This Book About Myths

David Butler

MFA SculptureWritten Thesis, 2014Concordia UniversityAdvisor: Eric Simon

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“…[I]n the eighties, there was a big change in the state of technology: it was discovered that an alternate space could exist

in the electronic media. Strangely, however, the landscapes of future cities that appeared in cyberspace were again all ruins.

Ruins have appeared as the virtual world.”

Arata Isozaki, On Ruins. 1997 N.p.

This Book About Myths: An Interview With the Artist

This interview was conducted on Friday, March 7, 2014. Ques-tions were entered into a text-to-speech program and spoken using the “Good News” voice. Answers were entered manually.

Good News Thank-you for taking some time to answer my questions about your thesis project.

Artist My pleasure.

GN Briefly, how would you describe This Book About Myths?

A This Book About Myths is an architectural model in ruins, a diagram for a museum of my own work.

GN Can you tell me a bit about how the idea developed?

A I started out making small objects inspired by ideas I had around material culture and the internet. I called them artifacts because they felt like objects that had been collected from an archaeological dig, albeit a vir-tual one. As the collection grew I began thinking about strategies of display, both online and in the real world. Archaeological finds usually end up in Natural History museums, so that seemed like a good path to follow. I started volunteering at the Redpath Museum and that experience really influenced the direction of the work. I was especially drawn to the cabinets that had storage shelves in the bottom and the idea that more objects were hidden away and that the displays could be switched up, so I decided to incorporate that idea into the work. Since the objects I was making referred to the Internet I also looked there, especially at Tumblr blogs or sites like Pinterest, which are another form of

collection and display, but with more similar to a Cabi-net-of-Curiousities than a museum.

GN Your display has aspects of that, but it doesn’t look anything like a traditional museum, can you tell me why you chose this kind of structure?

A Well, I needed a structure to house the things I was making, but then the structure became the thing. I guess you could say it chose me. I blame it on the grid.

In the beginning I wanted a simple table to display some work, with a lower shelf for additional storage, and a glazed tile surface so the light would reflect in a hori-zontal grid pattern beneath the objects. I was interested in using the grid as a surface because it is the framework for understanding space within 3d modeling programs. At this time I was looking at images by the sixties/seven-ties Italian architecture firm Superstudio who imagined the entire planet covered in a grid of glass cubes as an extension of Modernist urban planning. Superstudio saw the grid as a dehumanizing, totalitarian frame-work, but at the same time I was looking at the work of French artist Jean-Pierre Raynaud in the late seventies and eighties who was applying an all-over white tile grid to spaces and juxtaposing natural and historic artifacts against it and for him it was this really positive, utopi-an, visionary space. My project started out closer to the Raynaud work but gradually moved into Supertudio territory.

The grid has an interesting effect on people; it seems to bring out a latent urge to organize, like a mild case of OCD. Once I started with a grid, everything else had to follow the same proportions, so the table itself became a grid, and the storage spaces. The modularity of the grid

makes it easy to expand horizontally and vertically and it eliminates decision-making, all you have to decide is when to stop, so mine kept growing until it hit the walls. Rosalind Krauss said:

“Logically speaking, the grid extends, in all directions, to infini-ty. Any boundaries imposed upon it by a given painting or sculp-ture can only be seen-according to this logic- as arbitrary. By virtue of the grid, the given work of art is presented as a mere fragment, a tiny piece arbitrarily cropped from an infinitely larger fabric.” 1

Now my studio is not very big, so as this grid grew and started taking over the space, an interesting thing happened. I stopped thinking of it as a logical, idealized, flexible system of organization and instead it became a fragmented, lumbering, irrational organic beast.

GN You must be happy to have it out of there then?

A Yes, very.

GN You mentioned that your time spent volunteering at the Redpath Museum was influential. Can you elaborate on this?

A Sure. That was a great experience. My first day there I was asked to move one of the displays and I got to wear a lab coat and handle some specimens of coral that are now extinct. To reach behind the vitrines and handle the objects was a fascinating experience, things didn’t always feel the way I expected them to. Some of the shells were extremely heavy, and some of the coral specimens that looked fragile were actually flexible, like they were made of rubber.

1 Krauss, Rosalind. Grids. October, Vol. 9 (Summer 1979) MIT Press. pg. 60

Most of my time at the museum I spent chatting with the people who worked there, learning about the history of the place and the collections. One day in particular

I joined a fascinating conversation about the various dinosaur bones and fossils. Next to us was a giant Tric-eratops skull that looks like it weighs about two tons but it’s actually a fiberglass cast and very lightweight, the real skull was in pieces in storage. Nearby were some resin casts of Tyrannosaurus Rex jawbones. Tyrannosaurs are such a familiar image when thinking of dinosaur bones but I was surprised to learn that only about 15 skeletons have actually been found, the majority of what we see in museums are casts. Another display cabinet housed a smaller dinosaur skeleton, but this one had been cob-bled together from three different related species be-cause no one complete skeleton has actually been found. A lot of the stone tools are plaster casts mixed with authentic ones and the collection of hominid skulls has a label crediting the company that reproduces them.

Next to the triceratops skull is a very non-descript

chunk of a fossilized leg-bone that is kept in a box and it is brought out for people to hold and get a sense of the texture and weight of a genuine fossil. The surface is shiny from all the years of being handled. As I was hold-ing it, it was mentioned that the most common question asked of staff at the museum is, “Is it real?” The person that told me this paused for a moment and then added, “ I guess that’s the pressing question of our time, really.”

I got two things out of this exchange. For one, the question of “Is it real?” really hit home, in relation to the objects I was making using shared files of 3d models, scans, and printing, or simulated environments such as Google Street View and video games. My work isn’t di-rected at technology per se, I’m more interested in how

experience is altered after the encounter with technolo-gy. It was interesting that in a museum like the Redpath many people today don’t question the history or context of the space, but they do question the authenticity of the material. I guess we are so familiar with objects that are knock-offs and mass-produced that we have developed skepticism about anything claiming to be genuine.

The second thing I got from my experience at the Red-path was that many of the objects were produced using techniques from sculpture and that therefor as an artist I could make my own museum and the artifacts I made would be no less authentic. The displays in my museum combine found objects, altered objects, 3d prints, im-ages, casts, and hand-crafted objects, although it’s not always clear which is which, and the question of “Is it real?” still ties them all together.

GN Are there other artists you were looking at as you were building your D-I-Y museum?

A My first attempts at a museum aesthetic seemed just that, an aesthetic gimmick that didn’t really inform the work. It was the practice of Elizabeth King that got me thinking differently about the museum display as a context for examining technology. The digital artifact is ephemeral; it requires some sort of display just to ex-ist. In a museum this results in a display of displays. In King’s work hand-crafted objects and objects on screens are in dialogue with each other and the question of which is more real, or which came first, is complicated.

You can also see influences from Matthew Monahan and David Almejd in some of the material choices and the provisional construction of the structure. Looking at their work really pushed the scale of the piece. As well, in the summer of 2012 I participated in a Banff residen-cy led by Geoffrey Farmer. I have always admired his

approach to history and the relationship between sculp-ture and images in his work. Conversations with him led me to thinking more about the material trace of digital culture beyond just the images themselves.

GN I guess we should wrap this up. Would you like to say a

few words about the title?

A Well the title is adapted from a line in the introduction of The Raw and the Cooked by Claude Levi-Strauss. The original line is, “…this book on myths is itself a kind of myth.” I read a couple things by Levi-Strauss as I was researching the history of museums and anthropology and while some of what he says is dated now, I was actu-ally more drawn to the style of his writing. He is dealing with important anthropological and theoretical research but his books are also full of these poetic, personal ob-servations. In Triste Tropiques, sandwiched between his personal memoire and several chapters describing the dwelling and kinship structures of certain Amazonian tribes, there is a whole ten-page chapter just describing a sunset. Thinking of this, whenever I felt my own pro-cess becoming too dry and academic I would try to step back and get a more visceral sense of what I was doing. When Levi-Strauss describes his own book as a myth he is referring to the open-ended structure and sometimes inconclusiveness of his research and that also resonates with my work.

GN Thanks Artist for answering these few questions. I look

forward to seeing the work.

A It’s always a pleasure chatting with you, Good News.

Paolo UccelloVase perspective study circa 1450