December 3, 2007
A talisman
Below is an excerpt from an interview between the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist and the artist David Robbins, published in the Summer 2007 issue of X-TRA. Robbins is discussing the advent of his Ice Cream Social project:
From the beginning of my involvement with art I was a man of pop theater, a TV kid, but I was articulating that theater via objects and images, in a context devoted to objects and images. I got the art context fundamentally wrong, and gradually built that misperception into an alternative to it. The visual art context is really designed for people who want to, or already do, seek to align their emotional and psychological lives with the neutrality of form, while theater more fully recognizes the narrative dimension of human life—tragedy and comedy. The art world is always suppressing the narrative line, looking for ways to take it out or play it down, to zero it out. I wanted a fuller embrace of the fact of narrative—we live, we die, there’s narrative—not in order to critique art but only because that position was more authentic to what I was interested in.
I was never a darling of the New York Times or of the Whitney—far from it, believe me—but there are many ways to have a career in the art world, many ways to have a valid history. Come to think of it, don’t you find it odd that whenever we think of an artist, in any field, who no longer appears active, we always think that it’s because they somehow “failed”? Really, isn’t it just as likely that they found not to their liking whatever system they were required to engage in order to get their work out—the system failed them, on the human level—and, in an act of maturity and self-possession, they moved on? Culture systems such as the art world may be all we have, but that doesn’t mean they’re good systems. From a certain perspective the art world is a deeply unhealthy network that brings out the worst in people. It’s too bad that the pursuit of beauty and knowledge should do that, but it does.
The more time I spent in the art context, the more uncomfortable I became with the faith-based dimension of it. I had to invent a way out, and into another kind of creativity.