"Your visual experience can be so overwhelming that
you allow yourself not to think about meaning. That tension
really interests me."
"I’m not a conceptual artist who is only interested
in the idea. It’s really rooted in the visual. That’s
where I get excited."
"I look at things and wonder what they are and why they
are. I see things and wonder why people are not wondering
about them. Everything interests me: a gum wrapper could
interest me as much as something at the Metropolitan Museum."
You work in a variety
of mediums: installation, sculpture, video, glass, printmaking...
WILSON:
For the ideas that I have, it’s
more important that they’re done the way I envision
them. What’s great about printmaking is that you can
make so many of them and really share them with the world.
And the process, that’s really interesting to me. The
result is not like anything else. But I’m not a printmaker.
I don’t feel like I need to make prints. It’s
like with any material, if I have an idea for it, if I think
I could make something with that process, then I’m
into it. I really don’t have any desire to make things
directly with my hands. I don’t know when I left that
behind, because I studied art, but I get everything that
satisfies my soul from the kinds of things that I do—bringing
objects that are in the world and manipulating them, working
with spatial arrangements, and then having things produced
the way I want to see them.
I rarely do drawings of things...generally speaking, I don’t
have any desire to do that stuff anymore. I also have so
many ideas. People
will ask me, when I did projects with plaster casts did I
make these casts? Well no, because my ideas are rapid fire.
I produce when I see something, that’s when my ideas
happen. I don’t have those kinds of blocked artist
moments—never have. It’s because I’m totally
inspired by things around me and will just grab it and make
something with it. So I don’t have any desire to make
things. Now of course what’ll happen is, once I’ve
said this I’ll have a whole series of things that I’m
making. (LAUGHS) Which is probably a good reason to say it,
you know, because then all of a sudden I’ll do something
that I didn’t realize I could do.
ART:21:
Beauty, what is it for you?
WILSON:
Beauty, beauty, beauty, beauty.
I’m really interested in beauty as the ultimate visual
experience because I’m interested in the visual. But
I’m also interested in beauty in that it can hide meaning—your
visual experience can be so overwhelming that you allow yourself
not to think about meaning. That tension really interests
me. In a lot of my work, if I can I try to bring out that
tension....People
have to deal with the fact that there is meaning in beauty.
There is meaning in ugliness. Beauty and ugliness are not
necessarily separate, but we separate them. What I’m
trying to say is that it’s not a flaw to see something
beautiful and understand there’s either ugliness or
meaning within its sphere. There’s nothing wrong with
that. Well, I’m being very philosophical, but I’m
basically speaking for myself and my experience with people.
We try to separate out all these experiences—meaning, no
meaning, context—but to me all these things are at work
at the same time. There’s no harm in understanding
that. You don’t have to experience them all at the
same time, but not acknowledging that things are complex,
that beauty is complex, I think that’s the problem.
So I enjoy making it complex for people.
ART:21:
Can you say more about the power
of beauty?
WILSON:
Well, I’m interested in
power relationships. Especially in the works. Certain objects
have more power in certain contexts than other things. And
I like to put it all on the table, that something has a certain
power more than something else. Or something is perceived
not to be powerful when it actually really is powerful. Maybe
the power is masked by beauty. Maybe it’s positive,
maybe it’s negative. I like to bring all these things
out. They exist in the world all at the same time, but we
choose to look at one aspect of a complex thing. I don’t
like to relax into that kind of denial of the complexity
of things, so I’m always dodging the simple answer.
I mean power and beauty—that’s all the same for me,
these are issues in the same soup.
ART:21:
When you make something are
you thinking about its physical structure?
WILSON:
I’m not thinking about
physical structures, I’m thinking about the matrix
behind a work of art. The idea matrix, the structural matrix,
the textural matrix, the contextual matrix—that is the structure
of a work. I feel more comfortable with things when there
is some kind of a basic structure that holds the work together.
My work is strongly visual. I’m not a conceptual artist
who is only interested in the idea. It’s really rooted
in the visual. That’s where I get excited. But I have
a great need for structure in a conceptual thread—perhaps
throughout the works in a project—almost like a matrix more
than a structure. Things build on one another in an installation.
There’s a basic matrix that they fit within and it’s
not something I draw up. It’s a schema—another word
might be ‘theme’.
I think that really comes out of my education. You know,
in the early ’70s with notions of the grid. And there’s
no physical grid, it’s a controlling notion really
important to what I do. I’m hoping that people see
that. It’s not that I think in these terms of a rigorous
matrix, it’s just they become part of a matrix. What
I’m saying is, it’s part of who I am. It’s
not like I’m thinking about it, I would just be uncomfortable
if things were without that kind of matrix.
ART:21:
You seem to be very interested
in the idea of memory.
WILSON:
I would like to think
that objects have memories—or that they’re imbued
with memory. When you go to a place and an object that is
extremely familiar to you is in a totally different context,
you realize how much you have imbued this object—to the
point where you can’t see it in any other way. A lot
of what I do is capturing memory or eliciting memory from
an object. I’ve used the word memory in some of my
titles—there was a particular project in North Carolina
that had the word memory in it. I’m interested in the
world of images and objects where people seem to forget about
memory, forget these things have a past or multiple pasts.
I think the more you know, the more you understand about
something. It doesn’t mean you ordinarily just don’t
have any new thoughts about it, but if you see something
and you believe that what you think about it is all there
is to know, there’s something involved with the ego
there. The more you know, the more you have in the world
to work with. And I try to elicit those memories so that
people are not walking around blinded by their environment.
I look at things and wonder what they are and why they are.
I see things and wonder why people are not wondering about
them. Everything interests me: a gum wrapper could interest
me as much as something at the Metropolitan Museum. And sometimes
a gum wrapper is more interesting because it hasn’t
been thought about that much. It may be embedded with a lot
of imagery that would be extremely ironic if people understood
what was there. You look at something and you think you know
it, and in fact there’s lots more to know.
I think in the west, and particularly in America because
it’s such a young country, you get the sense that so
much comes into America and is re-fashioned and regurgitated
without really understanding what it is. We’re such
a young country, whereas in other countries they know about
the history of the thing that they have and maybe that’s
holding them back in some ways. So perhaps their problem
is not knowing what they know. But in the United States there
have been so many stereotypes about people, cultures, and
ideas on very superficial levels that have been translated
into the visual—black collectibles say, or graphic design,
or even in architecture, or advertising. Those things they’ve
hurt me in the past, because that’s how people see
me before they even get to know me because of all this media
material, TV and everything, you know, just very shallow
understanding of a particular subject. That has prompted
me to really want to know about things, to not take anything
for granted, not to assume anything about anybody and try
to tease out the various meanings. And then I can throw it
away, but at least I know.
