Chen Tamir: What’s it like to live in a cardboard box?

CT: Has the economic crisis affected your work directly?

WS: No. It was the economic boom, especially the raising of rent, that affected me and drove me out of New York. But those are punches I can roll with.*

[*Shelley has been priced out of both his studio and his apartment, and now lives in Connecticut]

CT: You collaborate with a lot of people, and you teach. It seems a part of your process. Is it?

WS: I collaborate partly because it’s more fun, and partly because it has more potential. At the same time I was doing visual arts in school I was doing theatre, and realized it was more fun to work with people. Theatre has served as a model for me since the ’80s. I’ve been doing collaborative pieces as a way of accomplishing something bigger than I could do on my own. I’ve worked with Jesse Berkowitz and Matt Bua, and lately more with Douglas Paulson. Doug has worked in the Relational Aesthetics vein from a very early age, even in undergraduate school, and was a full-blown pioneer in many respects. He’s worked in Denmark with another collective, Parfyme, and he’s working with Flux Factory here in New York. I’m now working in an architectural direction with Alex Schweder on a project that came out of “Flatland” at the Sculpture Center called “Stability.”

CT: Do you feel like a mentor to them?

WS: No. I had already done some of these drawings beforehand. I took them into the Drawing Center, and a couple of months later Mark had a show there. He probably had a jump up on me, but I had been working on them for years. It makes perfect sense because that’s how things happen. Ideas are in the air. That might be a fiction too, but it’s one that makes more sense to me. Mark had real success with them, and that influenced me to stop doing them because I would always be compared to him. The superficial similarity is there. I came back to them after doing the Williamsburg timeline drawing in 2000 that celebrated the new Brooklyn art scene, and everyone was so supportive that we did a print run. I realized I had something that allowed me to use a part of my personality — to tell stories and lecture — that I couldn’t do with normal visual arts, which aren’t normally a good method for telling stuff you already know. Art is a good way for finding out the things you don’t know yet, i.e. searching and discovering. When a work tells you things it knows, it sounds pedantic and tedious and appeals only to the people who are going “right on, that’s speaking for us.” So when I decided to do these rhetorical drawings, I knew I was getting into a risky field because it could sound didactic. I spent a lot of time trying to make them entertaining and seductive and open-ended and fun, and not too pedantic or didactic, even though they still tell a history. To augment this body of work, I do the live-in projects that I can do more intuitively.

CT: Do you consider the live-in works “relationally aesthetic”?

WS: I didn’t enter into that movement, which I think is offering a different emphasis on something that was already happening. I come from a different generation. It’s one with a social interest, but I’m interested in the individual artist representing his or her view of the world.

CT: “The Archive” has had six lives already. How does it change over time?

WS: The original Archive, in Bonn, was supposed to be lived in, but the room we were supposed to be in wasn’t available, and we couldn’t inhabit it. Then the label themes grew to be more important than the architecture. Now I’m finally living inside it. Its context has changed: There was one show about artists studios. There was another called “Slightly Unbalanced,” about psychic disorders and the Archive was seen as something made by a hoarder, with Collyers syndrome, though it was originally conceived as simply an externalization of the mind. There is a lot of personality in these labels, and a lot of strategies employed to make them surprising from one to the next and still have continuity.

CT: Can you turn over on your back please. How’s the massage so far?

WS: You’ve got very gifted hands.

CT: Is there anything else you want Flash Art readers to know?

WS: The idea that’s underlying the performance work is that one’s sense of meaningfulness develops out of personal investment and effort. Also about having an option to design your life around absurd ideas. When you work with an absurd idea, it gets drained of its small meanings and you’re left with just the big meanings. You’re left with nothing but its purpose and function, instead of its practical connection.

That said, it’s about a subject-object relation, i.e. how you create the world in your mind. It’s a feedback cycle. It never stops. It demonstrates how the world is both a malleable and permeable construction, where the true outside world is quantitative or qualitative, and the information that comes from you is interpretive. Interpretations come from the outside world as well because you are exposed to other people’s interpretations. It’s very interesting and cognitive. I’ve been thinking about these things since the late ’60s and I haven’t been bored since. I keep picking away at what the next layer will be.

CT: What are you working on next? What are you excited about?