Peter Garfield

In the late 90's, Peter Garfield was "that guy who takes photos of falling houses."  And he still is, no matter what the real story is.  But these days, he's moved on to video and other such dystopic photographs.












Chief Magazine: What's up, Peter?  Got any upcoming shows?

Peter Garfield: I have a show coming up at Mass MoCA in January and also, I've been invited with Deep Space 1 [load edit of Deep Space 1 in new window] to the Rotterdam Film Festival, so a lot’s going on right now.

So when is the Rotterdam Film Festival?

It’s from January 24th to February 4th, but my opening at Mass MoCA is January 26th, so I’m requesting to have my premiere, hopefully, the 28th, so I can catch the opening at Mass MoCA and then go over to the premiere.

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So did you send Deep Space 1 to the film festival or how did these things come about?

Well, I actually I had a residency over the summer at McDowell Colony in New Hampshire and, I don’t know if you’ve heard of the place, but there’s a lot of different creative types up there, writers, you know, poets, sculptors, painters, photographers, filmmakers and, one thing, I screened a film there. One thing, it took me a long time to finish that video for one. I was fixing up a house in Brooklyn for years and I kind of had to drop my artwork ‘cause I was doing it all myself, basically, with a couple helpers and then decided last year I really had to push this video through or its never going to get finished. I was a little worried about it though because I hadn’t done it in a while and so, the project was feeling a little cold to me. So, I had to kind of go back to it and treat it almost as found footage. I didn’t want to try to impose any of my earlier visions on it. I wanted to see where it was going to go, just that my life has changed, that everything in the country and the world has changed, since I started it. But one thing I couldn’t get to do was the sound editing, so when I showed the edit of it at the McDowell, I talked about how I just needed someone to do the sound engineering, kind of refusing at that point to put any more

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money into it and I wanted to see if I could get somebody to work with me, and a composer really liked it and he volunteered these two sound engineers in Washington DC, so that was great and they started working on it this fall. They’re working on that now and things just started to come together and there were three filmmakers up there as well and they all encouraged me, after seeing it, they said, “You definitely should submit this to the film festival,” which I hadn’t really considered since I’m just in a different world, different universe kind of, and I've never known much about that and I do have filmmaker friends, I didn’t really consider it much so... They really encouraged me and they gave me advice and told me about the process. So I applied and got into it and I’m waiting to hear from Berlin and Tribeca film festivals and, especially Tribeca, it’s looking pretty good. The one thing about the film festivals is that they’re going to show it as a single channel.

That’s what I was wondering. Because it's a three-channel installation.

So it’ll be shown kind of how you saw it, on one screen, and what I feel they want to do is show it as a three channel installation and I don’t know. I shouldn’t say too much because I just don’t know but I’m hoping that maybe it is done in Tribeca and maybe, since I’m here, I could actually do the three channel piece as kind of an experimental thing for them. But I don’t know, I don’t actually know even if I've been, you know, if I’m going to be accepted to that, but that’s kind of what I'd love. Ideally, it’s meant as kind of a museum piece or something like that, not kind of a commercial project.

How is that? You said you’re in a different world than the film festival circuit, so do you not consider yourself a filmmaker?

Well, this is the first project I've done. I mean, I bought the video camera to do this project. I bought it in 1999, which is ages ago now. Luckily I bought a high-end consumer camera and it’s still good but now things are moving fast. I did do some small pieces but nothing that I've shown. In fact, I didn’t really finish any of those pieces. I kind of worked on them and I was always focused on this one, this one bigger piece that I wanted to do. My ideas are kind of almost like scenes or short sequences, so it didn’t feel like a big leap and a lot of people commented that my work is kind of very cinematic, like in the way of photography, so that wasn’t such a leap. It really was just about a lot of technical aspects but the way I work, I’m very process-oriented. I tried but I could never work with a script or storyboards. I have an image in my mind and I just find a way of doing it.

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So with Deep Space 1, specifically, what were some of those initial images that then created this installation?

Well, one was the mural. There’s that mural of the tromp l'oeil of this big empty space, that’s this studio with the table, the work table that goes and disappears into that wall, and then this woman cutting through it and going through but that part actually developed after but the mural actually was there in my mind, this kind of fictional space, you know. A lot of my work dealing with this border between fiction and reality and so that was an element, also. So I had this image of almost kind of aquatic footage going through mountains and that was the aerial footage and so those were the two main things but then, like in the catalog Harsh Realty, with all the whole fake documentation of the flying houses, I started working on that project, on that catalog, which I considered basically an artist book, kind of. It’s meant to look like a serious artist catalog documenting a series of work. To me, it was another piece. It was a conceptual art work and on that one I started working with the actors and this kind of role playing and continued that and this series of photographs, Objects with Potential, which was basically extended into the video of these people in the video going through the motions. It looked like they’re doing something but you don’t know what, they don’t know what. In fact, I don’t know what. I struggled with that because talking with filmmakers, you know, there’s always the issue of motivation, you know, what’s the actors motivation, and I was, I don’t know... I drew a blank on that and I felt very self-conscious about that for a long time, but then I got more confident about it after a while. It really was that there was no motivation and it was about this kind of existential emptiness, lack of motivation, everything is just kind of set in motion. It’s kind of just happening. People are doing things. There’s no motivation and it’s really about that. It’s really about kind of, I didn’t know this at the time, all my work, I kind of discover things as I go and it seems to me it’s really about free will and these things are just set in motion and in the video.  There’s kind of these representations of daily activity and human concerns and just little snippets of it, like, there’s people in the lounge, there’s people working... There’s people, you know, there’s all the junk food and some people eating... There’s a lot, like, consumption and then, the make-up scene, just kind of trying to encapsulate life in a way, but that there’s no free will in a way. Everything is just, the camera is going through this space and it's just documenting everything, seems kind of inevitable.

So that’s kind of what I wanted to get at and a lot happened when I was editing last year. I started editing and I realized that I had to film this whole new scene, which was the very beginning of this snow falling then the TV screens and the garbage dump and then a whole bunch of stuff that I had filmed early on got cut out. It was hard to do but I just realized it wasn't meant to be in there at a certain point.

Just to touch on the free will and involvement of the project, I guess, just in your words, you can describe free will.

Um, it’s hard to say. I guess, well, as I see it, it’s kind of our ability to influence events, going from all the way to personal events on a personal level in our very own universe to events on a global level, you know, how much influence can we have as individuals, even as groups or communities and even when we do have influence, there’s so much self-destruction involved. The main interest in my work is psychology and I mean, just looking at the world, what’s going on today, you know, it doesn’t matter what our intentions are and what we say, it’s what we do and often what we do is... we just don’t get things right.  

Well I guess branching off of that and kind of the main aspects of your work that I find is kind of like this battle or this dichotomy between the real and the artificial and how within this project, specifically, how does the idea of free will work into those two opposites, if it does?

Well I guess kind of what my work is saying is that we know so little about existence, about everything that we can’t really make a judgment, maybe that we’re constantly in our minds. There is, you know, you can say reality and then fantasy but even within those, like within waking life, there are, you know, you smell things and your mind is brought back to childhood or you see something. Your mind is constantly going into memory, back to kind of temporal reality, back and forth. So I find it very hard to believe that there is this kind of linear progression and to me, the whole idea of progress is suspect, which it sounds very depressing to say that but I don’t know, which at the same time, I’m bit of an idealist. I mean, if I didn’t, if I really were a fatalist, I wouldn’t care about a lot of things but I get worked up about this war. I get really worked up about politics, so there is an idealism but maybe it’s a protective thing, self-protective thing where I try to rationalize that there is not progress. I try to temper my idealism with something else and I think nobody, ultimately no human really has the answers ‘cause we are our minds. We are learning more about minds but there always are our minds, so you can’t really get out of it to get the ultimate clear perspective. I don’t know if that makes any kind of sense.

Yeah, a bit. Maybe we can, from that, we can jump to about the project you're working on now which is this Brain Waves project? Maybe you can tell me a little bit about it, how that started and what the goal of that is.

Well how did it start? I’m not sure, but I've always had an interest in landscape, like Hudson River School since I was a little kid. I loved that and since discovering kind of Chinese landscape paintings, kind of the idea of the sublime and how it is about idealism in a way and it is fantasy, of how we see the landscape. It’s not really realism and I was interested in seeing all different types of representations of sounds, of light, of all these different things being represented in terms of waves and wave forms, being like mountains and being curious about how a lot of this was evocative of these ideals, kind of mountain scapes but they’re very kind of cold and analytical and I started thinking about that and just started working on this idea of these two opposites, one being this ideal, this sublime, and very kind of fantastical and the other being this hard analytical, mathematical reading of data that comes out into these beautiful forms.

I started the project several years ago but I hadn’t had a chance to get into it much when I was an artist in residence at a college a few years ago and I worked with somebody in neuropsychology there and I had my brain waves read as I was viewing video footage and listening to music and then I had a computer scientist there write a program that translated into topographical information, so it’s this big, vast mountain scape and I've only looked literally at, probably, one little pixel area of it in the last three years. I just have to really get nto that project and I haven't had much of a chance, so I’m not sure where that’s going to go but I’m working in sculpture and painting and drawing and I think there’s probably a video element of it as well. So I have a feeling it’s going to be kind of a rich seem to tap into but since I’m not a scientist, I want to be careful not to try and make it too analytical. It's still a poetic thing, which hopefully with have some resonance for technical people. I don’t know.  I’m not sure where that’s going to go. I have people I need to talk to who are doing brain research and I haven't pursued it enough to know where it's going.

Maybe, we can switch gears and I read somewhere that you said you’re kind of sick of being the “photographer of the falling houses” and one thing, it’s not such a big deal but I was going to attempt to see how far you’d be willing to lead on the readers but having mentioned the Harsh Realities art book.

It's actually Harsh Realty, yeah.

Harsh Realty, excuse me.

Yeah, but I mean, obviously it looks like harsh realities and most people thinks that’s what it says, but if you look closely, it’s Harsh Realty.

You’re absolutely right. So I mean, one of the things, well, I mean, let’s get this straight, they’re not real houses.

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No.

No, and then, they’re models you have made based on real houses or?

They’re actually just little HO scale train models and I would embellish them a lot. I’d break them up. I did a lot of... I’d make walls and patterns and all this stuff with paper mostly and glue and I’d make them look like they were broken up and I’d put beams on the bottom and dirt and look like they were torn out of the ground and so they were these little sculptures and they would take months to work. I don’t work you know day to day on them. I would work for a while and then put them away, so and then, I take them out into a landscape and photograph them hanging from a stick and I’d move the stick and I’d take a lot of photographs between one and two hundred usually to get, to narrow it down to one photograph that I would use, just to get the right angle, so that the perspective looked like this house was up above and far away, also so there had to be enough motion to make it not only look dynamic, but to mask the fact that it was this little tiny object. If there was no blur, then you’d see this thing really sharp and it’d look like a little model three feet from the camera, so I had to get all these things right. So that’s why it took a lot of trial and error.

And I guess, part of the whole process and the project itself and the output being the photographs, but was it essentially to convince the viewer that they were real houses right?

Well, that wasn’t the original goal of the photos but that was kind of the goal of the catalog but not even that it was, kind of, it’s all kind of metaphorical, never meant to be. Well I mean, I correct myself to say I wanted the catalog to be convincing. I wanted the production values to be really high on the catalog and everything so it could be convincing but, like, when I started I did the catalog in the fall of ’97, came out in winter of ’98, I’d been doing the photographs four years before, actually like five, over five years before, but the first couple years I wasn’t sure what I was doing. I was doing paintings of falling houses. I was photographing the houses against the backdrop. I wasn’t quite sure what I was getting at and then at a certain point, it kind of clicked and I was looking for this kind of tabloid look, like something you’d see on the cover of the World Weekly News or maybe something even more reputable. I wanted it to look like it was raw from a news photo or like a snapshot, so that was another thing I had to. It was always hand held. It had to look very kind of haphazard and by chance.

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Years before the catalog was even a concept, you’re taking these photos... so how did the catalog come together in terms of set up of the photos?

My original idea was maybe a dozen pages, absolutely no text, just images and no indication of what was going on, what these were from. I wanted it to be just totally, you know, totally unexplained but then I had a show coming up in New York and I kind of thought, well, I should do this book, but then I thought I should make it a catalog and it was just a series of casual decisions. I thought it should be a catalog but I hate most artists catalogs because they’re just so boring and nobody actually reads them and a lot of them get thrown away.

So I then that, coupled with the fact that I never liked being asked how did you do that, how did you do these, it started to just come together, this weird idea of doing a catalog. It would be like an authentic artist catalog and it would tell how I did these flying houses but it wouldn’t tell, it would tell one way of how one might do them and so, I just kind of, I kind of went day by day and I was never, I was excited about it but I was scared for instance. I had one writer who was starting to help me with the essay in the beginning ‘cause I needed somebody with more of an art critical, you know, theoretical background to help write that, to make the language more rigorous and she kind of got spooked by the project. She liked my photos a lot and she had wanted to work with me but then she felt I was kind of trivializing the photos and that was something I was worried about from the beginning. I didn’t want to do that but that was kind of a wake up call, although I knew that was a danger but I just kept going with it. I knew it had to be very convincing, very well done so it wouldn’t trivialize the work, so it would take it to another level and so I needed to have, like, in that first essay, to have the footnotes. I wanted it to look like a real essay and then we made up this guy.  I worked with Joe Wolin. We made up this writer, just got this name out of the phone book, and I wanted it to be kind of like a German name, so then we made up this little bio at the end of the essay. He lives in, I think, it was Berlin and New York. I wanted him to sound very international and then I called a curator friend of mine in Italy and asked her if she’d let me use her name as the interviewer. I wrote the interview, had some friends go over it with me, and she liked the idea, so she let me use her name.

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And you approached her saying, “Oh I took these photos of these model houses and I’m setting up this catalog that, in turn, details very descriptively the process of actually using helicopters and lifting real houses for the photographs"?


Yeah, I told her about the whole project. She had shown some of the photos in Italy and so I told her about the thing. I faxed her the interview and she liked the idea and she said, “Go ahead.” Then I started doing the documentary photos and, at the end, we were laying out the catalog and I felt it needed some more of the documentary stuff, so I got a friend at a design firm, he let me use his office and, you know. I went over there with a couple of friends and a couple of actors and we did those little, these little black and white incidental documentary photos of us in an office, kind of looking over papers, you know. I've got the Black, White, Asian, Hispanic. I wanted this kind of, very kind of PC-looking, kind of like American advertising, so I was just playing around with all these things that I consider, you know, that I think about, just threw them all in the mix.


And then, what was the reaction, the response to the catalog and the project?


Well, it was really mixed and that was one thing I was really happy of how it came out and I wasn’t surprised by any of the reactions, which I felt really good about. I really tried when I was working on it, to project myself, you know, a few months ahead and think, “Well, how would somebody think about this, picking up this catalog? How would they feel,” and I tried to build that into and I tried to, you know, kind of read and think, you know, how would this be taken. I didn’t want it to be. It was never meant to be a one liner. I wanted it to have many levels. So there were all sorts of reactions and, you know, some people just appreciated it, loved it for a project of an artists dropping houses from the sky and people would say, “You know, I loved that project. It’s amazing,” and I would just, like, in passing, meet somebody and there wasn't really time or opportunity to tell them, “Well, it’s all fake,” and that was fine with me if they liked that. It was fine. There were people I would speak with and if there was time to speak with them, I’d say, “Well, it’s actually all fiction,” and some people thought that was even better. Some people were offended by it. Some people draw different reactions. I remember there was one curator in a museum who, I guess, took at face value and he just, I could tell, he had an intense dislike of me and, you know, I wasn’t gonna. I could see why he would and then it was a lot about that. I kind of present myself as this white guy overseeing this crew and we’re dropping houses and there’s something very sick and irresponsible about it and its very flippant in a way but that was part of what I was playing on people’s preconceptions of who I am because I’m, you know, White male, heterosexual artist. There’s a lot of, you know, it doesn’t matter who you are or what race you are, people have different ideas of who you are and I didn’t want to kind of make a bitter comment about it but I just wanted to throw a curve ball, like, I’m presenting Peter Garfield as this kind of second generation earth works artist or something like that and it’s all, it’s all fiction.

And I read somewhere that you said you have no intention of deliberately misleading the viewer and I just want to know how that reconciled with the high production of the catalog and the actors.

Well, I’d rephrase that. I’m not sure how exactly you said that but it was definitely deliberate. It was deliberately misleading. I mean, I intended that, definitely. It wasn’t meant as what I had to do that was really think about, “Well, this is mean-spirited or is this, do I have a reason for doing this?” That’s what I had to establish for myself and that I felt good about, so all the reactions I got, I felt I could take responsibility for them, like, if people hated me for it. It all made sense to me.

I mean, it’s totally misleading. Nowhere in the catalog do I divulge that it isn’t, you know, all real because I felt that would really kind of ruin it in a way, the whole concept I wanted it to be very kind of hermetic thing, which existed on its own. I send it out there and I no longer control how the public reacts to it and it’s also kind of a comment on that, about the artist making art and once it’s out, you know there’s nothing you can do about it. The artist doesn’t even control the message because so much of the message is subliminal, unconscious, and artists can argue forever that that’s not what it’s about. Well, it’s untrue but sometimes it is true, you know, an artist puts things in their art that they don’t intend and so, this was a lot about that in a way.

I guess going with that, like, one weapon in the artist arsenal is to, you know, continue doing what they’re doing and in the case of Harsh Realty, which sort of gives a second life to the whole project and yet reveals it for what it truly is. I mean, what was the emphases behind that and the decision-making involved, like, to kind of unmask the mobile home project.

How do you mean? Rephrase that. I’m not sure what your asking.

I guess, what I’m curious about is, what kind of prompted the Harsh Realty project?  What made you put together this book that effectively said, “You know what? That whole houses falling series? They were really models.” What brought you to that point?

Well, I think one thing is I truly believe a lot of people--and I think our current and recent political situation and world situation supports--don’t really want to know the truth. In fact, they really don’t want to know the truth, which I find amazing and it really makes me angry but you know, on the other hand, I’m sure there are a lot of ways I don’t want to know the truth and I think in certain ways there’s something healthy about kind of a little denial sometimes and you can look closely at the catalog and probably figure out that it’s fake but what I do is I give enough indications in images, text, you know, with having footnotes, all these little things added together are convincing, but if you look at any one element, it’s not really. It’s kind of not plausible.

So you think that's the general public sort of, for lack of a better word, complacent with what they’re given?

There’s that, but I don’t want to sound completely elitist. I’m sure I am in a way but as I said, I’m guilty of the same thing and what I was saying earlier about our living in reality and fiction and so much, you know, like Carl Jung’s studies about mythology and how we’re often, we’re kind of living out mythical fantasies of our own and different figures in public life are living out our kind of mythical fantasies in a way too that have been passed down, you know, throughout human history. Whether it’s Bradgelina or, you know, like the Dallas Cowboys are like these gladiators. I don’t know. I just think we want to be entertained and we want to believe things. There’s a certain need for some kind of magic and I kinda liked the fantasy and in a way, I am creating in that catalog this fantasy of myself, like making myself into this other person and that is kind of a human, a natural human longing to be something else, to rise to another level, so it was kind of about that, that longing.

Also, I’m not sure I’m even answering the same question at all. I just was influenced a lot by travels like to China, to Cuba, and generally, I’d always been interested in that whole period of the early 20th century, of all the different streams of idealism and how they manifested themselves into different forms politically, artistically and so when I was traveling in China and Cuba, but in particular, just being very aware of the propaganda and kind of the socialization and how much of that we are bombarded with, here, in our culture. It’s very different. It takes on different forms and not necessarily as in cities, but I don’t know, it’s pretty sinister some of it. So, I don’t know, I’m kind of rambling.

So, you lived in Europe for a while, right?

Yeah.

And that was in Germany?

I lived in France for several years, went to art school there, studied French. Yeah, that was an invaluable experience, definitely. It kind of just, getting out of, getting perspective even though it’s still, it’s industrialized. It’s Western culture.

So, I guess invaluable to you, personally. I mean, what kind of importance would you put it on for an artist? I guess, so, just in general, to live abroad?

I think to just to be confronted with things that are foreign but, I mean, not just a foreign culture but, I mean, when I first went out to France, I lived in rural and southern France and I lived about 100 feet from a Roman arena there. It was like a miniature Coliseum and I would often look out the window and just for me, for someone growing up in Connecticut, a house that was 200 years old was a major relic. So then, I’m living a 100 feet from this structure that was built in 40 BC, so basically 2000 years old or more and just things like that, just getting thrown into a new perspective, I don’t know how else to explain it.  I was kind of shocked when I went to China. I had been in New York for quite a while and hadn’t been, hadn’t really traveled for like eight years and I wanted something that would just kind of shock my system. So I felt that’s what I needed. I went there. I didn’t speak any Chinese. I was alone and it totally shocked my system and it was amazing. I didn’t know what to expect, like, I just figured... One thing I found traveling alone, that when you’re with another person, people don’t really approach you because you’re a group. When you’re alone, you’re vulnerable, which a lot of people find to be a fearful experience and it can be but it’s also a very exhilarating experience and that’s what leads to interesting things, you know. It’s hard to do that now given the global environment as an American.

Right, as an American.

It’s really unfortunate but maybe it was kind of inevitable, I don’t know.

You know, it is interesting, kind of the inevitability of it all and, I don’t know, I saw Apocalypto earlier today and it opened, I mean, it was…

Yeah, what is it? Somebody told me about it, what is it?

It’s the latest Mel Gibson joint.

Oh yeah, the thing about the Mayans.

Exactly. But it opens up with this quote that’s, um, I’ll have to paraphrase it – “A civilization must be destroyed from within before it can be conquered from without,” or something like that and I just kind of thought that was interesting and I didn’t know exactly where Mel Gibson was trying to go with that, in terms of the Mayan civilization, trying to say maybe that they were already on their way out before the conquistadors came and started slaughtering people? How does that kind of fit into, you know, your view of the country today? I’m trying to think as Mel Gibson also, you know, and just feeling like, “Oh, as long as we stay true to our ethics and our, you know, we have this Christian morality then we won’t be able to be conquered from without,” or are we already dying from within? What are your thoughts on that?

I don’t know, we seem like a civilization in decline to put it very briefly because I don’t think it has to be that way but it’s, and that kind of is what I was saying earlier about free will, almost like as a civilization or the American culture, it’s like self-destructive. It’s like we have enough to know how to not let this happen, but why does it just happen anyways, you know, we have the President we voted for. Not all of us individually but we as a culture. This is, we asked for it and even if he didn’t win in 2000, he got close enough so that I still find it hard to believe that he can even have 30 percent approval. I don’t know who that 30 percent are. I just don’t get it. So I mean, I’m just I’m totally out of touch, so what do I know.

I guess, in kind of running with this thing, I kind of just want to touch, one big last thing is this kind of like, this theme in your work, specifically Objects with Potential.

Yeah, I was actually going to interrupt you to talk about that and... what is your question?

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Well, Objects with Potential does this similar thing like what you did with the Mobile Home project and the Harsh Realty, but this one seems to kind of happen simultaneously, this idea of, again, the real or the artificial, you know, the documentation verses this kind of staged set up or this photojournalism yet, you know, hoaxed, I guess, and it feels like it’s happening in the larger scheme like pop culture and such. How did they kind of come together as like a simultaneous event within these Objects with Potential.

What, the actual scenes?

Well, kind of like the idea of the real verses the artificial and how Objects with Potential, like the photography kind of, it feels simultaneously like both real and artificial and if that was like, I guess, the impetus behind it?

Yeah, pretty much, yeah. It’s kind of, in a way, it’s kind of the reverse of the mobile homes. I’m taking actual real buildings and kind of making them look fake and that was, I mean, I actually did retouch the images so that, like, they were airbrushed in a way, I would take out imperfections so that they would start to look like they were little models and even in that catalog, which I think I sent you, right?

Yes.

There’s the documentary stuff with people building the models and stuff like that. It’s not very convincing and I didn’t mean it to be in this case. It was meant to be kind of more metaphorical, like this is all, like a big game and I’m not trying to convince anybody but in those, they’re called Objects with Potential because I was thinking of, in going back to my consideration of the world and politics and all this stuff, of this future place or even not so far future. I don’t know but it’s a kind of distopia/utopia ideal, like where everything is just reduced to its necessities, like the architecture has got like no ornamentation, just really simple. The landscape is just totally flat. There’s almost nothing living. The only kind of living, the only sign of life, is this kind of this human flesh but they’ve got lab coats on and just very little identity left and so, this is kind of, so the title came from just the idea that everything being reduced to being an object with potential and I didn’t think of it as a Marxist critic but several people, after they saw it and read the title and stuff, said, “Wow, Peter. You’re a Marxist,” and I was, like, shocked.

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I’m just kind of like mostly fascinated, you know, with your work as a whole, it seems almost as if as soon as the viewers is settled, especially with Deep Space 1, then everything real is revealed to be artificial, kind of places this giddy skepticism in the viewer that I think, with Objects with Potential is a little bit different because, you know, in that the skepticism isn’t exactly giddy.

No, you know, it’s funny you say that because after I did the flying houses, I said, “Man, I gotta do something more uplifting. You know, it’s just too dark.” So you know, I kind of forgot about that and I was working away and I was almost finished working on Objects with Potential, and I suddenly kind of remembered that and I looked at what I was doing and I was like, “Oh man, I've done it again,” but it’s even darker, just so depressing, and the titles, they have a number on them and I put that in there to make it even more kind of nightmarish and arbitrary. The numbers are totally arbitrary. You see these numbers, seven objects with potential, so you look at the photograph. You’re looking for seven of one particular thing and it doesn’t match up, so there’s just this totally disassociation because I wanted the viewer to kind of feel, not just kind of see, have a illustration of what I was trying to depict in the photographs, but to kind of feel it like this disassociation, this detachment, and like some nightmare they can’t quite remember, you know, which was very much part of the project, not a very good marketing ploy, it's very hard to sell these images, you know. It’s kind of, I think, they’re hard to live with. They’re kind of beautiful in a cold stark way.

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Anything you wanna add or maybe wished I asked you?

Wow, I don’t think so. I don’t know.  Anything that you wanted to know that I have quite touched on?

Well, there is one little thing that I’m curious about ‘cause earlier this evening, you described yourself as "a white heterosexual artist."

Yeah, not that needs to matter.

Well, I’m looking at the Objects with Potential book. There are a couple of photographs…

Oh my god, I totally forgot about that. [laughs]

…Of the artist as a tall black man.

In the set for Deep Space 1 [title image of interview]. That’s so funny. That’s my friend James. He’s a writer and I met him up at this art residency years ago and, uh... oh my god, that is so funny that it hasn’t really ever come up. People don’t really ever notice that and that was just another one of my little things I just, I don’t know, we just did it for fun. I had thoughts of doing that with this catalog and I wasn’t sure about it and I asked James what he thought of it and he laughed and he was into it. So just another curve ball.

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Yeah and just another difference between the real and the artificial again.

Yeah.

Downloads

Deep Space 1 short cut

Website

www.petergarfield.net


Photo opposite:
Peter Garfield,
thrird from left.

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