JO: I’ve played around with a number of different ways of asking or expecting people to deal with the work and I tend to do that in both group works and individual works. Its an interesting question to be asked, as an artist as you do work and what it is that you’re asked to do, and the art won’t exist forever and I think it’s important not to take them for granted, like the gallery exhibition, or the museum exhibition, which is probably why I like working on anything that comes up whether that’s a CD cover or a project for a touring Formula One team.
To allow these various ways that people can come across the work, there are all sorts of possibilities, the challenge is to make a work that both functions optimally in the particular situation that people are going to find it – a gallery or museum exhibition – but can also somehow survive elsewhere without ending up only being about placement. Instead of being wrapped up in how people come across the work and how they interpret it, it makes such an enormous difference where you find it. Say finding a piece of work in a lobby of an insurance building in Tokyo, as opposed to a museum in uptown New York state, the meaning changes enormously, you can really focus on that and make sure that really functions, which is not what I do, or try to come up with a kind of discussion that although it changes its meaning in different situations somehow it retains its "logic".
I have made exhibition works that are above, beyond, or outside of the nature of an individual works interpretation. For instance I have made sculptures of cars, and trees, and animals where I set about in every exhibition to group these elements and create a kind of world that you could walk into and I built up an inventory of objects. With this inventory I would create exhibitions that were a kind of journey.
But one of the difficult points for me was how that affected the individual work and so for years have been focusing on retaining certain elements of that quality of a "walk through" world where the works can exist together and make a ‘group’ sense, but at the same time they also exist much more individually.
This is because when people walk around an exhibition I don’t think it’s necessary to make the works visually theatrical because people carry an enormous amount in their heads. In one room you could have a picture of someone taking their clothes off and in the next room a close-up portrait and an audience will make a connection between those two elements, those two people.
PB: And finally can you tell me of any currant and forthcoming projects?
JO:Taking public art further as a direct interaction. The way these projects exist, they really aren't about a person, I stumbled across a model who walked particularly well and that tallied with the desire I had to focus a bit more on the films of walking that I'd done, but perhaps focus a little more on the abstract. With previous films I had made they had been pretty obvious, it was very clear what you were looking at, if still a simplified drawing
But instead I wish to zoom in on parts of the body as I've done with painting, but get to the stage where you have very little information, but still have the feeling that you know you're still looking at a pair of legs, or a stomach, or an armpit, and when that disappears you are just left with a couple of lines.
