Jackie Gendel / Michael Jones McKean

Q&A with Michael Jones McKean

Your artwork often seems to exist in the space between materiality and poetry; in the past you've incorporated things like a 1985 Ocean Pacific windbreaker, a Campo del Cielo meteorite, and a cut ponytail from a Mid-Western girl…and you've made objects like a monochrome replica of a 1986 Dwight Gooden jersey, a fiberglass replica of the helmet worn by Spanish explorer Hernando De Soto, and a handmade wooden replica of a 1987 Promax J-1 Super Jumbo Boom Box. How do you decide when to invoke this sort of backstory to an object?
 
It’s a good way to frame it - a space between poetics and materiality - it gets straight to a couple ideas I’m interested in. With recent work, I’ve been making sculptures where materials and objects travel between their lives ‘with us’...or in other words; with their associative meanings, functions, references, mythologies, economies, and politics in tact and their inward, private lives totally divorced from the ordering systems that we construct. I am trying to capture the objects in a parallel reality where they float in psychic voids, ambivalent to our desires or needs for them. I’m curious if somewhere in-between this object-oriented shadow world that is free from human associations and the literate world we create for objects there might be a fucked-up third thing. Maybe it can be an animistic plane of spirited forms evading us that escapes the gravitational pull of our desires, our poems, and our metaphors...a place where objects, when they choose to visit us, do so with all their unknowable, perverse strangeness intact.  
 
I feel this relates to your question about ‘backstory’ as an invisible reality that exists around objects. Generationally we are increasingly skilled at parsing minuscule, alchemical details that exist (or we believe to exist) within objects. Think about going food shopping, maybe for just a single apple. You walk into a store and see bins and bins of apples. As we peruse the apples we make decisions, not just on how we project the apple might taste but whether it's organic, certified S.O., genetically modified, whether it's locally grown or grown far away or in a country that we agree with politically. What is the total carbon footprint of an apple sourced from an orchard in New Zealand? How were the workers treated that picked the apples? As we choose our apple we silently consider many extra-diegetic layers of information – meanings that form an invisible but palpably real backstory to the fruit... the object. This kind of connoisseurship, or secular magic, isn’t static - it carries over to corporate brands and computers and sneakers and chairs, 2x4’s and bagged potting soil, Koi fish and bottled water and of course it is directly transferable to how we think about and consider art objects.  
 
For me there are moments when specific external details about an object, such as how it was made or what it was made from or its compounding meta-histories, should surface. These details tell us about ourselves, our dreams, and our beliefs in things. If it’s done right, a work should swing freely from a deeply specific and soulful private life, to an egalitarian, maybe even universal plane where an object’s metaphors are delivered to us bravely and publicly.
 
In addition to your materials, your titles are also a vital component; in particular Sister Giving Birth and A Hundred Twenty Six Billion Acres, which are both on view here. At what point do you introduce language into your process?
 
I’m really working with language throughout the entire process but titles usually come toward the end. The title, A hundred twenty six billion acres refers to the total surface area of the earth, with an acre being a human-scaled way to understand and measure domain or property. More generally, a title for me is way of establishing an intellectual zone and parameters – a kind of ethos or logic for a work to exist.   
 
Certain Principles of Light and Shapes Between Forms, which was the rainbow that you constructed from harvested and reclaimed rainwater at the Bemis Center for Contemporary art in Omaha, NE and The Possibility of Men and the River Shallows, a large-scale installation made for Grand Arts, Kansas City, MO and DiverseWorks, Houston, TX are arguably your most well-know works to date. Yet this exhibition marks a clear return to discrete objects. Do you find that the differing scales change your relationship to narrative?
 
It’s weird to say...but I don’t think so. The larger works, although they have the possibility to hold and meter time with much more narrative potential, really screw around with narrative as an efficient delivery mechanism for meaning. In earlier work there was an overt engagement with using the machinery of narration, in particular theater, so there were a lot of props, sets, risers, a stage, lighting, and special effects to build a relationship with narration as a concept. Although I was using theatrical tropes within the work, I realized, perhaps counter-intuitively, that a sculpture is actually missing the tools to communicate a true narrative arc - it lacks the most basic elements required in storytelling: a beginning and end. Without an originating point and a totalizing conclusion, a sculpture exists as an inherently unstable device for narration, forever swirling around in medias res. This was an important realization for me; within sculpture’s genetic makeup I couldn’t create the meanings contained in our most culturally relevant and practiced ways: think the novel, the essay, film, TV shows, YouTube videos, theater, music. Sculpture is like a strange communication outlier that is almost mystical by design. Yet realizing this limitation became an overwhelmingly generative place to not only think about the nature of sculpture but to think through the process of how sculpture is ultimately made.
 
For someone who may be seeing your artwork for the first time, what would you suggest are some of the common threads that run throughout the large-scale projects that we've mentioned as well as the sculptures currently on view at the gallery?
 
It’s a great question. I think all of my artwork presents a consideration of objects, materiality, and histories with a sensitivity to how objects build and shed meanings over time. More recently the works play with the intersection of our physical object-based world and a screen-based reality that we toggle between by setting up allusions to photography and other kinds of representations. There is also an interest in, for lack of a better term, Techno or Nuevo-Voodoo...maybe a homemade armchair branch of Animism arising from an increased reverence for objects through their very negation as we wade through our shared Post-Internet condition. This relates, more globally, to a continued interest in the ongoing project of sculpture making – like why make sculpture now? I feel like there is a lot more to mention, but those are some of the ideas that come immediately to mind.
 
Maybe it’s weird to try to equate a large, logistically sprawling work like Certain Principles of Light…, which you mentioned earlier with the smaller more discrete sculptures. At the risk of over-determining some of the ideas in the work, maybe it's helpful to conceptually ground and diagram some ideas here.  The central component, as you mentioned earlier, of Certain Principles of Light…  was a prismatic rainbow that appeared very fleetingly in the sky. In a very speculative way I wanted to build a structure to understand the rainbow as an ancient form totally out of time - like a time-traveler immune to the effects of age or evolution. When we witness a rainbow it appears to us exactly as the first one did millions of years ago. The sculpture set the rainbow image in relation to a few other primary forms that included: a Bristlecone Pine tree from the foothills of the Rocky Mountains (an object with DNA allowing it to be the oldest living thing on the earth), a massive 110-pound Campo del Cielo meteorite (a non-earth object older than the earth itself), a Micronesian shell pulled from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, and a handmade quilt from Pennsylvania made around 1880. Although this sculpture was physically huge with the rainbow stretching city blocks, the project’s common sculptural language is shared with these smaller works in the gallery now. For instance, even as The Throat(a set of three objects levitating on fabric backdrop) references archeological field photography, CGI green-screen magic, and quotes drapery from Greek and Roman statuary, the work also evokes a very similar object-based poem by triangulating a set of shared forms: a block of wood, a shell, and a meteorite. 

Another artwork, The Constant Now, is really a conceptual primer for the entire show and condenses a set of core of concepts that I’ve been working with for years. The work contains a collaged group of homemade stock photos of hands holding objects - from a lump of clay, to sushi, to an iPhone - all hovering on a black and white photograph of pottery shards from an archeological dig. In some basic way I hope the work speaks about swirling geologic time and our fundamental relationship with objects and substances that are not us:  tools, materials, food, chemicals, technology - all touching us momentarily before they dissolve into their out-of-time realities divorced from us.
 
My original idea for pairing your work alongside that of Jackie Gendel, currently on view in the Front Gallery, was your usage of a sort of Neoclassicism. Do you find inspiration in antiquity and ancient cultures?
 
I do, totally, but my interest passes first over archeology and anthropology to get to art history. In terms of Classicism or Neoclassicism as an aesthetic, there is maybe a shared quality, an attitude, maybe a stoicism, a kind of inert valent charge that lives in the air around a sculpture. When it’s right, it reverses polarity on how we might normally absorb energy from an artwork. So a work’s energy store is not a frenetic or combusted one, not an expressive one - but an inward, haunted one.