Michael Dominick does not want you to stand around looking at his sculptures. He wants you to feel how they were made. From his entirely functional radiator works to his public molten iron performances, Dominick is often literally too hot for galleries. He agreed to meet for a cold beer and talk about Duchamp, steamy virgins, and his plan to pour 51 iron chain links in front of the Statue of Liberty next summer.


Chief Magazine: How important is location for your work?

Michael Dominick: Up in Nanuet [NY] we did this iron pour on the hottest day of the year. The day before it was freezing, and the day after it was freezing, but the day of the pour it was 98 degrees… and we're in the middle of a blacktop parking lot so it was probably easily 105 degrees and we've got this 3,000 degree furnace going. But… the authorities leave us alone. You can get a way with a lot more in the country than you can down here.

Is that by design that you're setting up on the blacktop?

Well not purposefully. I would prefer it be under a nice big oak tree in the shade, but what we definitely need is a lot of space and privacy. We've done it before on 20th Street in Chelsea, at the Mermaid Parade. The Mermaid Parade was awesome. We just did one recently in Long Island City and there's always the issue of, "Will the fire department shut us down? Will the police come and shut us down?" and I've done this, man, conservatively probably about 50 times over the years, and a dozen times in the five boroughs. And I've never been completely shut down. The only time it's come close was probably at the Mermaid Parade and the police—after we'd tapped the furnace four or five times—said, "Alright you have 5 minutes."

---

Have you been doing the Mermaid Parade for a while?

No. We just did it that one year… We kind of discovered that maybe it was cool that it was just a one time thing, cause it's like trying to go back and be 16 years old again, hang with your buddies and do the things you used to do. It's never going to be the same. It could never be as good as that. We're just gonna let it live in infamy… but other things kind of come up.

What we're gonna be doing out in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania—we're doing some molten iron drawings out there on August 19th. It's not the discerning art crowd like it was in Chelsea on 20th Street, but I'm hoping for that kind of intimate setting. Most people who come to an iron pour have no idea what to expect. It was just something cool in the art listings and then they get there and they see this fire breathing furnace and all these guys suited up in leather, molten iron coming out, and they're like, "Holy shit. What the hell's going on here?" The idea is that you'll never forget one of my performances. When you see one of the radiator sculptures, you'll never look at a radiator the same way again.

So the emphasis is on performance?

When we're pouring iron in front of a crowd, yeah, that's the emphasis. There's two, I'll refer to them as delineations: There's an iron pour and a molten iron performance. An iron pour is just when a bunch of sculptors get together and they make cast iron sculpture. It's such an extremely labor intensive activity that it requires a lot of people to do. So everyone kind of pitches in, breaks up the iron, helps with the hot furnace and all, and everybody gets the mold poured. A molten iron performance is all for the crowd. We do things a little differently, kind of jazz it up a little bit. We do crazy things that we wouldn't normally do at an iron pour.

Like what?

Like we pour molten iron into a 300-pound block of ice. I've poured iron into a mold where the front of it is clear glass so you see the iron come in, it fills up and [I] had it spell out words like "memory," or phrases like "you will never forget." We'll do stuff like... uh, coffee creamer is highly flammable, believe it or not. And we'll throw that in the fire. I have acquaintances in the field who will take a balloon filled with gasoline and throw it in the red hot crucible. We'll also do it in a much quicker, rapid procession.

At an iron pour, there's some down time. We're kind of standing around waiting for the iron to melt in the furnace. It might only be 10 or 15 minutes, but there's down time. The crowd is chatting amongst themselves, drinking beer, blah blah blah, maybe watching, asking some questions. At a molten iron performance there's no down time. Whatever metal is left in our pot, we'll pour back into the furnace and tap the furnace again right away, so there's always something happening. As a result a molten iron performance is of a much shorter duration, which is something I've always appreciated because when you go to see "performance art," which oftentimes tends to be a bit of bad acting, sometimes it's a bit drawn out laborious. It's like, "Aw come on. Please, just shoot me." This is a lot more rapid fire and it's over quicker. I have John Spencer Blues Explosion for one of the soundtracks, a little St. Germain, some acid jazz, mood lighting, blue lights. Other people have taken it to crazier extremes, but I'm slowly trying to develop it without it turning into a bunch of people throwing molten iron all over the place, [which] it isn't that cool.

---

---

Let's go back to your radiator sculptures for a second. Are these readymades? Does that term even apply?

It does. Kind of like when Duchamp did it, he wasn't trying to do readymades either. He just made a sculpture and the term readymade kind of came about. The whole way this notion even came about… I was hanging out in my bed on Avenue D, hung over one day. Those tenement apartments, they get screaming hot in the wintertime, so you have to open a window to get a reasonable temperature. The heat waves were just rolling out the window and I'm thinking, "Oh my poor landlord," you know, all that money. And I know guys in Tompkins Square Park who'd give their right arm to be hanging out on my fire escape right now. Something clicked right then.

I'd been using those radiators to make sculpture objects for at least 10 or 15 years before that. When I was an undergraduate student, radiators are the raw material we use. You'd break them up with a hammer and melt them in the furnace. It never occurred to me to make artwork out of the actual object itself. But any undergraduate can take a radiator, put it on a pedestal and say, "That's my art." Duchamp did that with the urinal back in [1917]… many lifetimes ago. But I actually had the skills from when I was welding my way through college to breathe life back into the radiator.

The first ones were just on a pedestal, a plinth. I had this custom little boiler tank I hid in the pedestal and when you came into my studio, it just looked like a radiator on a pedestal and it was like "Oh, yeah. Nice." [Artist] Robert Morris, I had a tutorial with him, came in—"Eh, that's nice." He leans over and puts his hand on it, and he goes, "Ow, that's hot!" And he kind of smiled—"Oh… that's hot." I said, "Yeah, that's hot!"

You know, that's the notion. The heat is now no longer utilitarian. You're not heating your home. It's a formal quality. It envelops you. You can't deny the feeling. That's when I knew that I was on to something, and shortly after that I started doing it in such a way that I incorporated the boiler tank into the composition. So when you look at the sculpture you're looking at boiler tank, plumbing, radiator—everything almost exactly as it appears in your home. But I do it in such a goofy way that you kind of have to go, "Is that a sculpture?" I'm not just appropriating the radiator, I'm appropriating its function as well. I'm making that work exactly the same way as it is in your house. Going to great lengths to make it work exactly the same way as it does in your house. So that when you see the radiator in your house, you'll never think of it in the same way again. If you really wanted to, every radiator in your house could be a sculpture. Your apartment isn't filled up with heat, your apartment is really filled up with the glory of the aura of art. Which I think is pretty cool.