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Material worlds

Sandy Skoglund on installation

BY CHRISTOPHER MILLIS

Installation artist Sandy Skoglund's six-page, single-spaced curriculum vitae reads like an international directory of museums and galleries. It's a 25-year history of her wildly original work, which involves designing rooms that make Rod Serling look like Walt Disney. She grapples with the tensions between the unreal and the real, searching for the deeper philosophical meanings within everyday things like food and animals.

In the spring of 1998, the Smith College Museum of Art will see the installation of her next major piece, "Walking on Eggshells." But next Thursday Skoglund will be visiting the Worcester Art Museum, where she'll talk about "Matt Mattus: Lure," a provocative work of installation art currently at the museum. Over the phone, however, she explains that her lecture, called "Art in the Real World," will focus on installation art in general and will touch on her own compelling efforts.

Given the difficult nature of installation art -- its demands for space, its cost, its time-consuming construction -- I started our conversation with a practical question.

Q: How do you make this pay?

A: Well, I make a lot of stuff. So the things that are produced as a result of doing the installations are sold, and I make a good income from it. The photographs, the sculptures, even the installations, occasionally. Usually museums give me start-up funds or installation fees rather than paying for the whole cost of the production, so that I end up owning it at the end. One piece I sold, `Fox Games,' was done for the Georges Pompidou Center in '87. They paid me an installation fee, I installed it, and then I owned it, and the Denver Art Museum bought it.

Q: You've been working on the same project now for the last 18 months. What do you do when a project like that is over?

A: That's an interesting question. When I was a child I used to love the longest books. I read Anna Karenina at the age of 12, and I savored every page and hated for it to end. On the other hand, there's a kind of real-world reconciliation in making yourself finish something. I mean, there's another person in you that's making it not only for yourself but for your culture, to be used in your culture. To me that's important. That's what being a professional artist is, really. So there's the element of satisfaction at having finally gotten it out; the satisfaction balances off the feeling of loss. I think that when I'm finally done, I'm really on to the next in my mind anyway.

Q: What's the last time you looked at somebody else's work and it made you furious?

A: A work that received a great deal of international attention recently. I'm speaking of an English sculptor who had an exhibition where he cut in half a cadaver of a cow and exhibited it in a case of full of formaldehyde. Damien Hurst. It didn't make me furious, but the use and abuse of animals is something that I have a lot of difficulty with. I really feel it's a tragic omission on the part of the human being, for our spiritual salvation, to not take into account the pain and misery of all the other creatures that surround us.

Q: What's the last time you saw something that made you call a friend and say, "You have to check this out?"

A: Probably the recent work of Petah Coyne. She's had several shows recently -- large traveling shows, sculptures. Her work is so completely fresh and unafraid of being feminine. It's dripping-icicle, ice-creamy, chandelier, skirt types of forms. Very involved with almost an abstract-expressionist kind of spontaneity in the handling of the materials, but they take on strong figurative overtones. It's very exciting to see people daring to be feminine, especially in sculpture. I think it's particularly difficult.

Q: Why?

A: Because the history of modern sculpture is overly involved with materials and strategies using materials and manipulating materials. And the work ethic is a big part of the macho mystique; it can be a big part of what it means to be a sculptor as opposed to, say, a painter. I think in particular for women it's a complicated task, because when you're involved in becoming an artist, you're involved in becoming as authentic as you possibly can be, even though that constantly escapes you. You have to look for what is real or unyielding about yourself as much as possible, and I think many times the educational system causes all of us to appropriate some of these mystiques in order to achieve acclaim and esteem from the art world. n

Sandy Skoglund speaks at the Worcester Art Museum next Thursday, April 10, at 7 p.m. Call 799-4406.