| If you could hire anyone throughout art history as your studio assistant who would it be? Scott Reeder: Joseph Albers—it seems like he would be really organized and have really clean brushes, plus he seems to be pretty good with color. Warhol would also be a nice assistant because he would be good at attracting other interesting assistants and he would always come up with the easiest way to do something. Tyson Reeder: Don Van Vliet, a.k.a. Captain Beefheart. A painter who could help me with my titles and play sax.
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Tyson and Scott Reeder are brothers and artists. They frequently work collaboratively, and together wrote the questionnaire below for them each to subsequently answer. Their work will be on view at Daniel Reich Gallery in February.
If you could hire anyone throughout art history as your studio assistant who would it be?
Scott Reeder: Joseph Albers—it seems like he would be really organized and have really clean brushes, plus he seems to be pretty good with color. Warhol would also be a nice assistant because he would be good at attracting other interesting assistants and he would always come up with the easiest way to do something.
Tyson Reeder: Don Van Vliet, a.k.a. Captain Beefheart. A painter who could help me with my titles and play sax.
What animal do you think would most understand your work?
S: Probably a turtle—I think they would have to have a sense of humor after living that long, but they also wouldn’t need to look at anything too flashy.
T: A toucan.
How do you get your ideas?
S: I have a system of notebooks where I write down things that pop into my head. It’s all numbered and color-coded (I use a four-color pen). Green is for art ideas. Red is for video and film ideas. Blue is for music and sound ideas. And black is what I use to write down boring information like grocery lists.
T: I have hundreds of small drawings on index cards that have become my own dictionary of colors, marks, accidental stains, and spills that I draw from in order to make distortions of Midwestern rural and urban space, small town freaks, and regional history.
How does collaboration enter into your work?
S: Tyson and I have been collaborating on projects since we were kids. We have a secret band and we’ve made around 20 albums that we still haven’t performed in public. Partially because we’re more of a studio band—kind of like Steely Dan. Recently our biggest collaboration has been General Store, our gallery in Milwaukee. My wife Elysia is also involved with the gallery, too. I guess the reason I like collaborating goes back to the two heads are better than one thing—you can move through ideas much faster with more than one brain working on them. But if there’s too many people involved, things actually get slower and more watered down. Three always seems like a good number—it also works well if you need to take a vote.
T: It’s always been there, since the early teen years, making our own world out of cassette tapes, drawings, and VHS videos in the absence of other culture. Now we share a studio/rec room with a "collab wall" in Milwaukee, and ideas can overlap in unexpected ways. Right now we are finishing sequencing our first album of Comedy Trance music.
How do your curatorial projects relate to your individual practice?
S: I think Tyson and I both have more ideas than we have time to execute, or maybe we just have some ideas that aren’t especially suited for our own studio practices. The curatorial projects allow us to ask questions that go beyond our own work. It’s a way of expanding the conversation.
T: There is something a little outsider or intuitive about how I paint that also comes through in curating. I like it when something random, like a thumbprint, can become a transcendent moment on a canvas.
What is your favorite kind of brush or painting tool?
S: I like flats—it seems like most of the paintings I’m interested in are more “wall” than “window.”
T: I like cheap things like sponge brushes, bingo blotters, and blow-pens.
If you could turn one of your paintings into a video game which one would it be?
S: Hamburger Heaven would make a nice video game. It’s a painting with a lot of brown in it. It’s just a field of hamburgers floating in a brown void. I guess it’s supposed to be about where hamburgers go once they’ve been eaten, or it could be a place like Valhalla, where a hamburger lover would eventually go after death. It would be good because I don’t see many brown video games.
T: I have a painting called Purple Landfill that could be a somber kind of video game. It features silhouettes of all types of trash against a purple sunset, including broken 45 records, TV sets, and sardine cans. The player would be a stray dog looking for other stray animals in order to form a pack.
Had any interesting dreams lately?
S: I had a dream that Maurizio Cattelan was going to pay me $50,000 to get a tattoo of an elephant on my arm, but he kept saying it had to be an “English Elephant” and I didn’t know what that meant so I thought it might be some kind of a trick.
T: I had a nightmare that Scott had a sock drawer in the glove compartment of my car, with never-ending lime green socks spilling out.]
What are your top five recent things you’ve done as an artist?
S:
1. Made a painting called American Dick for my last show at Daniel Reich. It looks just like it sounds and it made a great holiday card.
2. Another recent painting I was happy with was Panda Protest. It’s a study in black and white. It was inspired by a dream I had about a panda making a Franz Kline painting.
3. I also like the “Paper at Night” series I’ve been working on because it lets me play around more with abstraction.
4. The Drunk vs. Stoned series at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise.
5. The Piano Boys cheese performance at Rob Pruitt’s flea market at Frieze.
The Piano Boys are Ian Hokin, Tyson, and myself, and we first performed at Jack Hanley in Los Angeles. The Flea Market was already a great antidote to the stuffiness and predictability of an art fair. Something about a smoking stinky cheese with a heavy metal guitar player popping out of it felt very avant-garde to me—it had to be the least polished and possibly worst things to ever happen at Frieze, and that’s something I can feel really good about.
T:
1. Green Menomonee Chief painting and clay saxophone from my last New York solo show.
2. Arranged for Laura Owens’ younger brother to dress as a gorilla and drop from
a ceiling vent at a solo show opening reception.
3. Performed inside giant piece of swiss cheese at Frieze Art Fair.
4. East coast comedy tour with Frankie Martin and rapper Juiceboxxx.
5. Drunk vs. Stoned 1 and 2.
If you had to come up with a name for it what would you call the art movement that is going on right now?
S: “Image Searchism” or maybe “more broken mirrors.”
T: “punk for sale” or “post-good.”
If you wrote a manifesto what would it be titled?
S: Not sure what it would be titled, but the text would be all dingbats.
T: “Let’s Make Something New”
Who should be in the last group show on earth?
T: Charles Schultz, Hermann Nitsch, Bridget Riley
S: Everybody, including high school students. It could take place in Pompei.
