Visual artist Oliver Herring to discuss his work

Visual artist Oliver Herring will give a lecture at UNC tonight and will also be visiting the University in the spring to set up an art event with community participation.

He will be speaking at 5:30 p.m. today at Hanes Art Center auditorium.

In an interview with The Daily Tar Heel, Herring talked about his work:



Q: Where do you get inspiration for your work?

A: (Laughs) Well, I’m doing a lot of different kinds of work, and it’s not so much that I’m looking for particular types of information. A lot of what I do is working with people, a wide variety of people. A lot of them have nothing to do with art.

When working with them I learn a lot about them, and I’ve started to tailor my work with regards to a lot of their interests and needs.

I’ve just learned that people don’t have a lot of creative outlets and so I’ve started to tailor my work towards addressing that. So it’s not so much about looking for inspiration.



Q: What kinds of mediums do you work with in your art?

A: I do just about everything except paint so sculpture, video, photography, events or parties.

Those (events or parties) are called “tasks” — one of which will in fact be put together here in North Carolina next spring.

We are going to build a team in order to get this off the ground because this isn’t really about me. I’m just going to be helping to facilitate this part from New York and when I’m on the ground here from campus.

But the main responsibility will lie with the team that is put together, which will consist of students, I would think.



Q: Can you tell me more about these tasks that you do?

A: The task is basically an outlet that consists of a few very simple components — the space, the materials, and the people who participate.

The group that participates is very diverse. There’s a difference between task events and task parties.

Task events are a little bit more structured. Task parties are open to anybody and that’s what we’re going to do here.

Usually there are hundreds and hundreds of people, and it’s a little bit in effect like if you can imagine sort of an odd rave without the techno.

That’s sort of what the feeling is like. You have hundreds of people who each write a task on a sheet of paper and the task can be anything — stand on a leg, build a fortress, start a revolution, call your mother and tell her what you did today — whatever you want to write on the sheet of paper.

Put it in a task pool, and then you pull a task out of that, and you go about fulfilling it in whatever which way you want, with whatever is around you, with whoever is around you.

Whenever the task is completed, you write a new task, put it back in the task pool, pull a new task and so on.

Now, if you have a roomful of people doing that, in theory anything can happen, and it’s a really great way to, not only to engage the material in a really interesting and open-ended way, but also the whole environment with other people.

It can be a really adventurous and wonderfully intimate way to meet other people.

So tasks, for the sum of everyone who participated, whatever you want to see happen, you can put into that pool, and it will be interpreted by somebody else while you’re interpreting other people’s tasks.

 And so it goes.



Q: Can you tell me about some of your other work?

A: Everything that I’ve been doing lately for the past five or six years has been very collaborative.

I work with other people and take a lot of what comes out of these encounters.

Very often I work with people I don’t know. We start out strangers, and then we find a common ground and then find appropriate ways to generate a piece of art out of this.

But that’s not always the case.

With regards to these photo structures, they’re usually based on particular experiences that I haven’t had.

For example, a few years ago I wanted to work with somebody who was either going to Iraq or coming back from Iraq military wise.

So I found, through word of mouth, a marine who had just come through basic training and was on his way to Iraq.

We worked together for a whole year, and the result was a photo sculpture.

It was just a really wonderful experience mutually. He had never stepped foot into a museum — I didn’t really know much about the military, and we learned a lot about each other’s worlds.

It was really nice, and we’re still friends.

The piece is a sort of accumulation of the time we spent together.

And there’s other photo sculptures that are based on those particular experiences that I haven’t had.

I look for particular experiences, and I’m more interested in people who are not like myself.



Contact the Arts Editor at artsdesk@unc.edu.