[00:00:01] Welcome back to the Installation Art Podcast. Today we're doing something a little different again. I'm back with another bonus episode to recap my conversation with the legendary artist Sandy Skoglund and to share some highlights that stuck with me from that interview.

[00:00:19] In this bonus episode, I'll dive into some of my biggest takeaways from our chat, insights into Sandy's fascinating creative process, her relentless pursuit of new skills and her clever strategies for managing the challenges of being an installation artist.

[00:00:37] What a privilege it was to be able to sit down and talk to Sandy Skoglund herself. And our conversation left me feeling challenged and inspired in ways that I hadn't expected.

[00:00:52] If you haven't heard that episode yet, what are you waiting for? if you'd like some more background information on her early days, her childhood and youth, the studies, and then, um, the first struggles of trying to find a voice as an artist, trying to find a space and that kind of compromise or balance between working as a teacher and being an artist, then I definitely recommend you go listen to her interview with the Jealous Curator on Art for Your Ear podcast. I will link it in the show notes.

[00:01:32] Before I dive in to today's episode, I really want to share something. I recently received a lovely DM from a new listener and I just have to share it. Here's what they said: hi, I just found the podcast. This is truly something I was looking for. Went through two episodes so far. Very inspiring. Thanks for your work. Thank you! That means so much. You cannot imagine how much that warmed my heart. Thanks for reminding me why I started this podcast in the first place.

[00:02:12] If you are listening now and you've been enjoying the show, I would love to hear from you too. So stick around to the end to hear about how you can send me a voice message that could potentially be featured on a future episode.

[00:02:31] But now let's talk about Sandy Skoglund. I found it really interesting and funny that Sandy had this kind of belief, as an early graduate right out of art school, that she had to have this loft in New York City in order to be a real artist.

[00:02:55] In the end though, it turns out that her work was best suited for smaller spaces like, residential spaces like apartments. So she did actually used to rent apartments as her studios.

[00:03:11] As a side note, I'd like to say that I recently was looking at that as an option in Sydney, renting like a crappy, unrenovated house to share with some artist friends as studio spaces.

[00:03:27] And It's not so easy anymore to do that. There's a lot of things to consider like noise, neighbors, permits, insurance, whatever. But also mostly the price is no longer really accessible. Like it is not so easy for young artists to just go out and rent an apartment to be used as a studio. We can barely make rent on the place we live anyway. So yeah, times have changed in that sense. I don't know what it's like where you live. But I feel like it's kind of a universal issue at the moment is the real estate and the prices of real estate.

[00:04:15] Another thing that really struck me that I am still thinking about, and that kind of challenged me as well personally, is Sandy's relentless pursuit of new skills for each project.

[00:04:31] For example sculpting. You know, to make the first installations, she basically decided she was going to learn to sculpt and she had to make these cats out of chicken wire and plaster. And then she was like, well, that wasn't so great, let's do ceramics next. And then she learned bronze casting. And then, the hardest of them all, she actually learned 3D modeling on computers, like self taught in the early days. And as somebody who I remember when I was in university, I tried to learn Flash, you know, cause back then Flash was all the rage for your websites. That's what you used. And I tried learning it and it was so onerous and I remember I was following these tutorials that came with the program and they skipped a step. Obviously they hadn't checked the tutorial very thoroughly. They had skipped a step and it made continuing with the project basically impossible. Like I couldn't just figure it out on my own. So I cannot imagine how Sandy learned to 3D model by herself. I think she said it took her a couple of years to figure it out. But not only that, she's also so super motivated to use these new techniques and materials for each project. For example, her work, like A Breeze at Work. If you look it up online, the image is a room full of these big leaves blowing around. And you would think, you know, you could make those leaves out of paper or ceramic, but no, she decided to make them out of bronze and she learned bronze casting just for that. And you know, the weight of these bronze cast leaves obviously makes the whole installation process a lot more complex and challenging.

[00:06:47] Or in walking on eggshells, the floor is completely made out of real eggshells. I can't even begin to think of the enormity of that undertaking. And the fact that the model in the picture, like, they step on the eggshells. So you have to take the photo immediately, and you don't get any do overs or second chances because the shells are already broken.

[00:07:22] But not only that, all the bathroom fixtures featuring in that installation, the bathtub, the toilet, the sink, they're not just real objects or sculpted from materials she had already known how to use. She made them from paper. And she learned the art of paper casting with the help of an expert in that field.

[00:07:50] So for me, her willingness to dive in from the deep end and just embrace the fact that she doesn't know a material and she needs to learn it from scratch for this one project and then the next project is going to be something else and she's not really interested in using what she already knows.

[00:08:13] For me that's both admirable and intimidating at the same time. The commitment of time, which is what makes her projects so long in many ways, is something that honestly, I've... until I spoke to her, not even considered. I was like, no, I'm done with school. I don't want to learn any more new skills. Don't make me go and learn this computer program. I'll figure out how to do something without... you know. I mean, of course I've learned things along the way. You cannot help but learn through doing stuff. But now I'm thinking, what if I push myself? What if I tried a material or a technique that I've never tried, don't know anything about, but can learn. Because if Sandy Skoglund could learn 3d modeling, then we can all learn something that seems intimidating and time consuming that will make our work better, potentially. So, Yeah. It's interesting and challenging and I am looking at buying art materials that I've never ever used in my life, don't know what to do with them, haven't touched since I was a kid, and I'm like, well maybe, why not? Just try it.

[00:09:45] I just really don't like the idea of being an amateur and really being bad at something from the outset and bridging that gap of having to be really bad at something and try again and try again and try again and put in so much time and effort until you're no longer bad. And there's not really a guarantee that it's going to be good in the end, like how long is it going to take?

[00:10:13] I don't have 10, 000 hours to master a new medium or a new technique or a new material. I don't have the patience for that. So it's it's an interesting thing to think about.

[00:10:25] Another thing that she mentioned that I found very interesting was Her way of managing some storage issues. Her work is massive, each installation is so detailed, full of elements, it's large, it's the size of a room. So when faced with some storage issues, she actually offered her works to institutions as a gift. To donate a work to a museum. She said she approached a couple of institutions, first come, first serve basis, whoever said yes first, got the work for free. And I thought that was actually quite brilliant. This approach is like two sided benefit for an artist to do that. On the one hand, you don't have the storage problem anymore. or the restoration issues. You don't have to worry about that work anymore. It's someone else's problem now. And they, they can store it in their much bigger storage spaces. But also, as a big bonus, you are assured that the work will be kept and perhaps hopefully also shown every once in a while, but at least you can be sure that it will be kept by an institution who values it.

[00:11:52] And at the same time you can say as a young artist: Yeah, my work is in such and such collection, permanent collection. You don't have to mention the fact that, well, I gave it to them for free. It doesn't matter. It's theirs now. It's in that collection.

[00:12:10] I think that's a brilliant, brilliant idea, brilliant move. I don't know if, there's a lot of other artists who have done that. I haven't heard of it before, I don't think. So yeah, I love that. I love that idea. I'm kind of thinking like, hmm, Yeah. Hmm. Interesting.

[00:12:33] I mean, of course it helps that, you know, She had shown with that institution before. She had some kind of a prior relationship with them. So, of course, there was cause to offer them the work. But still, you know, Just, just an idea. If you're an artist and you have an installation that you don't know what to do with, contact an institution and ask them if they want it. Why not try it?

[00:13:02] I actually, I don't know if I should talk about this. This is a bit strange and morbid, but I had to do my will and obviously, all my closest friends and family are in Estonia and I'm here in Australia and all my work is here in Sydney. And I thought, well, if something happened to me and my partner, there's no one here who would care to take care of my art, like his family... I'm not being cynical, I'm just being realistic. They wouldn't know what to do with it or see value in trying to do anything with it. They're not even aware of what, you know, what you'd do with art that's sitting in a storage space. So I put it in my will that my art is to be donated to some museum or other here in Sydney. And honestly, it's like, would they, would they want it? I don't know. Would they be like, oh, no, no, no, thanks, probably, but I mean, you gotta shoot your shot, you know, like, if that's something that happens, I'm already dead and I cannot advocate for my work myself. So maybe my will can do something for me, who knows?

[00:14:22] But yeah, there you go. sometimes, as we know, dying really helps an artist's career, so you can't just not think about it, you know? Okay, let's get out of this morbid talk and back to Sandy.

[00:14:40] Another, thing, that I thought was interesting and noteworthy was her process of learning, which is kind of what I'm going through myself, of making your work more long lasting, making it more transportable. Panels that you can take apart and then reassemble, that can be installed without the artist's presence.

[00:15:10] This kind of stuff, it's kind of in the realm of engineering and design that we do actually have to think about as installation artists. And also archival quality, the impermanence of the materials, you know, like Sandy's example is an extreme example where she used cheese doodles, to make this whole big installation.

[00:15:35] And luckily she started with a smaller work and then realized in the process that these cheese doodles completely lose their neon orange color after a couple of weeks. And so she had to somehow take steps to preserve it if she wanted to use that material. I mean, if it was me, honestly, I would have said, no, let's find something else, let's, I don't know, use something that looks like the food, but not, let's not use that. I would have given up probably. But she decided instead to coat every piece of those cheese doodles in resin to preserve the color and preserve them so that they not only stay orange through the whole exhibition, but also decades later, they're still around. That installation is still being shown. So that's quite amazing, really.

[00:16:39] But I think in Sandy's case, she is extremely open to using materials that are changeable or unpredictable or, you know, using food in general is just... to me it's like next level of risk and maybe self flagellation. But also, you know, she has found ways to make walls out of jam. That's, yeah, That is some dedication there to using a specific material and not compromising.

[00:17:18] And I think what we can learn from Sandy's long career and from her work overall, you know, she doesn't make a lot of installations. She takes her time to create each piece. There are periods where she doesn't make any installation work per se. The fact that she started off making the photos as the primary form of the work, the end product itself was the photo and not the installation initially.

[00:17:56] I think those are all interesting aspects of her work and her career. And also the realization that Success as an artist isn't about ticking certain boxes or arriving at a certain destination like having that loft studio in New York City. But it's about going from one project to another and learning something new and finding ways to do something that you put your mind to regardless of the time and the effort and the experimentation it takes to get there.

[00:18:39] I think that's a great reflection to wrap up on.

[00:18:45] If you haven't already, go listen to the interview with Sandy Skoglund. It's packed with interesting insights and stories that I didn't even mention here. It was published right before this episode, so it's easy to find and I'll also include a link in the show notes. And Go check out her work. Just Google her name and the images will come up. She is a literal legend of contemporary art. Her work is being taught at universities and she was an actual pioneer alongside artists like Cindy Sherman who started that staged photography movement in contemporary art. So her work is definitely worth studying and paying attention to.

[00:19:37] I'd also love to hear from you and find out what were your main thoughts and takeaways from that conversation. You can tell me in a voice message through our special voice message page at speakpipe. com slash installation art podcast. Or if you prefer to type then you can also send us an email: anastasia at installationartpodcast. com. And who knows, your message might even get featured on the podcast.

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[00:20:23] Thank you for tuning in, and until next time.