Interview: Ian Carr-Harris

Artist: Ian Carr-Harris
Gallery: Susan Hobbs
Dates: 10 March to 16 April 2011
Interviewed by: Michael Hansen
Aired on ArtSync: 15 April 2011

On Conceptualism (2:40)

This term ‘conceptualist’ is interesting…it’s widely misunderstood, or seen with skepticism…almost as a kind of parody of thought itself, which is rather unfortunate because I think that one can view this term conceptualist (and I think it’s a valid term) as a successor to the idea of the medium itself…. I would say we all practice it even if we don’t like the word.

What we’re practicing is no longer an attachment to something finite, but rather a willingness to work with the uncertainties and the constantly evolving experiences that we have in the world – so this term conceptualist… is a way to lever us away from the rather convenient and very misleading terms (like sculptor, or printmaker….) and actually put us more closely in touch with what actually artworks were always about anyway.

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Explaining Raven (5:21)

There’s been a pulling apart of a single entity – the pop-up book – into two stages of its coming to being.

[It’s about]the uncertainty of any finite object…It’s that sense of looking around and seeing the world as in a constant state of becoming.

They’re bound together, of course, by what they are. But in terms of how they seem, they look different – and that gets us back to all the hierarchies we employ in language, and society.

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Two influences on Gebaude [Shape] (9:10)

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‘The Third Man’, a 1948 film set in post-war Vienna… filled with bad guys and good guys and naïve guys and crumbling edices… and a sense of the crumbling of society. Or society that has reached its nadir, and has nowhere to go but up…I wanted that reference specifically because the Vienna portrayed in ‘The Third Man’ is a Vienna of sewers and basements and..doorways  and darkness…not the romanticized nineteenth century Vienna.

The child’s kit, the mechanokit. I can get the kit, and I have all these little bits and pieces, and I can put them together! And then if I don’t like what I put together, I can take it apart, and reconfigure.

Images courtesy Juni Birol, Susan Hobbs Gallery, and Bright Light Films.