| Victoria Mayer: Tell me a bit about your current artworks and what meanings you extrapolate from your work? Joseph Giannasio: I question my motives, and I seek more of an experience in the work. Crafting is a form of meditation. There’s something in me that’s not at ease—when I work, I am very tactile. I am experiencing the world through touch, texture—to feel the world can settle the unease, everything else is just fidgeting. Things just wound up rolled. VM: How did you get started making art? |
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Joseph Giannasio – Victoria Mayer
Victoria Mayer: Tell me a bit about your current artworks and what meanings you extrapolate from your work?
Joseph Giannasio: I question my motives, and I seek more of an experience in the work. Crafting is a form of meditation. There’s something in me that’s not at ease—when I work, I am very tactile. I am experiencing the world through touch, texture—to feel the world can settle the unease, everything else is just fidgeting. Things just wound up rolled.
VM: How did you get started making art?
JG: I was working on construction jobs. I had some office jobs, but it bored the hell out of me, and I couldn’t hold on. Abandoned buildings are amazing to work in. So, I had these deals with people to use their space and, in return, they would get a new finished floor, or I would build a closet for them.
VM: What fascinates you about rolling things?
JG: It is about tinkering. It is a lot like doodling, only physically. It’s like a nervous habit—I always rolled papers. When I was young in the 70s, and marijuana was big, everyone was rolling joints. So, when I was a kid I was rolling these papers like joints (laughing). Then I stopped doing it for a while, and then I realized, “You know what, I need to roll things.”
VM: What do you understand when saying: Art is about Imitation? Is there a story you want to tell with your artworks?
JG: This is actually from the Latin root—to imitate nature. My work is more about the artifact, what is left over. My work is not so much about a narrative as it is iconoclastic. It deals with the external world, what can be done in it—art is about imitation. At the end of the process, what’s left is an artifact of the experience. The experience can be mythologized, maybe made metaphoric, perhaps decoded, but it becomes a symbol and maybe even a glyph. It conforms to some order. Then, after the artifact, comes the documentation, then the image.
VM: Your creative works almost exclusively consist of woodwork, construction materials and tools. What can you tell us about this choice of medium?
JG: I spend a lot of time at hardware stores. I worked in just about every aspect of general construction at one time or another; there’s something about ripping apart a building and tinkering around inside the structure, eviscerating what is usually someone’s home.
VM: Do you have any major influences or mentors in the art world that inspire you in producing your art?
JG: It was good to see the DADA show at MoMA last summer. Duchamp has always been a major influence. He didn’t say “I am an artist, and I make art,” he was more like “I am an artist, and I live art.” He didn’t draw a line between his life and his art; it was all the same for him. Man Ray’s Indestructible Object is one of my favorite pieces. On the one hand, it’s such an original piece not because of the craftsmanship of the artist, but because the artist somehow makes a connection between a metronome and an eye. Anyone now can buy a metronome and clip a photo of an eye to it, and then it’s a Man Ray.
VM: What’s the idea behind naming one of your artworks Gordian Knot?
JG: When the material is rolled, it has a kind of diametric relationship to a knot. Knots are an organized form of an entanglement, some are meant to be temporary, some permanent. A knot is also a puzzle, simple or complex; like the entanglements we create in our life. Some we intend to be permanent, but often turn out to be temporary, and temporary ones can become too complex to un-knot. A Gordian Knot is a metaphor for an intractable problem; solved by a bold stroke. King Gordius dedicated his ox-cart to Zeus. He tied the yoke to a pole near the temple with an intricate knot. It was prophesied that whoever unties the knot shall rule all of Asia. Alexander cut the knot with his sword. It is a simple yet controversial solution—he did go on to rule Asia.
VM: On your website, I read a statement by Oscar Wilde: "The past is what man should not have been. The present is what man ought not to be. The future is what artists are." What do these words mean to you, and why did you choose phrases to go along with your artworks?
JG: That we have made mistakes. We are making mistakes. Wilde uses artists as a broad term. Artists tend to dwell in the subconscience; we journey there, become tour guides, report back, but, most importantly, it is the realm of dreams and visions—it’s the origin of the future.
I use the quotes to invoke something timeless about the creative mind and the reaction to it. Artists constantly face the same obstacles, but it takes a faith in the process to not let the obstacles destroy you.
VM: What does “freedom” mean to you as an artist?
JG: Freedom is a good word, especially in these days. I think liberty is a better word though. In life, we have all these desires that we cannot achieve, and, in art, is this total freedom.
VM: What do you think about art, young artists and this generation?
JG: When you look at the schools, and they all start to look a bit too much like what is going on in Chelsea, I think you are kind of at the end of something. Because, what is happening is that it is getting too understood. Art is not about “is,” for me at least. It is about what “can be” and “what is going to be.”
VM: Is there a particular direction in which you think you are heading from here on?
JG: I’ve really just begun to investigate the possibilities of this work. It looks like installation, but, really, it is a type of earthwork. I am always looking to find the right situation in which to do work on a larger scale—a venue in which to do work outdoors. I want to do asphalt. I want to do a street. It has a lot of similar elements as paint, such as dripping and peeling.
