Interview date: April 2005
Interviewed by Ka-Man Tse
LMCC: We can start talking about this piece.
Troy: This is a large drawing I’m working on that’s
called New Rippon. Rippon, Wisconsin is this town that
was founded by these followers of a French Utopian writer by the name
of St. Simone. He was a predecessor to socialist
thinkers like Marx. These people believed in his writings, and
his writings were so kooky actually. He had this real fascination
with numbers, for example. Where he talked about 243 types of personalities,
and those were exact numbers. He had this idea that if you put
243 men and 243 women together, you could breed a super race, in a sense. Because
you would have all the different types of humans, but really only the
best qualities of humanity. And that you could create this utopian
society, similar to socialism in that people share, everybody would
do what they chose to do, but that would be the thing that
would was best for the society.
LMCC: Functionalism.
Troy: Yeah. So these people who believed in this went
and formed this town, which happens to be a few miles from where I
lived, where I grew up. And the other thing that then happens in this
town is that –the socialist experiment fails- five years top. Because
nobody really counts on the whole “selfish” thing. If
I can get everything that I want and all these people are just going
to keep sharing, I’ll take everything I can. Nobody really
counts on that. So the socialist thing fails, but the thing that
is interesting is that it becomes the birthplace of the Republican Party. So
I think there’s something interesting about the two things. And
of course the Republican Party was the liberal party in this party
initially, and that gets twisted.
So I thought what was interesting was how an ideology that is based
on the best characteristics of humanity, how it goes so terribly away. What
I want to take into account, in some simple philosophy, everything that
compels you to do something. And then create a society [based]
on that, some sort of gestalt theory that’s going to encompass
everything: this is how we’re going to operate. It fails. It’s
ultimately a total bomb. Unless it’s completely cynical,
which is what capitalism and the free market economy is. It’s
so cynical. Instead of starting out at grandiose ideas or who you
are, it starts out at the opposite extreme, the basest level of who we
are, which is, “you are going to do things that you need to do.” You
are going to look out for yourself first, and really function on the
basis of what would cause you the least amount of discomfort. [laughs] That
seems to be the premise of capitalism. It’s like an anti-activist
form of government, versus this other extreme. What I wanted
to do [with this illustration, New Rippon], I wanted to set
up with idea of utopia turned dystopia. All these people are
doing these things that are totally selfish, that they could satisfy
their temporary needs at this moment, whatever that would be, and it
just tends to be killing and having sex, basically.
LMCC: And watching television.
Troy: Yeah. They’ve got the big TV pulled
out. I’ve got a drawing over there, they’ve got the
big stereo pulled out… because they’ve decided that these
are the things they need. But it turns out to be just violence
and sex, and it’s just tearing apart the community. In
this case the community is still under construction, as evidenced by
the house on the corner. Even before it’s completed, it’s
already being pulled apart by the selfish needs of these people. There’s
a second aspect of this, which is sort of related to it, but also,
the original impulse came from the events in Rwanda and Bosnia and
Herzegovina, the last 15 years, where you see people who can manage
to live next to each other …
LMCC : and completely…
Troy: …kill each other. The fact that
they just go nuts on each other. What I found so fascinating about
that was this response that Americans had. “It’s
because they’re black.” “It’s because they’re
Eastern European and communist.” You have all these excuses
for it, but we’re all capable of it. If I’m convinced
enough that my neighbor is the source of all of my problems, then I’ll
kill him. This could happen. I wanted to put this all in
the Midwest. All these things are going on in Wisconsin. I
feel that if you could have the communist party and utopian culture
all in the same place, then well, you know…
LMCC: But in the midst of capitalism. You’ve
got the televisions and the fancy technology.
Troy: Oh yeah. Because you can’t expect
people, after, in our current society, after they’ve had television
and two-story houses, and fenced in yards, that they’re going
to give that up. I mean, come on. That’s the first
thing that you want to achieve. You don’t want these Eastern
Bloc style tenements that you find all over Yugoslavia, the Soviet
Style giant apartments. The hope and the American version of
this is that “I could get the starter home.” I
could get something that looks like manufactured housing, or the cheap
two-story. If I go along with some Master Plan, that’s
would is going to be promised me.
LMCC: This drawing reminds me of the Flemish paintings
where the town went awry.
Troy: Yeah, Hieronymus Bosch and the idea of the
world turned upside down, which is really based on the Illuminated
Manuscripts of monks, and how they would write in the margins, they
would write and make these drawings of the world turned upside down. Cause
you know, if you spend hours copying the Bible, you’re going
to get kind of crazy. Definitely, [I’m influenced
by] Bosch, Bruegel, and the vantage point of that, so that you’re
above all of this. You’re seeing from above. Nobody
diminishes as you move back. Nobody gets smaller in scale that
you see in space. So it’s a vertical space. Which
owes as much to Japanese and Chinese scrollwork also. Part of
what I wanted to do with this too along those lines is that it could
continue. I could draw
LMCC: …each panel.
Troy: Yeah. And that’s the larger plan,
is that they will continue to
LMCC: …to be this huge town.
Troy: This huge thing that just keeps growing. Right
now I’m in the suburbs but if I move to the right I head towards
the shopping districts, I’m going to get to the mall. If
I go to the left, the housing construction ends and we get to the forest.
The next large direction is going to be the mall. You’re
going to see these cut-away sections of the mall so you can look through
it. So you’ll see from the outside. Inside you’re
going to see all these teenagers doing these incredibly obnoxious things,
stealing everything that they can and taking off everything. And
that’s going to be the scheme for that. And then there
will be the forest section. I see the forest section as this
quiet peace that’s mostly just a few houses under construction
and some trees, and then about a dozen people pulling the dead into
the forest. At least that’s the grand scheme. But
the idea is that we’re onto a big wrap-around drawing.
LMCC: How long do you think this is going to take?
Troy: About two or three years.
LMCC: And when did you start this drawing?
Troy: I started this drawing in August or September. I
made a number of studies for it, building up to the large drawing. So
in order to advance to the next thing I’ll have to go back to
making smaller drawings again to plan it, and then to get to these
large drawings.
LMCC: I like the idea of the forest, where everything
actually happens.
Troy: Yeah I was about The Scarlet Letter and
how, what’s his name?
LMCC: Hawthorne?
Troy: Hawthorne wrote all those short stories about
setting up the New World towns, and how they’d be surrounded
by the wilderness, the idea of man as a civilized being, in the middle. The
moment you step away from other men, and the moment you step out of
society, you would return. You’re so close to returning to your
savage roots.
LMCC: That’s how a lot of suburbs are, here’s
the construction site, the cul-de-sac, the vinyl houses, but right
on the outside is all uncut forest.
Troy: It was like that when I was a kid. I grew
up in Wisconsin. You had these new subdivisions that were being
built on farmland, but they were near this edge of the farmland, and
then there was just this forest and these fields past it. When
we were kids we would play hide-and-seek and stuff in the forest, and
there were still some cornfields near by us, but every
year you could see the houses just take over and just keep growing. So
hide-and-seek got to be less and less interesting! [laughs] I
mean, that’s the practical results for me.
LMCC: But while growing up, you figure out other
things to do.
Troy: Right, there were many other concerns that
were going on. And I’ve got my fort.
LMCC: So tell us about your fort.
Troy: Well, this is how I got this residency [at
LMCC]. Well,
after September 11th – which from my studio you can see the World
Trade Center—when that happened my first impulse was just to
hide, just to go home and not leave. I didn’t feel necessarily
safe at home, I didn’t feel safe anywhere, but I didn’t
know who I was afraid of, this whole thing. Everything was anxious,
I didn’t trust the government, I didn’t trust the people
who had done this and I was upset. At that time the image
that had come to be, was when I was a kid, my brother and I used to
take the cushions off the couch and put them around the dining room
table and make this fort, and I’d bring blankets in and drape
those over, and we’d get inside and we’d just be in this
completely safe in this totally cool space.
I was thinking about that as this idea, where you’re feeling
unsafe enough in your own house that you build a second house inside
your house out of the furniture. So that’s what I’ve
done, I’ve taken all the furniture from a one-bed-room apartment
and crammed it all together. Along with the clothing and other
items you’d find in it and push it all together. You can
crawl inside of it, and there’ll be beer cans and a TV in their
playing a loop of cartoons and some really escapist magazines in here
for me. Kind of the stuff, where it’s all comfort, but it’s
comfort taken to a neurotic extreme. But everything is so extreme right
now that you don’t know. What exactly is an extreme or outrageous
response to it because it seems to me that this war in Iraq is an extreme
or outrageous response to the situation. So what I do personally
is miniscule is tame compared to that. Maybe this isn’t
outrageous to want to build a giant fort for myself and hide out from
the world.
LMCC: Well, it’s a more personal and emotive
response than the current situation, the current political situation.
TROY: Yeah. I think that – not to seem too hokey— but
in a sense, maybe if people had gotten in touch with their need for security
in a more personal way and a more introverted way, we wouldn’t be such
a violent and f*cked up culture. So that’s where it’s
going. And the way it’s positioned, is the entrance is opposite
of the window [the view] the World Trade Center from here. The wall over here
is built from coffee tables and the bed, so that wall is very solid. Then
all the windows [of the studio] are going to be covered with the plastic that
Homeland Security advised us to do during our threats from terrorists, except
for that one window. So it will just emphasize the relationship. I
don’t want to be so didactic with the piece, but I want to convey the
point that this is what it’s about. So then you’ll
just hide inside there and I think it will be good to chill.
LMCC: Will people be allowed to go in?
Troy: Yeah, they can. I think people will be able to
get in there one or two at a time. I really see it as a portrait as a
type of person. I thought about the character of the person who built
this. There’s just this excessive amount of duct tape to see it
in, and clothing is shoved into the cracks, the idea is to, really not let
any light in, or anything. Once there’s a blanket at the door cover
the hatch. With the cartoons and the beer and the magazines you
could be in there for a good long time. I didn’t want to get into
the extreme where everything you own is in this thing. Clothes are in
there, it’s just enough so that you have to get out and go to the bathroom
and you cook your food and then you could go back in there and hide out. I
was thinking, that’s the type of person that would do this. It’s
not extremely practical. So it’s not about, I don’t think
of it as an Andrea Zittel’s compact housing thing, that’s perfect
and practical and I could live in there. It’s more of an
emotional response to the situation.
LMCC: Yes. And it’s completely immediate and
not perfect. I mean it’s thrown together with duct tape. You
can almost see the person ripping it with his teeth.
Troy: Yes. And I tried to create intuitive logic to
it. The person is going, “well, ok. I’m going to keep
the dresser and the drawers together, the table and chairs together, the bed
and the sheets are together.” The person is trying to work with
the logic, almost. “I’m going to make sense out of this world,” But
the sense doesn’t hold up. There’s all this fudging and cheating. … I
like to think of it as a portrait.
LMCC: Tell me about your process and how you work.
Troy: I’ve really tried to turn my process around
in the last 6 months with this residency... A lot of shows that
you get in New York, you really sell the concept. In order
to do that I make preliminary sketches that are really thorough and
I say, “This is what this is going to look like.” Then
I just go in and make that thing, almost exactly how it’s going
to look. Because that’s what you do. For a
museum or any kind of institution here [in New York City]. Instead
I had a kind of a description of what I going for here, and I brought
the materials in and waited for them [materials] to tell me how to
shape them. I’ve had the furniture here for the last two
and a half, three months. I was waiting, I moved things around,
I turned things up on their side. I let the material and the
process dictate the form. I like to think of it as less of a
top-down approach, and now it’s more of bottom-up. Even
with the drawing, I’ve laid out where the houses would go, and
then I’ve just waited and worked every thing through and the
figures have come out where they have. One thing suggests the
next. With both, what I’ve been looking at is really more
of a fiction, a model of fiction. The way writers talk, and they
think about setting up characters, and then the characters take on
a life of their own. And that’s what’s been
going on here. With the sculpture, I came up with this guy, but
he needed to build this for himself. So I let him tell me what
I was going to do. [With the drawing], all these people, how
they were going to respond. They’ve been given their freedom,
they’ve killed and screwed everybody they could, and now they’re
deciding what they’re going to do next. [laughs]
LMCC: What will they do next?
Troy: That’s a good question. I’m
waiting for them to tell me. They could turn on each other. The
remaining people are the ones that will get it next. I have a
feeling that the women are going to be the only ones left in the end. As
I draw them, I keep thinking that the women seem stronger then the
men. I have a feeling that I will have this society of ruling
women. But we’ll see as this progresses over time. [laughs]
LMCC: What influences your work. What sources do you draw
from.
Troy: A lot of art history. Reading. And the people
that we’ve talked about Bruegel, and Goya and Manet. And events
in the world today. And when I make things like sculptures and installations,
it’s really more of a response to materials. So I wait to see. I
look at the things in my house, or I look at the things around me, and I think,
How could arrange the things around me that could equal this piece or put a
twist on this culture of consuming. It’s a material culture, so
it’s almost always about the things you own representing who
you are.
LMCC: The first thing that I see in this drawing
[New Rippon]—and it’s so predominant – is the Tyvek,
the construction wrap [for the new houses], and it’s so America. We’re
just going to build and build, the frontier, Manifest Destiny, we’re
going to have additions upon additions upon additions.
Troy: Yes, it is total America. When I was in
grad school I went to a show at the Chicago Institute of the Art called About Place. And
[for the show] Dave Hickey had essay about specificity. And
it really got me to start thinking about how specific I can be to where I’m
from. So that’s been the long-term influence on me, is just be
as close to dealing with who I am and where I came from. I was
also working with one of the artists that came through and put me in
a show in Chicago was Kerry
James Marshall. His series of paintings dealing
with the housing projects where he grew up were just hugely influential to
me. They just seem to be of this grand scale that was very human. They
asked big questions, but then were also specific. They specifically described
and depicted these projects. Since then, my work continually
comes back to a Mid-Western, lower middle class to middle class lifestyle,
and using these people as subjects really.
LMCC: You’re talking about this character
that builds this sculpture? Are you…
Troy: Yeah, it’s an exaggeration of myself
in way. I think that’s what you do very often with art. I
think almost all art tends to be this exaggeration of something you’re
thinking or feeling about. Because if it was so matter of fact
and blasé… well you hype it up and kick it up a notch. That’s
what where this comes from. Also, it allows you to have this
distance. It’s an exaggerated version of yourself. You
can look at yourself critically, in a way that you wouldn’t necessarily
be able to if it was that personal.
LMCC: or with humor
Troy: definitely.
LMCC: What are some goals, what are you trying
to achieve in your work or in general?
Troy: Most of the time what I show are installations
and sculptures and the drawings tend to be more personal, typically. And
I usually have an idea that I’m following. The ideas fluctuate
from some very formal art concerns and social issues and emotional
concerns, and walking between those things.
LMCC: How has this studio space and/or this specific
area of Manhattan influenced your work.
Troy: This piece was a direct response to that,
so it was a huge influence. The only other time that I applied to
this residency was in August of 2001. For years I have carried around
with me the pass that I got when I went to the World Trade Center August
31st of 2001. I had just gone in there to drop off my materials
for the residency. So it has been a big influence on my thinking.
LMCC: What are you thinking about doing next?
Troy: I start teaching in Cleveland at the Institute
of Art in August.
LMCC: Do you listen to music while you work? What
CD or song have you been listening to way to much?
Troy: I listen to Tin Hat Trio and instrumental
stuff when I’m working. And Wilco. I gotta get
over the Wilco thing.
LMCC: Wilco is so 2003.
Troy: Isn’t it so done? And Arcade Fire quite
a bit, and it fit in to what I was doing.
LMCC: Favorite website?
Troy: Oddtodd.com.
LMCC: What else do you pursue?
Troy: I’m teaching. I run. I’ve
run two marathons and I’m returning for my third in the fall.
