Kevin Curran Interview: Part III

Read the first and second parts of my interview with Kevin Curran, Bushwick-based artist and curatorial director of The Laundromat.

Kevin Curran: It sounds to me like what your asking is, “Where is this all going? What’s your plan? What’s your goal?” Whether it be in my own studio, or in curating, or whatever.

Reid Singer: Yeah. I freely acknowledge that it can be dicey.

KC: What do you mean?

RS: Well, first of all, people’s ambitions and their egos are very delicately woven together, like, “What are your dreams, man?”

KC: That also borders on being dangerously sincere. [We both snigger.]

RS: Well, I’m really curious and I didn’t know quite how to phrase it the first time.

KC: Well, obviously everyone wants to be recognized for what they’re doing. It’s sort of like when you start applying to graduate school or whatever, and then you start to sort of realize, the next year, when you’re in graduate school and you see people applying, everyone says, “It’s a roll of the dice. It’s the people who are in that room at that moment, and what they’re thinking about at that time.” It gets so murky, that value judgement about you. As the person who’s applying, it’s so personal. It’s so painful to get rejected from stuff. Everyone in graduate school thinks they’re going to get their first show, their first solo show in New York at this time, and it’s going to happen, and I’m going to be with all these collectors, and blah blah blah.

The one thing I would say is at least my approach to it has been that I just want to get involved in all aspects of what it is to be an artist, so I am into studying about art, and looking at art. I’m into teaching art classes, and talking to students about their art, and what I think.

That really helps me think about art myself: looking at art, teaching about art, working in exhibitions, organizing shows, seeing how people react to art, and then making my own art. All these things. Every angle. Sometimes I think about it that way. I’m going to work every angle.

RS: That’s one of your goals?

KC: Yeah, just get into everything. I will learn more that way, about art, about myself, about different attitudes, about what people think about art, all that stuff. Maybe I have a short attention span. Maybe I like to jump around and not be just focused on one thing.

RS: What’s the longest amount of time, for example, that you’ve spent just making art? Or does that not even happen?

KC: Well, I’ve made pieces that have taken me months to make.

RS: But during that time, were you exposing yourself to anything else that would’ve affected your process? Have you ever been devoting your energy just to making art, or teaching?

KC: Well, yeah. For instance, the last two years I’ve been in Japan, I’ve been teaching art history, and I don’t have a background in art history, so, just out of necessity, I haven’t had that much time to make my own work.

RS: What category of art history were you teaching?

KC: I teach a real easy one. I teach the survey from Giotto to now, and I also teach Modern Art, which is like Post-war, which has been great for me. I’ve learned a ton. I’ve looked at so much work. At Yves Klein, or Piero Manzoni, people who you don’t really hear much about but who are really amazing. Or even somebody like Francis Bacon, who might be out of style now.

RS: How long ago was that Met show of his? Two or three years ago?

KC: Oh, I don’t even remember. So, there are periods where I’ve had no time to do anything but study and teach. When I had a show in Tokyo in 2009, and I was teaching, but I had this solo show, I was working my ass off, every second I had that wasn’t devoted to working with students, I was hiring assistants, and making my sculptures, and working on my installation. It goes in fits. There’ll be periods where I’m very, very busy on one thing, and it’ll change and I’ll be very busy with something else.

RS: To pay the rent and everything, just making that happen, are you happy with how you’re having to budget your time lately?

KC: Well, no. Obviously, I’d rather just work and sell my work.

RS: I mean are you relatively satisfied, things being as they are, your constraints being as they are?

KC: Well, recently, I just took a job where I work four days a week instead of five. It’s at a gallery and I do like it, because I get to listen in on them talk to their clients and how they talk about art. I never really had any exposure to that, at a high-end gallery. How they work it. How they create the aura of desire around these things. That’s been really interesting. Also, the historical contexts that they put on things, like, “How do you establish value?” I’ve heard some very frank conversations about these issues, which I find very interesting.

Ideally, I then have a third day, that three-day weekend to work in my studio. I work at night from ten ‘til one in the morning. I do have more of a routine now, but I’m leaving in three weeks, so it’ll be all up in the air again.

RS: Are you excited to be getting back to Japan?

KC: Absolutely. In the context of current events, which I usually try to shy away from, I think it could be interesting at this moment. I was worried for my students. How do I deal with this semester? Are they all going to be traumatized? Are they all going to be freaked out?

RS: Are they all going to grasp out at the first possible opportunity to think about what it’s like to be somewhere else? To think about what it’s like to be in America?

KC: I think each of them have that curiosity, but are they going to want to make work about an earthquake and a tsunami? I’m not sure. When momentous events happen, what do you do? That’s something that I don’t typically try to do. I won’t make a 9-11 artwork.

RS: Thanks.

KC: It would be horrible! But, if this project goes on, we’ll see. They’re kind of a reserved culture, I don’t think anybody would make that kind of a gesture. In that culture, how do you express yourself when something has happened?

RS: And you’re going to be there for how long?

KC: Two and a half months.

RS: That’s a semester or a term?

KC: Yeah. That’s a semester.

RS: How’s your Japanese?

KC: It’s okay. I’ve been practicing. There’s a website called Language Exchange, where you can meet a partner who wants to practice English.

RS: And talk to them on Skype?

KC: You can meet them on Skype, or you can meet them in person. The dude I is like, “I’m in my early 30s, I like baseball, I like drinking beer.” I was like, “Dude! We can meet at a bar. We can watch baseball games.” We chat. He helps me with my Japanese. It’s getting better.

Kevin Curran Interview: Part I

Last month, I was able to speak with Kevin Curran, a Bushwick-based artist and curatorial director of The Laundromat. Kevin is currently teaching Art History and 3-D Design to summer session students at Temple University's campus in Tokyo. Here's how it went:

Reid Singer: What was your background in curating before you started The Laundromat?

Kevin Curran: At Tyler, where I went to school, you can get full funding for both years of graduate school if you get the exhibitions graduate assistantship. I’d  organized exhibitions during undergrad,  and also during the four years after that when I worked at Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, so I put that on my application.

At Tyler, part of my job was to supervise or act as the director of the undergraduate exhibitions club, and the other part of it was managing the building of installations in the gallery for the Tyler Exhibitions program. The logistics: moving stuff around, getting the U-Haul, hanging the art. I was not usually on the writing side of things at that point. It was more like the actual physical part.

RS: Did you get to choose any of the art for the students’ exhibition program?

Omar Rodriguez-Graham. Sebastian Sendado, 2009. 180 x 200 cm. Oil on cotton canvas and linen.

KC: Well, no, because ideally the students choose the artists, but I had to help them come up with a structure to do that. So, the one show we came up with was “First Year Out.” It was curated from artists that were in their first year out of undergraduate. The idea was just to get the students a sense of what could come next. I was more interested in helping the students see what they could do after they graduated. Other people, like the guy who preceded me, he was better at getting big-name people involved, and doing really exciting stuff with that.

RS: Who was that?

KC: Omar Rodriguez-Graham. It’s actually the guy who’s guest-curating the next show at the Laundromat, artists from Mexico City [Naturaleza Muerta]. But my focus was more: “What’s attainable for you? What’s the next step? What’s the next thing that’s going to happen when you leave here? How can you make something happen?”

RS: Did you do anything significant between then and when you started the Laundromat?

KC: Well, I thought I was going to work in a gallery when I moved to NY. I thought I was going to be an art handler or something. I interviewed at a bunch of places, but nobody would hire me, because you have to have experience in NY to get a job in NY. There was that paradox. Or you had to know somebody. The director of exhibitions at Tyler knew a few people, but nothing happened that way. So I ended up working at this furniture store for a few months, and then I bailed out. I was on NYFA [New York Foundation for the Arts] classifieds every day looking for a new job, and I got a job art installing for a company called ILevel. We worked for Art Consultants, Interior Designers, some galleries and also private collectors. This was great because I installed art in a lot of different contexts: fabulous and modest apartments and homes, corporate offices, art fairs, retail stores, medical offices, etc. Pretty much everywhere.

At that time I was still living in Sunset Park, in Brooklyn. I didn’t have a studio. It was a really weird situation. Have you been to that neighborhood before? In Sunset Park?

RS: Yeah. It’s pretty.

KC: I mean, it’s pretty cool. It’s not like Bushwick at all. It’s different. There’s just no young artists’ scene there besides the warehouses down by the water. So luckily we got this studio, my old Bushwick space, on Melrose, 238 Melrose, which was above this laundromat, that’s how we ended up with the moniker, “The Laundromat,” and my studio initially was huge. It was twenty by twenty, which for me was awesome, but I wasn’t always making a ton of work in there. I was making work, but it would be kind of fitful. Also, I would be leaving the country, going to Japan every summer. So I started thinking: “OK, how can I use this space in another way that’s creative? I need to take advantage of this space.”

First I thought I would maybe do a residency. When I would go to Japan, I could have a residency program in my studio. Then I thought, maybe the thing to do would be to have a show in there. Then I was like, “Oh. I’ll just do shows in there.” So that’s how it got off the ground. It just sort of progressed. I wasn’t like, “Oh. I’m going to be a curator,” or anything. I just sort of felt like I was under-utilizing my studio a little bit, or I wanted to find another way to use it.

RS: What were you doing in Japan?

KC: Part of Tyler is they have a campus in Rome and a campus in Tokyo. After my first year I went to the Rome campus for the summer program, then after my second year I went to the Tokyo campus for the summer program, to finish, and then it just happened that someone was leaving for like a hiatus, so they asked me to apply for that position, to teach 3-D design over there, so I started teaching there in the summers. I’ve been doing that since 2007. I’m leaving in three weeks to go over there again.

RS: How would generally describe your curating style since you started The Laundromat?

KC: I guess I would put it this way: you have a group of friends, another group of friends, and they don’t know each other, and then you have a party, to make everybody meet each other? That’s basically what I do with it.

RS: You talked a second ago about difficulties with respect to finding work, a lot of that depends on knowing the right people. Have you felt like a good middle man?

KC: I guess. It’s like, you have your cohort that you go to school with. Some of them move to NY when school ends. Then you get jobs that are random, and if you’re an artist then a lot of your jobs are art-related, and those people are all artists, and so you’re starting to build this community, and you already have this other community going, so for me the beginning of it was that.

That was maybe the first year of the program: the Tyler people, plus these other kind of art-handlers, or people I was meeting, secondary, through New York. The second year was a lot of people from Japan that I met through teaching over there, young artists from the program that I hadn’t taught myself, but I had known, who were graduating.

Takayuki Kuboda. Vincent Van Gogh, Shoes, 2009. Oil on canvas.

RS: Who was the one with the wall placards?

KC: You’re thinking of Takayuki Kubota. He was the last one. Takayuki is actually a great example because he had a review in Flash Art when he was a sophomore in college. His work is killer. And he worked for the Asian Art Archive, so what his job was in Tokyo was to go around and keep track of what’s happening, and as a result he knows everybody now. And then we had Maiko Shioda and Joe Protheroe, and then we did Takashi Matsumoto and Liz Atzberger, sort of in backwards order. That season was the idea of bridging that place and this place. Takayuki had a solo show, too, because he was ready for that.

RS: How would you define the Bushwick audience?

KC: Well, here, it’s more like art made by artists for other artists, whereas in Chelsea it’s more made by business people for other business people to consume these things that are proven commodities, or speculative commodities. There’s a whole business side of it.

I mean, I love selling work. I’d love to sell everything. I’d love to get that Porsche. But I’m not running myself ragged to also make the sale. I want the show to look awesome. For me, that’s the goal. Part of it is connections. I guess I don’t have people who collect.

RS: Are you ambitious about that?

KC: I haven’t been so far. When people come I always have the price list. I tend to sell work in the $450 range, all ready-to-hang. Usually these are framed. It’s like, put a nail up, and you got it.

We’ve sold a fair amount of work. And we did this other show this year that was more intended to get people to buy stuff. Everything we sold we sold for $100, which is not aiming at that guy who’s showing up in his car service or his limo. Again, it’s intended for people like you and me to begin collecting. The idea is more, in 10 years, who knows?

Right now, we’re all kind of speculating about each other. We all don’t know where we’re going to go, what’s going to happen with it, who’s going to end up becoming somehow recognized or important, but right now, it’s all on the same level.

RS: How have you envisioned your goals, as far as wanting to keep doing this, the kind of curating that you want to try to do at the Laundromat?

KC: I guess it’s not really defined by economic imperatives. It’s more a community-oriented kind of thing. Not in that warm and fuzzy way. I want to make realistic shows. It’s not like, “Oh, you’re my friend, you’re going to be in my show.” and that’s one of the hardest things to do is to tell somebody: “No.” Actually the best thing to do is say: “Oh, I’ll think about it. I’ll get back to you.”

It’s surprising. Especially now that I’m in the third year or fourth year that we’re doing this, I get a lot cold calls and emails from people saying: “Hey. I’m this artist in Yugoslavia. I’m really excited to do a show.” It’s crazy. I really don’t ever respond to that. Well, sometimes. I used to write back to people just ‘cause I felt like it’s nice to write back. I haven’t been doing it as much lately.