Patrick Killoran
Next time you find a wallet in a crowded part of town, don’t just take the cash and run – you might be part of a work of art. I caught up with the artist responsible for such scenarios, Patrick Killoran, at LACMA. Killoran’s work mostly happens in public spaces outside museum and gallery walls. He’ll lose 200 fake wallets in the city center, or an important-looking set of keys in a gallery. In one piece, he covered taxicabs in giant stickers bearing the image of the drivers’ naked bodies. Oftentimes, there’s no way to document his art, and there has been no marketing or sale of art objects. But that’s really the whole point, isn’t it?
–Gabrielle Paluch
L.A. CityBeat: What inspired you to do the project with the wallets?
Patrick Killoran: If you look at a lot of my projects, they pretty much all happen in a space that isn’t an exhibition and they’re not necessarily labeled as an artwork, so when you’re experiencing them nobody’s telling you what you’re looking at. So when you see a car that’s covered in an enormous sticker of someone’s body, it’s a strange event where you end up talking to the driver about his nipples but there’s no frame around it to tell you you’re having an art experience
How do you feel about people who respond critically and say what you do is not art?
Well, I guess that’s the history of the 20th century. I’m interested in extending the field in which art can exist, and for me my work for the past 10 or 12 years has been about building a practice that has an aspect of anonymity. Maybe someone has a meaningful event, an event where someone has to make a moral decision, or an event where someone feels they have transgressed something, but perhaps that’s not contingent on having been told that that’s an artwork – by me or anyone else.
Are you heavily influenced by relational aesthetics?
When I talk about my influences, I cite David Hammons. His most famous work is hanging out in SoHo just as it’s transitioning and putting out a blanket with the rest of the street merchants and he makes snowballs and sells them, and it’s very aware of the pointless marketing of an object, the idea of the elevation of the neighborhood through a consumerist renovation. It works in a way that maybe you have to come to it instead of it coming to you. I think I fit well into that group of artists dealing with the questions addressed by relational aesthetics: Nicholas Bourriaud was interested in questioning a service economy as I am. But Bourriaud was also emphasizing the fact that these works were occurring in an exhibition space, which none of my works do except for Observation Deck. It became very clear to me that I wasn’t interested in being in the gallery.
Since your work is generally not in galleries but in public spaces, how has the public space in L.A. affected your work?
In L.A. there isn’t a huge number of places where people overlap and converge, like a space where people can go to protest or give a speech. Coming from New York where I know places where tons of people hang out and give political speeches, or crazy people with ideologies – that’s interesting to me and difficult to find here. But in some ways for my work it’s OK because I’m so interested in how consumerism has formed public space, and in the United States it’s taken on a very specific structure, such that L.A. to me is like America on steroids. And New York is some weird anomaly because it’s so incredibly congested and most American cities expand out but New York can only expand up, giving it a particular type of limitation that you don’t see other places. Or that you don’t have to own a car and there’s all this overlap on public transportation, even if it’s superficial, you just can’t avoid the neighborhood because at one point they all get on the subway with you. But at the same time New York is going through some sort of weird transition right now where everybody who isn’t a millionaire is getting pushed out into the boroughs. I think New York just has a different set of properties. L.A. has a type of economic autonomy, too, at least in the art world. Both cities, L.A. and New York, have this gravitational pull in the art world where if you live somewhere else, you’re always living in relationship to that city.
Which specific public spaces in L.A. are interesting to you then?
I went with a friend to a farmers market, which was a really funny place to me. It was just after I’d moved here, and my friend told me, “OK, we’re going to the farmers market, and we’re probably going to run into a couple people. But don’t think that this is how L.A. works. You don’t normally have this situation.” For this city, the public spaces are all defined by common interests, such that she was actually hard-pressed to find a place where she could just sit and people would pass by. I think that’s the dynamic I find interesting here: There’s a weird bypass in L.A., because the things that draw people together are interests, and beyond that there is no overlap. Or, like, the lines in L.A. Nobody seems to be able to tell me where the line is that divides east and west. It’s like a sliding scale depending on whom you ask, they’re all trying to figure out a way to centralize their own zones.
For your new project you are now a Schattenhändler [shadow-merchant]. Would you like to purchase my shadow?
Well, there’s a whole contract and ceremony, so I can’t buy it right this very moment. But we can start negotiating the price. It’s a very specific contract that states that I own your shadow throughout the universe forever and then I take a photo of it. You sign the contract and I pay you, and then that’s it.
Would you like to take a look at it?
As long as you own the shadow that’s all that matters. Now it’s about five o’clock, it’s a pretty big shadow, but that doesn’t matter. It depends on what people want me to pay. Here’s this thing, your shadow, something people assume they have without question, and is attached to their bodies, and can I basically commodify that, and how absurd of a gesture that becomes.
How much would you offer me for my shadow?
How much would you want? [Lots of negotiation follows.] I’ve noticed lots of people back out once they realize they’re going to have to sign a contract, and then everybody at one point tries not to take the money. But I have to insist.
Learn more about Killoran’s work at www.patrickkilloran.com.
Published: 10/22/2008
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