¡Colores!; Interview with Ted Larson

It's you and me. Oh, that's God, thank God. Yeah, a bunch of people are like, they're not even there. He's looking up, right? Hi, mom. Yeah, but yeah, even for me, and being an athlete my entire life, I go home now and people are like, what are you doing? I'm like, I'm a poet and they're like, you're a poet? When should we become a poet? You're always just a soccer player. Like, it's crazy when I go home. I was in the paper at home and all of my mom was getting all these emails and I go blue. They were like, what are you doing? Well, people always ask me because I'm tall about basketball. And that's what I played, you know? I was playing basketball. And it's kind of a funny thing, because a lot of people know me as an athlete. And I still am an athlete. I'm riding my bicycle and skiing all winter long and doing all this different stuff. And people also know that I'm an artist, but it's kind of funny. There's like people that know me in one way and people that know me in another way. And there are not a lot of people that know me in both the areas of my life. Right, in that way. It's kind of funny. That's funny, yeah. Terry, do you want me to do the clap thing?

There was the clap. They're ready to start, but usually we have to do a, we want to make sure that our sound is synced so they have me clap in front of the camera and make sure that they hear it at the same time. They see me put my hands together. But now no one's talking to me. Where'd you go, God? Hello? Hey, towards Ted. Mm -hmm. Perfect. All right, that's a good sign. You're a person now. So we're fortunate to be in a studio with Mr. Ted Lars and how are you doing today, Ted? I'm really well, how are you? Thank you for having me here. Yes, absolutely. So we're fascinated by your art and want to have a deeper conversation with you about your process and your motivation. So I want to start with your conversation that you're having with minimalism. Can you tell me a little bit about that? Well, I don't really think of myself as a minimalist. I think of myself as a reductionist. So I like to reduce things down to their essence and then build back

out of that. What I mean by that is there is a very bare state that things can exist at. And then it's an accumulated state that the very same thing can exist at. And by working both directions, I find it interesting to find the nature of what things might be able to be. I love that, it sounds great. The nature of what things might be able to be. So there's a possibility in the artwork when it's done. Hopefully there's some possibility. It's an investigation. I'm not claiming answers. I don't really have much interest in answers. I have a lot of interest in questions. So I want to lead the possibility of the viewer towards maybe seeing something, but I'm not terribly concerned with actually what they see, right? So it's kind of a strange thing because here I am making this thing which is seen in its absolute. I mean, it is what it is. And yet hopefully they see beyond that to

maybe possibly something more than that. Yeah, and they're having these questions about meaning. The materials that you use, what's the interplay with that? And why do the materials actually have their own kind of conversation, I guess, in your work? Well, the materials are important to me on really one level and then they have a separate importance on a different level. So I'm working with pre -painted material because it has a history. I was trained as a painter. And so as a painter, I'm interested in the history of painting. And a painting is an object as much as it is, as a real, it's a, well, let me rephrase that. A painting is an object. It's a place where the mind can go into also. So when you look at a painting, a two -dimensional object on the wall, your brain looks into it and sees something inside of it no matter how concrete it is as an object,

it's still a thing that you see into. And at the same time, it's a physical thing. It has a history, it's lived a life, it sits on a wall, it has a certain presence off of the wall. And there's a huge history to mark making and painting. And I'm very interested in being a part of that history. And so I make work, which is in reference to the history that is behind me, my own history, as well as the history of other artists. And the history of the materials. And so going back to the materials, a prepainted thing has a history to itself. And I'm interested in taking that history and relocating it or dislocating it or altering it or offering it an alternate ending. Because we tend to view history absolutely. This thing happened in a certain time and it happened in a certain way. Constructed in a certain fashion.

Well, what happens if we turn it around a little bit and we start to move a little bit of our understanding of things, doesn't it point towards a possibly different meaning? Sure. And so I'm trying to find a place where in my painting, process that I can offer alternate endings to pre -existing dilemmas. I like that. We were talking about perception earlier, but that idea that history is perceptive. I understand that to be what you're saying here. Exactly. Well, everything in our lives is a perceptual issue and art fundamentally is a perceptual issue. And so what I'm interested in doing is taking these pre -painted materials, removing them from their original source and then taking that material and building a new life for it, which then alters the original life that it has, giving

it a new life, and then we perceive the old life in a new way. And I think there's something kind of interesting about how that might point towards the possibility of perception. Sure. And I don't know if that may know. Well, the, and I'm losing my earpiece one second. The, okay, I can hear you now, Ter. Sorry, you were going for a second. Sorry, Ter, sorry, Ter. I'm about, I'm gonna go back a question because I saw a connection there with them. We were talking about the materials and then having a history. Now, how does that, how is that impacted by your philosophy of nature and the nature of the materials or the connection between your work and nature? Well, when I was, when I painted more formally and with, you know, actual paint, painting for

me at that time was a vehicle to, well, let me explain this in a different way. When I was painting, I actually was interested in the environmental aspects of nature. The subject matter was a vehicle to hang paint from, but it wasn't necessarily of, of tremendous interest to me. The subject matter. It was just a way to smear paint around on a certain level. Now, things have changed in every possible way and how I view my work and, kind of, I'm really feeling like I'm not really being very articulate here and expressing this. So, right, you can start again. What was your question? So, what is the relationship between your work and nature? The relationship of my work and nature. Well, I think nature

has two different possible meanings. There's the environmental aspects of nature and then there's the inherent aspects of things. I'm interested in the inherent aspects of things, not in the environmental aspects of things. And so, dealing with the materials for what they are exactly and for what they might be, possibly, is where I take my premise from wanting to work with this material as opposed to that material. A pre -painted material is already made and there's a gigantic history to ready made, it's obviously, and I want to take this ready -made thing which has a history and has a life that it lived and take that life and offer that life and alternate ending from where it was in the moment before I took it

and hopefully that ending that I'm offering it is a possibly more interesting ending than it would have had it continued in its life as it was. And in the much the same way, I think about like when I'm in the studio and I'm working and I'm taking these materials, I'm hopefully offering different endings to aesthetics that I'm also dealing with, certain theories of beauty and certain relationships of beauty and certain ideas of what beauty might be and bringing those ideas up and looking at them formally is what they were and what they are and then thinking, how can I take this and offer a different way of seeing this idea of beauty and maybe give it a different ending from where it was originally described

maybe hundreds of years ago, maybe 50 years ago. Sure, giving it a different story. This interplay, what's this interplay in your work between reductionism as we talked about earlier and the evolution of form? Well, I don't really have much interest in camping myself and making minimalism to a certain degree has a kind of formal repetition that is involved with it conceptually as well as aesthetically and so there's serialized forms that can happen in it. That part of it interests me to a certain degree but the idea of making the same thing over and over and over again really doesn't except in one other area which I find quite fascinating which I'll get back to in a second. And so when I'm working, what my working premise is is I have several different issues that I'm trying to look at and investigate all at once

and by offering the viewer many different ways of seeing the issues, hopefully they will understand different perspectives of these issues. So when one reduces things to their essence and then builds back from that essence to a more complex version of that essence adding to it, if you will, by taking a box, you have a box. What happens if you take two boxes? Now you have a relationship between two boxes and what happens if you have 10 boxes and you have relationships between 10 boxes? As a maker of each one of those boxes, something happens to me in making each box. So this goes back to the reason why working seriously might interest me because one of the reasons why I work, actually the primary reason why I work is because I'm a very rules based artist. I make very specific ways of working before I

begin. I want to explore a very specific issue in a particular piece and the way that I know that I have a way of a possibility of exploring that is by making very specific rules of engagement, if you will, for how I will work with the material, how the material will inform the work and the form that the work might actually take place. I mean, how it might physically manifest itself. Even in a way you talk about it, you talk about creating questions versus answers or a line of inquiry and then investigate. I really like how you say that, what I'm trying to investigate in my work. I mean, that also lends itself into what are the questions? What are the many different ways we talk about perspectives that a person can see this? And so you have these rules of engagement which you spoke

to something about logical order in your work. To me, that sounds like, you know, there is a logical order that the work has to have its own inherent logical order, but I am always constantly trying to subvert that order. And so I'm both interested in and having that dialogue be seen and knowable and at the same time, misdirecting it. So you'll see something that you didn't expect would be part of the order. And by having, you know, like if you take one, like going back to the cube, you have a cube. And if you take this cube, how can you take that cube and see something other than that cube? Well, it all depends on how you rotate it and hold it in your hand. That cube can become a different shape depending on your orientation to it. It can become a triangular -like form. It can be much more rectilinear than square. There's many different ways by holding the cube and looking at it

formally and moving it around, you can see different things. So that's the metaphor towards taking the issue and holding it and moving it around and being able to perceive this possibly multifaceted idea from many different perspectives allows us to be able to see the multifaceted aspect of the original problem. So let me jump in and change the direction just a little bit and talk about, we were talking about this a little bit before we started the interview. The idea that what you're creating, especially with sculptures, that they actually change the orientation of the room. So you actually have to move around it. It becomes something that you live with in the space. When you're creating, is that thinking about that experience, the experience for the, I don't know what we'll call it, the user, the experience for the person who's going to live with

this piece is going to co -ed have it with this piece. Do you think about that when you're creating these pieces like where it will situate itself in an environment? I do. People stand in the world, in relationship to the world. And there is a dialogue between who we are as people and the natural world that we're in. And then the moment that we start inhabiting that world and we start carving it up and parsing it out and making roads and buildings and everything else that we do on it, we become more and more in relationship to our built world. And our built world is an idea. It's a place that exists both in reality, in physical space, as well as conceptually. And so we're sitting here in relationship to one another physically, but then there's other kind of relationships that we're sitting with each other in front of each other with

also. The idea of the interview that we're having. What does it mean to have an interview? And yet there's the physical proximity of the two of us at the same time. And so I'm wondering when I'm making work, it automatically has physical presence. And because it has physical presence and you stand in front of it or you stand in relationship to it, you're aware of the relationship that you have to the physical object. And it starts to define the relationship. And you start to define the relationship. As well as that physical object starts to define the relationship that it has to the wall or to the floor or to the height of the room or other kinds of issues that come up because of man's interest in architecture. And because we tend to view the world through

the lens of the physical world that we inhabit and those physical boundaries that we're in, be they limitless when you're standing in the deserts of Southern New Mexico and they seem so open and wide and vast, there is a limitation to that. As well as when you're inside of a building, there's limitations and openness to that. It's sort of this inversion, reversion sort of thing where it can unfold and it boxes itself up at the same time. And so art has this possibility, this is I think a really important thing. For me, I don't know if I've made art. I know that what art is supposed to do. Art is a way of changing the way we see. So it's like glasses. If you have, I mean, when you have your glasses on, you see the world in a very specific way. When you take them off, you see it in a different way.

When you're experiencing art, it changes the way you see the world. And it might be very subtle and it might be profound. But that shift that happens in that seeing the world in a new way, that's what I'm trying to get to. I don't know whether or not I've actually accomplished that or not for other people. That's not really what I'm interested in doing. I'm interested in doing that for myself. I'm interested in making work, which I can experience the effect of making work on myself. That's the reason for working. The reason for working isn't what it does for other people. It's what it does for me. Because I don't know what it will do for other people. And there's so many variables to that. I mean, I make this thing, I stand in the spot and I make this thing. I have no idea what your experience is going to be when you stand in that spot looking at the thing. But I know what the effect is on me, making the thing and

viewing the thing. And I can measure that and I can quantify that and I can take that information and that data and I can then build a new system of working, a new rules based game and I can take that information and I can say, well, what is the perception that I'm having with this? What kind of issues does this bring up from me? What is the new work that will be developed as a result of making that work? And then I write and in the process of journaling about what those issues might be, I come to a point where I realize how that work can unfold, how that new work can unfold and the process of making that new work. I also try without breaking the rules of the game to cheat the game, to try to go behind the rules and come up with an unanticipated result. Something that my original work in writing or journaling didn't actually

illuminate to me because that's actually where I'm experiencing the new glasses. And you were talking about subverting the logic model. So I like you talking about it in the form of a game. I thought, we had a good spot, Tara, if you can hear me, where he was talking about what, I don't know if the art does something for anyone else but it does something for me. I really like that. I really like that. So I couldn't hear what you said to me before. Mm -hmm. Sorry, sorry. Okay. Mm -hmm.

So, okay. This process that you create, this, these rules of engagement or the game, I like that. Where do you see that manifest itself in your, because we were talking about the effect on Ted, like that, the art is the effect on you. Essentially, that's only perceptually. We talked about perception. That's really the only thing you can speak to. Where do you see that impact other parts of your life? Is there a concrete example of when you're not creating art that you actually have these rules of engagement in this game in your life as a person? Not that an artist is not a person. You know, the funny thing is it's like I worked with a very, very specific, you know, the rules -based system, but I don't necessarily live that way. You know, I'm not a very rigid, regimented

person. I tend to, maybe I need more of that in my non -studio life, serves my studio life. It's, you know, they're in total balance with one another. When I'm not in my studio, and I think of what I do in the studio as being very much like a practice, I go in there and I make things, and the way I make things is a honing of a certain ability that I have. The physicality of using my hands with the materials, there is a certain kind of discipline and development of that discipline to become better at it. And then at the same time, I will change up my ways of working frequently, so I will work with totally different techniques. I'll do this technique for a while, and then I'll stop doing that technique, and I'll begin this technique,

because I'm not really very interested in developing craft. The craftsmanship that comes to my work, I really want to figure out a way to both develop that and unhinge it at the same time. So I'm never really very comfortable, and by switching between different ways of working, I'm never really terribly comfortable with any of it. But I know how to work at all, and so I'm having to go back and relearn, and it's that relearning. It's that setting up a system in which I can have a positive inquiry into things on every possible level. So when I'm welding, I'm welding, and I know how to weld. And then I stop welding for a while, and I have to almost teach myself how to weld again, and that's right, I have to change the temperatures, and I have to run the stick at a different speed, and that's right, this metal reacts differently than that metal. And the same way, when

I'm cutting wood, wood feels differently in this thickness, than it does in that thickness, and I can cut it with this tool differently than that tool, or I'm using a drill press, as opposed to a hand drill, and the drill press cuts the material faster than the hand drill, and you use rivets as opposed to a kneeled wire. There's many different ways that we can join materials together, and you have a certain comfort with them, with joining materials together in one way, and then you stop doing that, and then you join it in another way, and it informs other things that are completely unrelated, like the idea behind making the work. What does it mean to make something which is made, really crisply and cleanly and perfectly? What does it mean when you make something that seems really dashed off? The dashed off thing may actually not be dashed off at all. It might take forever to make that dashed off looking thing, whereas the pristine thing might have taken seconds.

So there's this funny thing that can happen, and then if I'm paying attention to what my value structure is, do I value making the thing that takes forever, or do I value the thing that comes quickly? What does it mean to me to value something that comes quickly over something that takes forever? What does it mean to value the other way around? Because these value judgments that I'm making are perceptual issues, and if I'm choosing to say this thing is more important than that thing, why am I choosing to do that? And what am I losing, or what am I gaining, and benefit of that? If I choose to take this piece and put it in that place and give it primacy, that means I'm choosing not to give something else something prime. And if I'm saying that I want no hierarchal order of anything, I don't want to have an arrangement in my work where one thing becomes more important than another, and that's a more sociologically -based issue that I believe in. I don't like

hierarchal arrangements within society, nor do I like them in my art. But these are the questions. So you talked earlier about a line of questions that, like, these series of questions that you are kind of going through during your process, and there's no... So one question leads to another question, right? Exactly. And so, at the root of that, although, let's take the one about primacy. There's hierarchy, right? Do you have an answer for Ted, as to which one's more important, or whether you want one to be more important, when you're working with a material, whether that pristine piece versus that dashy piece? You know, one of the things that, one of the mandates that I think that minimalism or seriality brings to it is a formal repetition. And so, repeating a form as an end to itself isn't very interesting. But if you can figure out a way to arrange those repeating forms so that they're not necessarily seen for what they are, but they're seen for what they can

be, and then you obscure them in a way so that you don't necessarily recognize that form immediately. If I make a bracket in the bracket, and I make hundreds of these brackets, and these brackets are all the exact same shape, and I take these brackets, and I arrange them so that no one bracket has more importance than another, and I put them together in a way so that you no longer see the original bracket. You see this repeating form that creates a different form that's unanticipated. There's no hierarchy in that. So, there's no one thing that becomes more important than another. The accumulate of effect of them all becomes equally important and creates something beyond the original unit. Is there something that you can point to in nature that me, or the viewers might recognize, that gives us this idea of what you're talking about? Yeah, grass. You know, when you see grass,

it's a blade. It's a single thing. And through the accumulate of effect of grass, we see a lawn. And lawns are very different than the single blade of grass. That's beautiful. So, we talked before, and this is going to be our last question, but would I, the question I kind of posed to you when we were sitting in the green room was that, that unknown, that possible, that, you know, those questions that lead to an infinite amount of possibilities in front of you and in front of your work, is one motivating factor that can kind of pull an artist towards creating more work. Like, I want to ask more questions, I want to investigate, I want to find, I want to find. But then behind you, there's, like you were saying before, your history, your experience and your body of work that's also propelling Ted Larson to get up every day and create this work. In the middle of that is you. So, what is your, your thing that drives you to continue to create this work that makes people ask questions? You know, I'm, I'm

a curious person. There's a tremendous amount to know in this world, and I feel like I know like next to nothing. And that in itself propels me. I want to know more about what the world is and the more I know about what the world is, the more I'm curious about what that means to me. And that turns on itself and makes me then curious about what more there is to know about the world and what that effect is on me. So, it extends, you know, in all areas and all disciplines, from math to physics to philosophy to aesthetic theory and all these different areas of life and, and concerns, you know, we were talking about food and,

and, and, and kinds of, of things that we eat and, if we eat this, then, and where are the sources of this coming from? And what does that do to the environment that we live in? And, and, in turn, what, what, if that affects the environment, doesn't that affect me? And so, if that's affecting me, is my wanting to participate in that? And so, you know, it continually loops around on itself until it becomes a self -perpetuating machine, basically. So, you know, I've figured out a way to make a perpetual motion machine in my studio and I just show up to work and it does, it tells me what to do. I'm in service of it. It's not in service to me. I like that. I've never heard an artist say it quite like that. Right. But I feel, I feel like I feel the same way. I feel like the, the poems are going to come without me. Well, I

mean, you know, you get enough of an inertia going with it and it leads you. And we might try to steer it. It's not very successful when I steer it. When I have to slow myself down and listen and it tells me what it wants. It doesn't yell. It's normally in a whisper. And so, I have to slow myself down enough that I can hear that whisper and in our modern culture, slowing down like that is very, very difficult. Let me just pose this. And we talked a little bit about, you talked a little bit about not knowing the effect of your art on the person who ends up living with it. And, you know, that's perceptual. Obviously, right. You can't perceive what's happening for another person. But in a way, in a way, these questions you're talking about, about society, about philosophy. Like, would you want your art to, let's say if you could, if you could

say what effect your art had on people, would you want your art to have that effect to make people ask questions about their existence, ask people, make people ask questions about their theology, their theory of being, their society, the space around them. What is your intended effect? People ask those questions of themselves all the time. If my work helps stimulate some of that, that's great. If it doesn't, that's great. It's none of my business. Sure. It's amazing how many people have very specific opinions about the nature of the world that they live in, or that we all live in together, and they have very specific belief systems about that. I think that is so utterly absurd in its just patent form that we believe that the world exists in service to us. Just the very premise of that, I think, is really hilarious. The

world actually exists, and we happen to be here. It would exist without us. It will exist without us. It existed before us. It will exist after us. And that goes exactly what your theory of your work, right? Like, yeah. You in service of work, the work is not in service of you. Exactly. Thank you so much, Ted. Thank you. Appreciate it. Yes. Rat. Rat.