RE TYPED
Deborah Stutz and
John Lee: Where
did you grow up, and did you receive any kind of formal artistic
training?
John LeKay: I was
born and privately educated in London. Probably like
most artists, I became very interested in making art as
a child. I learned how to draw and paint in my brother's
art studio, who is also an artist and poet. He was
attending St. Martin's School of Art at the time.
We regularly went to the Tate and National Galleries to
study the old masters. When I left school, I joined a
circus and after that worked on James Bond films at
Pinewood Film Studios.
Deborah Stutz and
John Lee: When and how did you first start showing your work?
John LeKay: I
arrived in New York in 81 and first showed my work here
in 87 at the Bronx Museum. This was a large
assemblage piece made out of broken chairs, chicken wire
fencing, blackboard collage, taxidermied crow and
spectacles.
I then had a two person show at PS 122. Randy
Alexander was the first dealer to offer me a one person
show at the Paula Allen Gallery in 1990. I showed the
sensory deprivation tank, odor absorber, tactile
objects, olfactory object (Old Spice), a
paradichlorobenzene piece, the negation of sound piece "Untitled" 1989. The concept was for a person to
experience the various stimulating objects in the space
and end up naked in the sensory deprivation tank.
This was a kind of metaphor for the womb or tomb.
From thereon, the offers to do shows happened by
themselves.
Deborah Stutz and
John Lee: When did you begin to collaborate with artist and
curator Kenny Schachter?
John LeKay: Kenny Schachter called me up in April 91 and asked me to put
some pieces in his "Decorous Belief's" show.
Deborah Stutz and
John Lee: Do you as an artist prefer certain media or identify
with any styles or productive process?
John LeKay: I
consider myself a multi-media artist. Style is something
that happens after years of trial and error. The
assemblage work I was making earlier on was influenced
by American artists like Kienholz and Rauschenberg, but
by the time I had my first one person show a few years
later, the work had completely taken a new direction and
I had developed my own sensibilities. I don't
think I have a particular preference for a certain type
of medium or material or process; I simply use what
interests me at the time.
Deborah Stutz and
John Lee: Please describe where you work
and what works for you?
John LeKay: I work in a condemned 20,000
sq ft 1st and 2nd floor indoor parking lot, considered "dead
space" by the City. What I prefer is to work in a neutral
environment, without noise and windows blocked out; somewhat
like a large sensory deprivation tank. I work intuitively and
kind of illogically in a mathematical manner and I like to work
on more than one body of work at a time - one on each floor. In
doing so, I am able to detach myself from one work so that when
I go back to it later on, I see it in a fresher perspective. I
collect ideas and let them sit for a while at different stages
of evolution and then I pluck them when they're ripe. I
rarely work on paper because sketching ideas can deplete some of
the energy and selecting the right emotion(s) to accompany the
piece is crucial. The physical work is usually just going
through the stages already completed in my mind. I then throw
the idea out of whack by doing something totally unpredictable
to surprise myself at the last moment. This spontaneous part is
the most exhilarating and satisfying because it's as if someone
else made the work and I am seeing it for the first time.
It's very boring for me if I just mechanically go through the
motions of making a piece that I've already conceived.
Deborah Stutz and
John Lee: How did you get involved and conceive of your work in
your show "The Separation of Church and State" at Cohen
Gallery?
John LeKay: The
Separation pieces evolved very slowly from the
assemblage work that I made in the mid- eighties. The
first pieces were more minimal, reduced and silent; more
self-conscious and finished with usually two elements at
the most. The Separation pieces were very maximal,
formally anti-formal, raw and aggressive. They
contained many more components, as many as 20. In
these pieces I also utilized sound, odor and electricity
(motion). There were 10 pieces altogether which really
work off each other, but I only showed five because of spacial requirements. "Desperado", "One Celestial Last
Waltz in the Tropic of Cancer" and "Percodan Purgatory",
I showed later with Kenny Schachter. The largest piece I
have not shown yet, which consists of 8 separate pieces
titled "Stations of the Double Crossed".
Deborah Stutz and
John Lee: What kind of reactions did you intend to elicit from
your audience by emphasizing the "tangible" and "what's
out there on the street" in your piece "Zipperdeedudazipperdeeday?"
John LeKay: I
have always tried to investigate complex psychological
and philosophical subject matters. Some of the issues
that I have addressed and materials that I have used in
the past may be considered taboo. I have
experimented with mixed emotional humor and other
complex emotions such as anxiety, euphoria and grief, by
superimposing them on top of each other like layers of
translucent paint or incongruously juxtaposing them with
interesting results. Humor in general is subjective, but
I find jokes that are not necessarily funny or that have
more than one level to them fascinating. A good line of
poetry and a good joke is very similar in a way. I am
interested in work that elicits a simultaneous response
of different emotions at once with a delayed reaction
which is often contrary to the initial reaction. Zipperdeedudazipperdeeday was made from an impression I
had seen and heard one day on the Bowery of these two
homeless alcoholics having a good time, singing and
recording their duets on a tape machine in the privacy
of their street home. V.E. Frankl wrote in "Man's Search
for Meaning" about humor as a defense mechanism of temporarily
detaching himself from the sheer horror. My
intentions were not derisive or cynical. It was looking
at life in a detached Buddhist kind of way. The fact
that a man disaffiliated from society can be a homeless
alcoholic and still be content with his surroundings,
says a lot for the state of the world we live in.
Deborah Stutz and
John Lee: Can you please tell me more about your interest in
psychology and philosophy and the role it plays in your
art work.
John LeKay: I became interested in them both as a kid
and spent a lot of time in the libraries reading various
subjects such as neuro-chemistry, brain lateralization
and the interplay between the cerebral hemispheres.
I researched many theories in psychology and pop psych
and I also read a lot of quackery found in junk shops.
Weird things fascinated me like brain washing techniques
and memory alteration. Later on I got into all this
esoteric stuff and experimented with hypnosis,
telepathy, telekinesis and various methods used in
Russia and the Far East. I've experimented with
diverse ways of tapping into the subconscious mind
through meditation, auto-hypnosis and sensory
deprivation.
Deborah Stutz and
John Lee: Please describe your earlier work with the sensory
deprivation tank and cryonics suspension dewar in 1990.
John LeKay: Sensory deprivation Tank - 1990. This object is designed
to isolate the mind and body from all known forms of
external stimulation (tactile, auditory, visual and
olfactory stimulants). Sound, light, touch and pressure
on the body are eliminated by the blackened out
soundproof chamber. The effects of gravity are negated
by the participant floating horizontally in an 800 lb epsom salt water solution. The effects of temperature to
the body are eliminated by adjusting the salt solution
temperature to that of the outside temperature of the
skin (94.5m).
As a result of total deprivation, one is induced into a
deeply relaxed state. Traditional art stimulates the
mind through external visual and auditory stimuli.
Conversely, as an art object, the sensory deprivation
tank functions as an instrument which creates an
internal mental movie of one's memories and hypnogogic
thoughts. Besides myself, the artists that participated
in the tank naked and semi naked at the Paula Allen
Gallery were Rickrit Tiravenja, Cheryl Donigan, Kristen
Mosher, Alex Pearlstein, Jon Tower, Carter Kustera,
Susan Wexler and Kevin Quinn. Afterwards, I bottled the
water and residual particles of the participants and
labeled the ingredients.
The cryonic suspension dewar, which I exhibited in 1991
at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, was kind of like
a camera. A cryonic suspension dewar is used to freeze
something or someone in time. The difference is
that a photographic image deteriorates through time and
so does the paper it's on. The great thing about
cryonic suspension is that in liquid nitrogen,
everything stops; there is no deterioration and no
decay. Time stands still in there. At 196 C,
320 F below zero, all metabolic and biochemical activity
is brought to a halt. At
the opening, the dewar was accompanied by a video
showing the cryogenic procedure. Also present,
were members of a cryonics organization (including
scientists), available to answer questions and sign up
interested individuals. My intention was for an
art collector to buy the dewar, so that when he/she died
they would be frozen in it. The collector would
become a part of the piece, "kept in storage" for a
while, and then be resurrected in the future; kind of
like a time machine.
Deborah Stutz and
John Lee: What were the olfactory objects and how did working with
them lead you to your most recent paradichlorobenzene
sculptures?
John LeKay: The
Olfactory Objects - 1987. These objects were 12 x 12
square perforated stainless steel boxes on stainless
steel pedestals with various objects placed inside
(i.e., a synthetic rose deodorizer, a bucket of cow
manure, a bowl of Lysol disinfectant, a stick of incense
from an Arabian harem and a urinal cake). The object was
designed to stimulate, through the sense of smell, the
association of subliminal or conscious emotion and
memory via the olfactory nerves. In comparison, the
sense of sight, sound and touch reach the limbic system
less directly.
I had left a urinal cake out in my studio next to a
trash can. I had not been down there in a few weeks and
saw that the cake had completely vanished. All
that was left was the metal hook. I experimented
with changing the material into various shapes. I
placed a small piece in a sealed Tupperware container
and discovered that it formed these beautiful crystals.
I found that if I left them in direct sunlight the
process was accelerated. I then explored the idea
of making colored shapes.
Deborah Stutz and
John Lee: How do you produce the sculptures
and what inspired this idea.
John LeKay: I carve the scull
shaped heads out of large pieces of para with a
chisel to make the initial shape. Then I leave
them out and allow the oxygen in the atmosphere to erode
away the chisel marks.
Deborah Stutz and
John Lee: What happens to the encased sculptures over time?
John LeKay: Over
time, the external parts of the piece begin to evaporate
because there is a certain amount of oxygen trapped
inside the vitrine. The trapped vapor emitted from the
head forms crystals which attach themselves back onto
the head, especially to the protruding parts like the
nose, ears, tongues and on the plexi glass. The
peculiar thing is that these heads shed their skin like
snakes but regrow new layers with baccarat-like
crystals. I recently showed a green two-faced head
and it appeared as if it was growing these stalactite
daggers out of its mouth. By shining a spotlight
on the pieces or leaving them in direct sunlight, the
features of the faces are dramatically transformed.
There is an interesting quote written in 1547 about St.
Bethlehem's hospital "Bedlam" for the insane in London,
"I do advertyse every man which is madde or lunatycke or
frantycke or demonyack to be kept in safe garde in some
close house or chamber were there is lytell light".
Apparently it was believed the light made the patients
go mad.
What I call the fourth dimension is the stage where
evaporation and crystallization meet. These
self-contained, perpetually changing sculptures will
eventually be unrecognizable from my original conception
and will take on a life of their own. Their
existence is timeless, as long as the custodian of the
piece does not break the seal and allow it to escape
into the atmosphere.
Deborah Stutz and
John Lee: How does this work relate to your previous work with
found and ready made objects in installations?
John LeKay: The
relation of the Separation show to the Para show is not
just the similar use of objects and subject matter like
angels, decapitated heads or Mickey Mouse. The
Separation show was a 5 piece installation divided into
two parts, Part 1 - the Church (tangible), Part 2 - the
State (supernatural). The Separation show was an
examination of the idea of what can bind and separate
the soul and the body. The five pieces were 5
estranged characters in dire sociological and
existential pits with no exit. The euthanasic
quadriplegic with an unresolved oedipal complex, the
broken melodious hip-hopping skid-row drunk, the
acrobatic shell-shocked suicidal vet, the happy-camping
baseball catching torso in the woods and the crucified
lazy-boy jesus heckling lunatic on the street. I
am fascinated how the brain functions on a delicate
balance of neurochemistry and sensory and metagnomic
perception when subjected to all these enigmatic
conditions of the mind and different states of
consciousness, like hypnogogic dream states, chemical
induced hallucinations and mad deliriums.
The "Delirium of the neutral angel" Para show was a
metaphysical extension on the Separation and State show.
Metaphorically speaking, one could perceive the chemical
cherubim as being ravaged by a flesh eating
anthropomorphized virus or being ossified by fear and
having a literal chemical "out of body" experience to
escape the spectral invasion of the nefarious shape
shifters.
On a traditional art level and aesthetically speaking,
Cezanne's formal composition in his "Nature Morte Avec
l' Amour en Platre" may have inspired me to use the
cherubim as the centerpiece of the colored heads.
The cubistic and angular forms of subtle interlocking
planes of contrasting shapes and complimentary colors of
the apples, oranges, pears and other fruit resemble the
spatial arrangement of various colored floating
Bosch-like heads in my installation. I am also reminded
of "The Anatomical Dissection" by Hogarth where the
dissected man is surrounded by grimacing doctors with
his entrails hanging out on the floor and being lapped
up by a hungry dog. Associatively speaking, in
terms of ready mades, the concept could be in a position
of checkmate.
Deborah Stutz and
John Lee: How does the process of creation and the process after
creation of these sculptures articulate your
conceptualist take on art?
John LeKay: In my
earlier work I investigated the creative process through
negation by using time and its elements; like dust,
cobwebs, rust and bacteria. I was interested in
the state of entropy and how eventually almost
everything dies or deteriorates over time. Conversely,
what intrigues me about the idea of the paradichlorobenzene pieces (transforming in state,
vanishing and recrystallizing) is the antithesis of
entropy and decay. Paradichlorobenzene actually
eliminates bacteria and that is why it's used in public and
private lavatories all over the world to "neutralize" odor.
There is a long history of decay in art. The neutral
angel's escape through evaporation and re-crystallization is a
metaphor for transcendence and creativity. These pieces will
continue to grow long after they leave my studio
