A Nurses Update

As I continue to develop my interest in the uniform, my thoughts have increasingly turned to what power the body of work has over me. Questions that surround this body of work seek to find out where these suits place me in the artist’s context. The uniform’s appeal to the ‘cult of the artist.’ An image like Eva Hesse’s portrait inside of her studio suggest that the artist, apart from the produced work, commands a real presence. The uniform transplants me into the culture of the artist proposing that my fixation resides within the identity of production rather than the “actually produced”.

From a conversation with Jeremy Chen:

Joe: I operate with a self conscious, self deprecation. My uniforms seem to allow me to venerate the artist, myself, the museum without fully embracing the culture. I think that the cult of the artist is a safe place. I want the viewer to believe that I am venerating the artist, artist life, artist's wake. yet I want to remain outside of the culture so that when the shit hits the fan I am not pulled down. I deal a sharp sarcastic edge. When I am in the uniforms they allow me to temporarily be genius, insane, loved, tortured. And if I am not getting the response that I desire I only have to change my uniform.

Enter the constructed studio. The uniform is a chameleon by nature, where as the constructed studio is a fixed narrative. The constructed studio is also able to participate in the discourse of the ‘cult of the artist’. I constructed hypothetical working environments that might exist if I was producing artwork. These spaces ride a fine line between artifice and a personal mode of production. The work produced within these spaces was not appropriated. It is an actual creation, yet the studios are edited. From a safe place the constructed studio might portray a tortured artist and venerate the essential work that comes out of such a heavy burden. My work becomes a euphemism for itself, resisting total disclosure.

Chen: Is your work situating you in a place where you are distanced from the public? Essentially does the studio, the museum and the object as artifact keep us at a distance from the artist?

If the uniforms and the constructed studios do the work of the museum, then it is a testament to the mediation of art history. However vain or dishonest, the identity being constructed, the work that I produce comes out of a real desire to explore the manipulation of image and narrative. The distance that the viewer feels is a symptom of situation and spin.