By Michaël Amy
December 1 2007

In 1998, when David Altmejd graduated with a BFA from the University of Quebec in Montreal, he was given two solo exhibitions and his work was featured in three group shows, all in Montreal, the city of his birth. In 2001, he graduated with an MFA from Columbia University’s School of the Arts in New York City. At the time of this writing, he has already had more than 10 one-person exhibitions and has participated in numerous group shows, including the 2003 Istanbul Biennial and the 2004 Whitney Biennial. This year, Altmejd represented Canada at the 52nd Venice Biennale. His sculpture, with its highly idiosyncratic mixture of materials, techniques, and images, seems most akin to Surrealism, though its sensibility is difficult to nail down. Hovering between cool indifference and romantic pathos, it allows for a wide margin of interpretations. One influential critic labeled it “Modern Gothic.” Altmejd’s work seems very much of our time with its juxtaposition of clumsiness and technical sophistication, horror and beauty. It begs for explication, incorporating werewolves (loups-garous, in French), mirrors, crystals, allusions to Modernist architecture, birds, and giants—images undeniably linked to ideas that Altmejd has made his own. This sculptor, who had planned to become an evolutionary biologist, renders things in a state of flux. Altmejd lives and works in Long Island City (New York) and London.

Michaël Amy: Let’s begin with The Index, your piece for the Venice Biennale. What is it about, and how did you arrive there?

David Altmejd: It is always more about how I arrived than what a piece is about. I am uncomfortable talking about what a piece is about. All I can talk about, really, is how I got there. When I visited the Canadian pavilion for the first time, I was struck by the building’s unusual shape. It resembles a croissant, half enclosing a courtyard. Tall walls of glass separate the interior from the courtyard. A tree grows inside the building. The space is quite chaotic and organic. There is real ambiguity between what is inside the building–so you never quite know where you are standing.

I can imagine that some artists would be annoyed with this space because it is so awkward and has such an overwhelming presence. Instead of trying to hide the peculiarities, I decided to push them further in an effort to make something almost crazy. Since the space is both overwhelming and awkward, the only way to take it over is to fill it with things. I thought that by making an aviary, I could inhabit the space by placing birds here, there, and everywhere. I thought of an aviary because of the trees outside and inside the building.

Since the birds were already in my work, this was a natural step for me. The birds originally had a very specific purpose. They were used as tools and were very one-dimensional. I used them when I decided to integrate gold chain into my work–a decision that resulted from my interest in the idea of the sculpture itself becoming a sort of living organism. I am talking about the whole becoming akin to a body, and not of the individual bodies appearing in a sculpture. So, at one point I began using a gold chain as a way of making energy circulate through a piece. This nervous system gave the impression of the whole thing coming alive. Then, I was struck with purely formal decisions, which I do not like to make. I, of course, decide to make the gold chain go from one corner to another, and in and out of a hole, just to make the work look good, but I am uncomfortable with the fact that these kinds of choices are so arbitrary. So, the first time I used birds, I used them as little helpers to carry the chain from one corner to another. That way, the formal responsibility shifted to the piece. It was not me who chose to make the chain go there, and there, and there, it was really the birds. I was able to pretend that the shape of the whole was generated by a logic inside the piece itself. That’s why the birds are there, and they also add little bits of energy and color. As far as my older pieces are concerned, the birds are almost meaningless.

MA: Your sculptures reveal an interest in horror and the grotesque. The birds bring to mind Hitchcock’s movie. They also have links to dinosaurs, those great monsters of the past.

DA: Yes, definitely. I became aware of this especially while working on The Index. In the beginning, however, I did not think about the symbolic potential. The birds were just helpers, and the main elements were the decaying bodies of the werewolves, or the architecture. In Venice, the birds have become the central elements, and the werewolves and the architecture have become secondary. Their only purpose is to provide hiding places and food for the birds. Somewhere in the installation, a werewolf’s head is hung as a birdfeeder.

MA: You use somewhat poetic language to describe imagery that some would consider unsettling.

DA: I do not have the impression that I am speaking in a poetic way. I am talking about a very genuine relationship to materials and references. For me, it is all so practical

MA: You speak as if things do not have meaning.

DA: I am much, much, much more interested in energy. I seek to inject energy and create tensions in a work because in my mind, tensions generate energy. Think of the negative and positive poles in an electrical circuit. I am much more interested in the object being alive and being able to develop its own intelligence and generate meaning. I do not want to use the piece as a tool to communicate meaning. I want it to be able to generate its own meaning. I realize that this is probably a cliché. Everything in a work is physically connected to something else in that work. I always refer to a work as sculpture, and never as an installation, because I want the work to be like an organism.

People in Venice kept telling me, “Wow, David, I don’t know where I am going, I don’t know whether I am looking at the piece or its reflection, I don’t know whether what I am looking at is inside or outside, or whether I am looking at another person or not. “The intensity of the reaction was surprising. People had a hard time making sense of the space. Some had no idea where they were going and bumped into mirrors. That was what I was after. Several people, who were really careful, let down their guard as they were leaving and crashed into the pavilion’s glass walls.

MA: You speak about your work as being alive, yet it often depicts death.

DA: I am much more interested in life. I consider myself a total optimist. There is nothing morbid about my work. Life is so much more palpable than death. Life becomes clearer and more visible when it grows on top of something that contrasts with it. A bird looks much more alive when it is standing on a dead carcass than when it is standing on a table. I am much more interested in how things grow on a dead body than I am in the dead body itself. It’s post-apocalyptic. There is disaster in the beginning, but I am more interested in what happens after that.

MA: Your work is filled with opposites, contrasts, counterpoints, and dualities.

DA: Yes, absolutely. The more I think about it, the more it seems to be the driving force in my work. That’s the way I think in terms of materials, colors, even the meaning. The werewolf appearing in my work comes from culture; it is filled with meaning. I see the meaning inside my references as a kind of charge. I see everything in terms of energy and nothing intellectually. Even if it’s a Star of David, the image acts like a battery–it contains electricity because it is so highly charged.

MA: Do the mirrors in your work function as conductors, drawing one thing into another realm?

DA: In a way; I never thought of that. I first used mirrors to create infinite spaces. I like the idea that a sculpture is like a living organism, like a person–I like that it is infinite in all sorts of ways. In Loup-garou 2 (2000), you see an open box hollowed out of the side of a rectangular structure. The box is shaped like an L. The werewolf’s head is placed inside the box, but around the corner, so that you cannot see it directly. I placed mirrors inside the box to create a periscope of sorts, allowing you to see the head. By doing this, I created an infinite space. The mirror acted as a metaphor for the infinite space inside to structure. I am always interested in filling my work with energy and contrasts and the idea of infinity, and the mirror suggests that, as well as transformation.

MA: How did you arrive at the image of the werewolf? What were you looking for?

DA: I made Loup-garou 1 and Loup-garou 2 while I was at Columbia. I was making structures at the time. Since my studio at school was very small, I decided to build a light table filling almost the entire space and leaving me with only a foot and a half around it. All semester, I used this thing as my worktable, and everything I made, I made on that table. At the end of the semester, I found a way to integrate everything I had done on top of this structure or inside it. The work contained the memory of its own making. It was both an action surface and a presentation surface. However, there was something too cold about the things I was using, the surface, the wood, and the light, and I felt that I needed a strong concentration of grotesque to pull it off–a head or a body part would do the trick.

I love Kiki Smith and Louise Bourgeois, but the fragmented human body had become too commonplace in contemporary art–a human head would have been boring. I thought that if I placed a head of a monster inside the piece instead, it would be just as powerful, but strange and not familiar, and I liked that. So that’s the first time I placed a monster head in my work. I opted for the head of a werewolf because that creature’s transformation is very interesting to me. I went on to produce a series of werewolf heads.

I like that the werewolf looks like a human being–you relate to it, which is nice. I like the idea that it has complex symbolic potential–it could be a metaphor for double identity. Then there is the idea of transformation, which always features in my work. Things grow: crystals growing on things, plants growing, birds flying, so that you have the impression that the piece is alive and that if you went away and came back a week later, it would look different. Then, there is the hairiness of the creature, which I find seductive and almost sexy. I immediately thought of making the werewolf crystallize, so that there is a contrast between its hairiness and the purity of crystals.

I invented a little story to explain the sort of weird energy that interests me. If a man transforms into a werewolf, it constitutes the most intense transformation experience that one can have–on both a physical and a mental plane. In a matter of seconds, one goes from one state of mental and physical identity to a totally opposite one. Right after the transformation is over, the monster’s head would be chopped off and placed on a table. The head would be so filled with energy that it would crystallize immediately, instead of rotting. However, this story did not precede the making of the sculpture. It’s not the way in which I imagine Matthew Barney going to work. I imagine that he starts with the narrative and then makes the story generate the objects. That doesn’t happen here. The story came afterwards.

MA: What attracts you to the work of Louise Bourgeois and Kiki Smith? Their ideas about the body? Their narrative drive?

DA: I think most of all it’s the freedom with which they handle materials–how they are able to create something precious and lively looking by combining the most banal materials, materials you would never think of combining. Bourgeois’s cells, those little enclosed spaces you can peer into, with glass objects and other things inside them, for me, those were like bodies. I had never seen anything so interesting in terms of a self-contained sculpture, but made from so many different elements.

MA: Is your work baroque?

DA: I think it is–though I am not an expert. Isn’t there respect for chaos in the Baroque? Don’t Baroque artists use spiraling columns to create the idea of infinity? I totally relate to that. In The Index, there are stalactites that multiply infinitely, which creates a kind of infinite grotto.

MA: Are you interested in Surrealism?

DA: I have always thought that Surrealism was conceptual–it was really about the idea of making reference to the psyche and to dreams. I am not interested in those concepts, but I am drawn to certain of Surrealism’s formal qualities. Some of Max Ernst’s prints are really beautiful, and I am crazy about some of Dalí’s paintings.

MA: Which other artists interest you?

DA: I really like painting. Dana Schutz seems to have the same interest in process that I have. Her images come out of her relationship to the materials and references she uses. She creates problems, and her paintings are produced in an attempt to solve those problems. I relate to that. When I was in school, I was interested in trying to come up with an attitude for myself. I was looking at certain American artists like Paul McCarthy, Cindy Sherman, and Mike Kelley. Their delicate mixture of sarcasm, humor, and the grotesque constituted a specific attitude. Then, when I started making work, I forgot all of that.

MA: Are your compositions preceded by preparatory drawings, or do they grow organically and intuitively?

DA: They grow organically. I always make a drawing first to mark down what remains so abstract in my head. However, the moment I start working with the materials, the sculpture starts having a life of its own. I let things go, because what comes out of the process seems so much more real than what is in my head. I start by making some structural elements. Then, I make objects and start placing them. Then, I go back to the structural parts and build a hole, figuring that it would be much more interesting if one of the objects were hidden. Then, I think it would be more interesting if little objects started growing out of the hole. There is continuous adding, subtracting, changing, and extending.

MA: I read that you are fascinated by Borges. What do you get out of his writings?

DA: I love labyrinths and mirrors–they give me the shivers. Borges’s work is so abstract, but it makes me shiver, so I am fascinated by it. How does he do it? How can I make a labyrinth feel as worrying as in a text by Borges? It’s impossible. Writing is abstract. Sculpture is real. Since it is real, I would have to place a monster inside the sculpture in order to create a sense of fear. But Borges does not have to do that. You feel there is a monster hiding somewhere, but Borges never mentions it.

MA: Your work is about loss–the loss of innocence, the loss of one state in favor of another.

DA: Perhaps, if you focus on death and decay in my work. But that is just a small element of the work, which is crowned with optimism. At the beginning, there is death, but it is followed by life, optimism, and energy.

MA: You also overlay the sculptures with fake jewelry, which is fraught with intimations of kitsch and romance.

DA: We talked about contrasts. Life and death is contrast. Something seductive and something grotesque also constitutes a contrast. I thought that a beautiful earring would be much more beautiful when worn by a monster. If I were a jeweler, I would use monsters as my models. There is also a lot of humor in my work.

MA: Which many viewers may be missing.

DA: I think a lot do, indeed. Some people see it. I don’t really think about it when I make the work because the humor is so fundamentally there. To put a pink brooch in the shape of an eagle head on a werewolf is humorous. What I make is able to generate a certain nervousness, or emotion, or laughter. For example, a bird-headed figure in The Index has testicles hanging under its beak. Now that’s humorous. It is hard to understand how people can miss that.

MA: The figures appearing in your work are always male.

DA: There are also female werewolves, but the ones I make are all male. I am a man, and as a gay man, I am attracted to men. I am consistent. The idea of a world only filled with men is aesthetically quite specific. I can appreciate that.

MA: Those men would have no way of reproducing themselves.

DA: That’s true. But I don’t use the same logic we find in nature–that would be too literal. I feel that my work is about trying to generate energy and life, but through other means than natural logic.

MA: Does your work aim to express beauty while playing with the abject and the grotesque?

DA: Yes, indeed. I feel that the only interesting way I can express beauty is by showing what contrasts with it.

MA: Good versus evil?

DA: That is a little too moralistic. But I am interested in the contrast, of course.

MA: Is there a religious component to your work? In your sculpture, objects are displayed almost as if they were relics or fetishes.

DA: I never thought of it that way. I am quite fascinated by relics and fetishes. I like the idea that an object becomes precious because it contains something–an energy, a soul, a history. I am not religious, but I like the presence and the feel of sacred things.

MA: Do other writers interest you, besides Borges?

DA: At one point, I was really into J.G. Ballard. In The Crystal World, everything, all of a sudden, becomes covered with crystals. I quite like Dennis Cooper. I also like certain filmmakers, like Cronenberg. When I was talking about Dana Schutz, I mentioned her appreciation of process and how her work kind of happens by itself. I feel the same way about Cronenberg. I have heard him talk about his movies as being bodies that have their own intelligence and make their own choices, and I really like that. David Lynch has great humor. The way that he mixes the psychological, the humorous, and the abject reminds me of Cindy Sherman and Mike Kelley. But his films go beyond that and become the most elegant and emotional things. And I love Eric Rohmer’s work more than anything, but I don’t know why.

MA: Have you thought about making videos?

DA: There would have to be a logical connection to my sculpture, but it will probably never happen, although I have always been into imagining videos. I want to make things naturally. Even though I love painting, I would not make a painting because it would be too uncomfortable.

MA: Why is your recent work titled The Index?

DA: That goes back to Borges. It could also have been called “The Library.”

MA: Is there a Borges story called “The Index”?

DA: No, but I could imagine one. It’s also because the title contrasts with the chaotic nature of the piece itself. The title suggests something ordered, cold, and structured, while the piece itself is totally chaotic. I also like that the title is mysterious sounding and not literal.

The title of my other Venice piece, on the other hand, is quite literal. The Giant 2 depicts a giant, and since it was preceded by an earlier giant, this one was given the number two. Giants will continue to appear in future works of mine, though they will be shown standing. This one is seated because the pavilion ceiling is too low to allow him to stand. If this giant were standing, it would be 18 feet tall.

MA: By Being seated, the giant becomes a landscape of sorts.

DA: Yes, that’s exactly what I wanted. I was interested in the body as a universe or landscape. The Giant is a metaphor for nature and landscape. The Index can be seen as an abstract, inside-out version of the giant. I looked at different mythologies. The giant is always created before men and women, and I imagine that the forests, the seas, the winds–nature–would likewise be created before men and women, so the giant and nature are one. Even when appearing in fairy tales, the giant is never truly mean; it is not good, it is sort of dangerous, but you can easily go around it.

The Venice giant is inhabited by animals and plants. The plants are not real: I like suggesting transformation and decay rather than having it take place in my work. I am into the idea of building rather architectural structures. Then, I find a way to make the whole piece look like a living organism, a body. In the case of the giant, I was interested in going the other way, by making the body into a kind of architecture that would be inhabited by animals. I ordered the taxidermy birds on-line. A stuffed skunk descends a small staircase, way inside the torso. For the giant’s hair, I used horsehair, which has just the right amount of coarseness to look realistic. It came in either black or white, but I wanted a brown-haired giant, so I used hair dye.

MA: Is your work autobiographical?

DA: I see my work as being a combination of things that come from me. Every reference, color, and material comes from me in one way or another: I used to collect crystals, I wish I were the sexy werewolf, I’m Jewish, hence the Star of David, I love pastel colors. My work is a more intense version of myself. But even though it has my genes, it’s also an independent thing with its own history and its own internal logic. In that sense–and I know this may sound corny–it’s like my child. It comes from me, but it becomes something else.

Above: The Giant 2, 2007. Foam, Resin, Paint, Wood, Glass, Mirror, Plexiglas, Silicone, Taxidermy Birds and Animals, Synthetic Plants, Pinecones, Horse Hair, Burlap, Chains, Wire, Feathers, Quartz, Minerals, Jewlery, Beads, and glitter, 100 X 168 X 92 in. View of Installation at the Venice Biennale.