worked in museums. And became very interested in how museums display things, because I was working in them. The Museum of Natural History, the Metropolitan, and others in New York City. And what intrigued me was that they displayed things in very different ways and sometimes, the same kinds of collections – if you look at different ethnographic—well, ethnographic, take away that word. If you look at the work of Africans, Asians, and native people, where they exist in these different kinds of museums—the art museum and the ethnographic museum—they display them, they talk about them in very different ways. And through the projects that I do, I kind of unpack what they are actually doing to the artworks, and saying about art and about culture. And so I had all this nascent stuff in my head, and finally, when I started making these projects, it all became clear. And so a lot of my projects are still to this day just investigations of thoughts that I have, questions that I have when I’m in an institution. And for me, these museum projects are no different than if I’m making an installation of my own handmade things—well, “handmade,” I don’t do that many handmade things—that’s not my real interest anymore—but my real objects that I’ve created one way or another. It’s just that museum space are not a… they’re systematically together in a certain formula, and I like to subvert the formula somewhat and bring out other ideas.
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