Art’s Labor: An Interview with Randall Nelson

Jared Demick

          Last spring, University of Connecticut’s Homer Babbidge Library held an art exhibition in its two main lobbies. This is nothing out of the ordinary; the library usually plasters its walls with various aesthetic objects that almost nobody stops to ponder. However, over the course of that spring, something quite different happened. Instead of the usual pedestrian fare, the library found itself entangled in a controversy that even ended up involving the Undergraduate Student Government. The focus of the conversation was a few installations by Connecticut artist Randall Nelson.

Nelson decided to install some pieces that satirically condemned our culture’s widespread environmental abuses and its silent complicity with violence. The particular pieces in question included “The Birdwatcher’s Verdict,” a glass box with a bird hanging by a noose inside and the message “Some birds get what they deserve” scrawled on the front; “Lest We Forget,” a war monument replica with homophobic graffiti scrawled on it; and “Catch and Release,” a mock-proposal that invasive bird species such as European starlings be painted other colors so that they are attacked and killed by their own species. To anyone with a discerning eye, it was clear that the installations’ hyperbolic and absurd proposals—how could one ever hope to paint every living starling in the United States?—were savagely hilarious indictments of our cultural apathy. Nelson’s art proved to be socially-conscious, anti-comatose aesthetic.

While many in the UConn community felt Nelson’s sharp-needle aesthetic, they didn’t grasp how it was trying to help their lives. In fact, it seemed that the majority of the University had forgotten about the existence of satire and irony. Students could call Nelson homophobic for “Lest We Forget,” but then go back to their dorm rooms and laugh at Family Guy, a television program containing homophobic jokes about a baby. The controversy at Babbidge showed two things: 1.) that free expression has still yet to exist in this country and 2.) that large parts of the American public have reduced art to the status of decoration. Apparently, whenever art questions how we conduct our lives, we seek to silence it.   

Yet it would be a mistake to equate Nelson with the controversial reception that his work has received. His work combines a humorous playfulness with a faith in common-sense. Over the course of this two-hour interview, I found Nelson had a vibrant, infectious energy and a real sense of art’s purpose in relation to society. While I often tried to find out more about his aesthetics, Nelson instead constantly reminded me of an artist’s labor, the economic and social factors that decide how an artwork even comes into existence. Nelson’s interview reveals how institutions constantly seek control over the artists they display, how costs and lack of income determine the times of creation, and how an artist, no matter how precise their vision, cannot control public reception of their work.

The Frustrations of a Public Art Exhibition

Randall: What’s expected of public art is quite different from what you usually view in a gallery. Galleries like things that are cutting edge. In public art, they don’t want any cutting edges. They want everything to be as safe as possible. I don’t know about mentally, but I definitely know about physically. Things that would have never occurred to me as being a problem have been giant problems to people here. One of the two pieces that they used to illustrate the brochure had two bowls. One had dried corn in it labeled “Monoculture” and the other had layers of nuts and fruit that was labeled “Biodiversity.” They said, “No, that piece can not be in this show. It offers food. Unrestricted, unsupervised food.” I said, well, it’s art. The name of the piece is “Choices.” People are supposed to make a choice whether they want some of it. The basic idea is, do you want the dried corn or do you want the fruit and nuts? Also, the individual viewer has to decide, “do I want to take a piece for myself out of the exhibit?,” when you know you’re not supposed to touch an art exhibit. But I’m offering it and the title is “Choices.” On a lot of levels, we’re being asked to make that choice, the same choice that a farmer makes or a hunter-gatherer makes. But they said, “Well, nobody’s allowing them any choices here.” It was all for insurance purposes because they did not want one person to tamper with the food and then another to eat it and get sick and then have a lawsuit. So there were no choices allowed.

It was that kind of thing. Everything was over insurance. There’s a question about this piece now [“The Rogue”] because the ropes might present a tripping hazard.

Jared: Although I don’t know who’d be running around.

Randall: There’s no reason for anybody to go over there, but that’s what they’re saying. . .and this piece, [“Why Feed The Homeless”], the clothesline, the fire marshal wanted to know if those [bird food] bags had been fire-proofed, if they had been treated so they were fire retardant.

Jared: Despite the fact that we’re in a library with flammable books.

Randall: I said why should my stuff be less flammable than 99% of the things in here. They seemed to think that maybe somebody going by will take out a lighter or a match and, just for the fun of it, just light the pieces on fire. I said, “Well, if they’re going to do that, they could light the books too.” I said, “I don’t know what fire retardant is going to do to this, but it’s definitely going to ruin all the lettering I’ve put on it and probably make the bags themselves look horrible.” I don’t even know where I could get it. Is that something that is commercially available or is that a specialty product?

          This war memorial [“Lest We Forget”] was supposed to be surrounded by dry leaves. I had two bags of dried leaves. First, they want to know, had they been fumigated? “Are you sure there’s no bugs in them?” I said, “Look, I collected them last fall and as far as know, there are no bugs. They’re dry and clean and no bugs living in them.” Then the fire marshal said, “No, they’re not allowed. That would be a fire hazard.” I had to go out and buy artificial, fire-retardant, treated leaves. I spent four hours taping each leaf to the floor because they were afraid that somebody might kick one into the escalator and it might jam the machine. I spent four hours taping those damn leaves. There are two hundred leaves.

Jared: How did you get involved in getting this exhibit here?

Randall: A friend of mine who is a retired professor from the art school, Roger Crossgrove is on the committee that screens artists that apply for shows here. He had told me a couple years ago, “I think you’d be a terrific candidate. You should apply.” So I did. It’s funny. They keep saying to me, “Well, we didn’t know that this piece was going to look like this.” I said, “Did you look at the pictures I submitted, the best pictures I had?” The only pieces that they didn’t mind were that one [“Hammerhead Shark”] and the “Aggravated Penguin. ”Those are the two. There was no problems with them. This piece [“Early Bird Farms”], they were afraid that somebody might vandalize or set fire to it, to the newspaper articles. I said art is like children. You make it and then you let them go into the world. You can’t protect them any more than you can. That’s one parents’ horror: when your child needs you the most, you won’t be there. Yet, at some point, that will probably happen. But that’s just reality.

Jared: You can’t stop every little thing that could potentially happen.  

Randall: Although many parents try and the University certainly tries. They don’t want dangers of any kind. Things that never occurred to me as being dangers seemed to be big dangers to the University. But, oh well. . .

Survey of a Career

Jared: What I notice about this particular exhibit is that it almost seems to be a mini-survey because some of these earlier works are coming from the 80s along with the really recent. What made you decide which pieces to include here?

Randall: Some of it had to do with space. It’s not all the work I’ve done obviously. I’ve got the world’s largest collection of my artwork just like most artists do. They wanted more wall stuff. I said, “I’ve done very little wall stuff.” Almost everything that I’ve done that I still have access to that are wall pieces are in this show. I’ve just started doing these pieces with glass fronts on them in the last couple of years. Thematically, they’re all related. This piece, the clothesline, I was still finishing that. I was still the writing the commentary on the bags and stuff a week before I started setting the show up. I was going through it the other day, I was seeing some grammatical errors and stuff that I did when I was up until 11 or 12 at night copying stuff. I had been collecting for several years all these different articles and things you find on the internet and newspapers and things and sifting through them, picking out pertinent paragraphs from articles that made the points I was trying to make. You don’t want to overwhelm the world, but that is kind of what I was trying to do.  With a piece like this, I am trying to overwhelm you. I’ve only seen two or three people actually inside there reading that stuff and it’s been up there for a couple of weeks now. So I guess most people don’t want to be overwhelmed.

Jared: I can even say from my experiences—I was here Tuesday morning, checking out these pieces again and I went inside briefly—the way the piece is set up, you feel like you’re transgressing this boundary, that you’ve stepped into the exhibit and you’re like, “Should I be here?” It’s like, you know you’re supposed to because the lines are written inside, but yet you’re fighting this social conditioning you’ve had. I think we’re still working with this idea that it should somehow be at a distance and to get close to it is very interesting.

Randall: Well, the lady who’s the curator for the gallery, she really wanted to know where the “doorway” was into that piece. “Where’s the door so that people can get in?” And I said, “There’s no door under a clothesline. If want to get under the clothesline you just duck under one of the sheets or a towel or something.” She said, “But you’re not leaving that information for the viewer.” I said, “I shouldn’t have to.” I’m leaving a lot for the viewer to figure out for themselves because I don’t want to force-feed them. I think with art, certainly with postmodernist art, a big emphasis is on the discovery that the individual makes and if you’re interested and you want to look, you’ll discover and if you’re not interested, you’re not going to look. There’s several different crowds that look at art or several different categories of people. The one I hate the most is this person who, when they come into the gallery, the first thing they do is look at the title and the price and then look at the piece and laugh and go on to the next one. They [the gallery curators] said, “We need the prices.” I said, “ I don’t want the prices published on these pieces.” They said, “Why not? Maybe we’ll sell them.” “If someone actually wants to buy a piece, they’ll come to you,” I said, “but don’t expect that phone call.”

Jared: I noticed too what was really striking—and I think it’s interesting that you mentioned postmodernist art—you seem very conceptual in your artwork, that there’s a lot that goes into the thinking before the act of creation even happens. As you were mentioning with the bird bags and the internet research that you’ve been doing and compiling for a year, how do you usually get an idea for a work to even start out?

Randall: That’s an interesting thing. . .these old pieces if you notice, they have metal parts, these two have the heads [“The Rogue” and “Hammerhead Shark”] and “Aggravated Penguin.” That was a style that I did for about ten years, using found objects and then making the art. This piece [“The Rogue”], I really like this piece because it was breaking away from the idea of the object on the box just being exhibited. This was done on the floor, it was taut, it was showing a lot more going more than just. . .this [“Aggravated Penguin”] is showing nothing going on, he’s just pose. It’s like a beautiful little taxidermy bird or something like that that’s an imitation of something. It’s very much a classically just “done” object. This guy [“The Rogue”] was the first one that wasn’t just an object. I mean there’s a lot more going on here. I mean it scares people. It was a rejected from a Connecticut figurative artists’ show. There were three female nudes in the show, but they rejected this and I said why. They said, “Because it’s too male.”

Jared: Talk about being sexist. . .

Randall: They were worried that I was going to have to drill holes into the floor and bolt the thing down. They came up with all these crap reasons, but they didn’t like the fact it was a nude guy. But it’s more than that because he’s tied up, he’s bound, because to me. . .what does he represent to you?

Jared: To me, what’s amazing about the piece is the threatening suggestiveness of it. I mean, we have this table here, that knife, and it’s almost like a mixture of torture and autopsy it seems to suggest is about to happen. There is this clean spareness about it yet we have this individual who is obviously in this writhing kind of state, who’s bound up. What I like about the found objects is it seems to prevent any kind of emotional connection with the figure. It’s almost like erasing the face. . .

Randall: Yeah, he doesn’t have a face as we would see it. Well, you know what I like of this piece? I see this as the goat horns. This is Pan. This is the Roman god who is the god of essentially lust. He had a human body with a goat’s head and his little buddy Bacchus used to get the girls drunk and they would dance with him and then perform. He became the symbol of everything that was wrong in the Roman pantheon of gods to the early Christians and they singled him out to be the Devil.

Jared: Hence the devil horns.

Randall: The Devil is essentially the god of recreation made evil. Having grown up on a farm, farmers spend most of their lives—certain farmers who raise animals—they spend most of their interaction with animals either feeding them or injuring them or killing them. When you have baby pigs, the first thing you do is you castrate the males and you cut their tails off if they’re going to be raised in a pen so they don’t bite each others’ tails off. You cut cow’s horns off, you castrate the calves, you separate the calves from their mothers very early and you are constantly doing something the animals do not want you to do. Having to restrain them. . .if you want to raise horses—unless you’ve got a very valuable colt you want to raise as a stallion—one of the first things you going to do is castrate him to make him manageable because a male horse is a big, mean animal and so is a bull. But I see this [“The Rover”] as almost like farmers have captured him and brought him back to the barn. They’re going to do what they do with all the animals are difficult for them. I wanted to do this as an installation. I wanted like a barn wall and a barn floor, almost like this was a stall they had gotten into and tied him up. If you’ve ever worked with big animals like a bull or a horse, you have a pair of rings like that [in the installation piece] and you tie it in two directions and it can’t really go anywhere. This one [“The Rogue”], at least to me, tells a much bigger story. Obviously, you got some of that story too.

Jared: So, with these particular sculptures, you basically would find these objects and they would suggest these figures you could construct out of them. . .

Randall: Right. The found object sets the scale. It gives me the idea. You know what this is, the shark?

Jared: It’s some kind of piping, right?

Randall: No, no. It’s an antique door closer. I used to find these all the time. I’ve still got a mess of cast-iron pieces that I’ve found for pieces that never got done. Then I got to the point where just making the animals like this, I couldn’t tell the story I wanted to tell anymore as a carver. I kind of quit doing it. I just got frustrated. I couldn’t find a way—and I kept thinking of myself as a wood-carver—and I couldn’t find a way to tell the much more involved stories that were in my head. I was hesitant to make much, much bigger things because I wasn’t selling the stuff I already had. You know, the last thing you want to do is keep making bigger and bigger, non-sellable artwork.

Jared: Because where do you store it.

Randall: Where do you store it? Absolutely, where do you store it? That is the problem. I mean if you’re an artist, a sculptor especially, you’re like one of those snails that just keeps building a much bigger shell for itself, each year you put another channel and another channel. I mean, the idea of moving and selling my home is like a nightmare because what do I do with it? If I get a job offer to go to California to teach, what am I going to do with all of it? I’ve got 25 years of tools and equipment and sculptures.

Forgotten Responsibilities

Jared: So instead of getting larger in scale, how did your artistic practice change?

Randall: It actually just came to a halt for a long time. I was just busy working. I had a young family and they had a lot of expenses and they need somebody to drive them and I had jobs that were taking me all over the country to work to make money. I travel a lot because you go where the work is and as a stone-carver or mold-maker and things like that, sometimes I’d go to Chicago or Savannah or Texas or California or wherever. When you’re home, I would be working on my house because I bought an old house that needed a lot of work. That just took up quite a lot of my time. I kept getting ideas for pieces. This piece [“Lest We Forget”] was in my head for ten years. Then when I went back to grad. school, this was the very first piece that I did. I had been thinking about this piece, but I didn’t know what it was going to be. I just saw this as like a war memorial, a war protest piece, but then they were saying, “If you want to know what your art’s going to be about, go deeper. Look deeper in yourself. Ask yourself what does it mean? What does it mean to you?” I went to be Vermont College in Montpelier and I went to my first residency there and I was driving home and I was thinking. I started thinking about this piece and I hadn’t known what this piece was going to say. Who was it going to be about? The names on it, were they just going to be people out of a telephone directory or what?  Then I started thinking, what about myself? Then I started thinking, there have been a lot of people in the military in my family. So I said, ok, that’s who it is. So these are all members of my family.

Jared: It’s a whole family history.

Randall: This thing sat right in my living room for two weeks. I collected all this graffiti years ago when I went to school in Brooklyn. I was fascinated by the graffiti. You’d see it was like this call-and-response thing. One person would say something then somebody else would overlay it. It goes back and forth. I thought that was terrific and then I just used that as a way of indicating that this memorial, this family memorial, has been essentially abandoned by the family that built it. You see that a lot in old memorials like in big obelisk memorials in graveyards where none of those family members are still there. Nobody cleans it anymore, nobody puts flowers around it and people have started using it just as a post to spray graffiti on. The graffiti people are not doing this to desecrate a memorial. They’re using it because it’s one more flat surface to put something on. To them, it’s nothing more than a way of getting somebody who’s walking by’s attention. That’s almost worse, that they don’t care about it because it’s just a spot to them, to spray something.

So this piece isn’t about a war memorial anymore. The war memorial is an image of what a family does when it’s feeling really good about itself and pious, but then the fact that they’re no longer coming back and worrying about it. This represents obligations and responsibilities that you’re no longer taking care of. I had this piece in a show and a group of kids were in there to see it the day I was gallery sitting. They said, “What does it mean?” I said, “Well think about it like a shut-in. Do you have a grandmother in a nursing home? Do you go visit her? That’s a responsibility. She’s a member of your family. If everybody’s too busy going to school or going to soccer games to ever go see your grandmother who’s in the nursing home”. They said, “So this represents an old woman?” I said, “No, it represents your moral responsibilities that you are not dealing with. It is whatever you should be doing and know you should be doing, but you don’t”. . .

But my teachers didn’t get this. They said, “Open up, tell the world what you’re thinking.” And then, of course, one of my two advisors, who is gay,  as soon as he sees the words  “fag” and “Jimmy is queer,” he just ripped into me during the crit. He said, “How can you do this giant homophobic thing? I wished we had never let you in as a student.” I said, “Did you read the carving that’s underneath it?” And he admitted to me that he hadn’t even noticed it. I said, “You write for Parkett magazine and you didn’t even spend five minutes considering what this is.” I said, “You got trapped in your own rat-trap.”

Jared: You would think being attuned to what art has been doing for so long, things such as irony. . .

Randall: I would have. They told me to put my heart of my sleeve and then they stomped it. I mean, this guy ripped into me in front of. ..he waited. . .this was the last piece he criticized and this was the first piece I brought back for my second residence, he just tore into me in front of the whole group, just dressing me down. He said, “I am deeply and personally offended by this piece.” My classmates made T-shirts that said “Deeply and Personally Offended” and they handed them out to everybody at the next residency to wear. This guy was trying to figure it out. . .it sounded familiar, but he couldn’t remember what it was. I remember him saying, “I wish we hadn’t accepted you as a student. I can’t imagine how we could have been so wrong.” Yet I was the one who made the commencement speech at our graduation. I think he must have changed his mind at some point.

Jared: What I like about this piece and this bulletin board with the birds is, in some ways, it reminds me of modernist collage in that you’re letting bits of the world actually speak to the viewer. It seems that your art, in a lot of ways, has to do with framing the world’s discourse in particular ways.

Randall: I think there’s so much stuff going on and there’s so much information coming at us that people really do have to pick and choose what they want to pay attention to and just ignore the rest. I was listening to a thing on the radio and they were talking about ADD and how it’s becoming more and more the problem for children, how they keep diagnosing it and having to give these kids Ritalin and stuff. The guy was talking and he said, “Well, how the hell can any of us not have ADD? There are too many things demanding our attention.” He said, “How would a person like George Washington or Thomas Jefferson even feel if they got dropped here? They would feel like their brains were being torn apart.” There’s no time to sit here and have rational discourse. I mean, when was the last time you sat down and had a long talk with somebody? Am I creating more of the problem or giving them something to sit and stare at? I don’t know. To quote Jack Kerouac, it was the night and I had no answers, all I could offer was my own confusion. Artists don’t offer answers; they offer questions or they point out questions. That’s what I do with this piece. Obviously, I don’t have a solution to why bird species are disappearing, why children are in danger. I don’t have answers to this. I did this piece when my kids were still young, when I had daughter in high school and another in junior high school. I was worrying about them. Any parent that have  daughters worry about where they going to go. My older was talking about going to school in New York and I mean, it’s a dangerous place and you’re worrying about them.  

Jared: What I liked about this piece was the juxtaposition of children being in danger and the birds and it has this fusion with the milk cartons.

Randall: The “Have You Seen Me?” That’s the tag line from Advo Systems. . .they allowed me to do that. The Vice-President of Advo Systems gave me permission to use it as long as I’m not making profit off of this. I said, “Don’t worry. The chance of me selling this and making a big profit off of ‘Have you seen me?’ is very, very slight.” But I’ve shown this piece several times.

Jared: What I find so interesting too is the wings on both sides are kind of disturbing, the way things come together.

Randall: Did you notice that there’s more?

Jared: No I didn’t.

Randall: There is even more. If it’s overkill before, you walk back here and it’s getting killed twice. I don’t have any attractive back for the bird milk-cartons. Originally, this piece was done with a big commercial refrigerator that was black and had the glass door. That had been my advisor when I was in grad. school. That was his suggestion, “Use that, it will be really imposing.” The thing weighed a ton. It was a bitch to move around and by having the glass door, it put too much of a wall between you and the art. You can’t read the info or see the pictures clearly enough. He said, “This will make the milk look like it’s being offered in a refrigerator.” It just put me off. Then I got the idea of using just the milk crates and I liked that better. Now it’s more of a found object. It’s kind of fun, almost like a kid’s toy version element to it.

Jared: It was this sort of irreverent humor in the center too which is a nice offset for all the disturbing aspects of it. What I like is it’s not a comfortable humor, but it’s almost unsettling in some ways. I wondering if we could talk about the role of humor in your work since it permeates a couple of things that you’ve done.

Randall: Well, the humor element is definitely there. I like to tell stories, I like to be funny. It’s really easy to make boring work. It’s a lot harder to make something that is serious, but still a little bit lighthearted. It’s much harder. One of my teachers in school, her most memorable line was, “It’s really hard to make political art that doesn’t suck.” That line just stuck with me. You know, most political stuff is like we got to go out and save the world right now kind of stuff and “Are you with me?” and “C’mon, let’s get out there!” It’s like listening to the fundraising on National Public Radio or something. It’s not much fun. They’re not trying to be entertaining and fun, but this is. I’m not trying to make light of it, but, you’ll notice, in each of these [bird milk-cartons], I have my own little comment at the bottom.

Predators & Society

Jared: There is this tension between the background and the foreground. Do you see this as running throughout your work? I guess it runs through “Lest We Forget.”

Randall: This piece in the middle certainly has it. This had come out of a specific action actually. I had been reading a lot about birds and relating them to cats. First I did that piece “Birder,” that picture of the cat with the bird hanging in front of it. “Birder” is a term that birdwatchers use. Real birdwatchers, serious birdwatchers, the ones who have the heavy spotting scopes, people who spend a lot of money and time and have their Audubon book and their life lists. To them, birdwatchers don’t really count. I was thinking about that term “birder” and then I looked it up in the dictionary. I have got a really old dictionary, printed around 1920 or something, and it’s got all these old definitions in there and the idea of birder, that was a term for a bird-catcher, a person who caught birds to take their feathers. Then I thought, I know a birder, that little cat. That’s one of my cats. If I let that cat outside, within 10 minutes, she’s got a bird. She’s a better birder than anybody with a scope-sight, believe me, or has a vest with all the little pockets in it.

          It’s a very humorous piece, very tongue-in-cheek. Then I started thinking about how Audubon and a lot of the other organizations have been talking about the destructive habits of cats and how cats, just in this country, kill thousands, maybe millions of birds a year.

Jared: I was reading about that. Wisconsin, I guess, wanted to hunt feral cats and the public was so outraged that they didn’t allow it even though 26 million song birds have been eradicated. . .

Randall: I had been thinking about this. They say one of the best things you can do is keep your cats indoors, don’t let them go out anymore. They say give them an area they can go out in. I can close a porch or something like that. I did this. I fence my porch with regular screen. I had done with nylon bug screen. Of course, they ripped it just like that. Then I got the heavy-duty cat-proof mosquito netting which is metal and they ripped that, too. I had to keep replacing it. Now I’ve got half-inch wire mesh over that and they can’t get through that. Boy, did my cats hate me, were they mad when I did that. It’s like I ruined their world. The male cat we had started spraying in the house. He was so mad about this and he was spraying all over my stuff.

          So I was thinking about enclosures and while I was working on the idea for this piece, the home invasion happened in Cheshire [Connecticut]. I was thinking about predators, about cats as predators and a lot of those who were on the cat’s side, “Who are you to say that the cat doesn’t have the right to kill whatever it wants?” They are essentially sticking up for the cat’s right to be a predator. I said, “Well, what does a society do with predators? What do you do with a monster?” That’s what this piece came out of.

          It was so wild that when I was working on this piece, the home invasion happened. Then, suddenly, everybody was screaming, “What do you do with a predator?” This is what I had been thinking about for six months and I’d even written an essay about this [the essay is available here: http://www.rnelsonartist.com/gal_moster.php], trying to figure out, does the cat have rights or, if we like the birds, is it our obligation to make the cat miserable? How do we make the cat happy and still let the birds live? And if you think now, we’ve got these problems, the same problems, with people who’ve been convicted of child molestation or something. They serve five years in prison. What do they do when they get out of prison? Nobody will let them live anywhere. They can’t go back to their family’s home. Nobody wants them. They’re persona non gratis anywhere they go. It’s like should they have been put in jail forever? Are they worse criminals than murderers who go and serve six years and then get out and are back on the street?

          But my pieces now are just like memory jogs. They give you a little bump, a little nudge, and make you start thinking.