“Iceland has a long mythology around trolls and the animated landscape, it is the most dramatic landscape I have ever been in, volcanism is everywhere, hot springs, glaciers and geysers that are howling out in the valleys like a jet engine that never stops. Seriously.”
CARA ERSKINE: You made your first walk-in inflatable, Generalized Occupant (for Pittsburgh) with a seamstress. Do you always work collaboratively?
COLIN ZAUG: It seems to me most things are essentially collaborative, even showing art requires a vast network of people. The seemingly autonomous decisions we make while creating art maybe really aren’t so autonomous. I want demystification so people can get back into mystification on their own terms. Working with someone else externalizes the decision- making process and forces you to articulate things and work through them quickly. It’s less internal or studio-based, more pre-formative.
CE: The inflatable offers a very intimate, quiet space: a refuge from the outside world.
CZ: I want something that reverses itself, you are external to it, convex, and then you are surrounded by it, so all the sculpture’s aspects are easily graspable. There is a parallel to architecture, but then it is soft, somewhat vulnerable.
CE: That makes me think of Rotopiary, which needs a person to activate it. It's collaborative as it needs a person to "motor" it and the topiary—which is hand-drawn in green marker—rotates on the inside. It's very funny, tongue-in-cheek.
CZ: Rotopiary was based on the early film and camera work I did based on Richard Attenborough’s film Chaplin, where the landscape would spin so the camera could be static, moving over the landscape or the landscape moving around you. The rotating landscape drum is a cool way of trying to remake something very visceral, primal, that is racing through the underbrush, but it is also very Victorian, there is a politeness and control that seems very nineteenth century, I need to have more rotating landscape drums around me...
CE: Yeah, more unobtrusive, delightfully breezy mechanizations…the inflatable is powered by a small, freestanding fan, which gives it an almost respiratory nature, it undulates and wavers, it breathes...
CZ: I like the use of air in art, because it is nothing, it speaks to the blankness I like to get at sometimes, the "white noise"—a cancellation, but at the same time wind is very physical.
CE: You were raised in a fairly remote area in the desert of New Mexico, and live there now. How does this affect your reading of landscape or land, culturally, politically, visually?
CZ: It’s complicated, but I think the desert is visually very exposed. The forces that create the landscape are very apparent, the geology and hydrology are seen right there out in the open. Because of the lack of vegetation you can see great distances, so the sense of movement is heightened which effects your sense of time, the way light and shadow change throughout the day is dramatic, exposing or attenuating the topography. I was in Iceland, and in the high Northern Hemisphere in mid-summer the sun only goes down for a few hours and it never gets fully dark. Some people believe the landscape is inhabited by trolls and when the sun changes position that much in a given day, the landscape starts to crawl around because of the radical movement of the sun and the resulting shadows; things seem to move even when you are static.
CE: Trolls, as in Icelandic sagas?
CZ: Iceland has a long mythology around trolls and the animated landscape, it is the most dramatic landscape I have ever been in, volcanism is everywhere, hot springs, glaciers and geysers that are howling out in the valleys like a jet engine that never stops. Seriously.
CE: You’ve also said Pittsburgh is very Lord of The Rings.
CZ: Pittsburgh is very Lord of The Rings because of how the film played with distance and verticality: towers, bridges, chasms and peaks. The term is LOTR, pronounced “loater.” It has to do with drama and romance, which becomes dorky when combined with fantasy, but Pittsburgh has a grittiness that balances this well...
CE: When I saw Pittsburgh for the first time I was beautifully disoriented. Labyrinths of houses and bridges cling to hillsides in impossible, stacked formations. It reminded me of space from a Japanese scroll painting. I know you watch a lot of films, but have you made any films or videos?
CZ: I have made some little films, looped artworks from movies, one was called Titanique and was basically a re-edited version which only featured the ship, no lead actors. I stole that idea from a Czech artist named Jiri Suruvka, he’s great. The other was that film loop from Chaplin, where a keystone cop chases a burglar in front of a rotating landscape drum, the camera is static and the actors run in place while the painted drum spins behind them.
CE: Location and the use of space are central to your practice. In Prague in 1999, you made work in a castle in the Czech countryside. How did that location inform your work?
CZ: My work is pretty transient and portable so travel and adaptability are part of it. I started using whatever was at hand—using a sink on the wall as a physical starting point and support for a blankness, then a chair, then some bottles, then a soccer ball, which was funny because it was already round and white, then the British artist made me release the ball so we could kick it around on the lawn, so then that little sculpture was full of air. I like using pedestrian objects as an armature for weird sculptures, it’s about making complex things simple, in the dumbest way possible, literally simpler, which in the end doesn’t really make them simpler, it’s naive or hopeful...
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Colin Zaug was raised in, and continues to live in, Cerrillos, New Mexico. He makes mixed-media installation art. http://www.colinzaug.com
Cara Erskine is an artist based in Pittsburgh. http://www.caraerskine.com
