In anticipation of our second In Studio visit on February 3rd, Mercer Union President Juliana Zalucky interviews 2010 Grange Prize winner Kristan Horton.

Ephemera related to Oracle is included in the Out of Print exhibition, currently on view at Mercer Union until February 26, 2011.



Oracle, 2000

Juliana: You are often described as having an “intense studio practice”, and with series like ‘Dr Strangelove Dr. Strangelove’, ‘Cig2Coke2Tin2Coff2Milk’ and ‘Orbits’ your studio environment seems to take center-stage in your work, why do you think that is?

Kristan: Cubist and Futurist projects seek to re picture the familiar world. I like rediscovery. For me it
outlines the fragile nature of how we identify the world and the potential to upset settled notions of
what is.

I also like how this re picturing of the world, about perception and epistemological concerns, can
occur through the most humble of materials. Cubist and Futurist artists saw that you can begin by refiguring the most commonplace items. In philosophy we are often centering lines of thought around simple, familiar things, like the thought that leads the carving of raw wood into an axe handle. I support the idea that it is a critical territory to engage.

There is something sticky about commonplace objects in terms of our conviction. It can be upsetting to encounter alternative conceptions of the things we rely on the most because utility or practicalities are involved. If we had to debate a doorknob every time we used one we’d never get anywhere. At the same time, arguing over whether a table in a room is real, or some such thing, it is at once ridiculous and critical. It strikes at assumptions in a way that more exotic contingencies do not. Something close to home.

I remember reading Kierkegaard where he discusses immediacy. Immediacy is the safeguard against the potential dangers implicit in the modern age’s necessity for reflection. He worried that reflection should always relate to immediacy without which we might detach from reality. I think I have always tried to work against that detachment by latching onto the objects that exist for me in daily life. Hegel would say this immediacy is synthesis in disguise; that we are fooling ourselves to believe in anything un-mediated. I’m docile enough to appreciate both points of view. I feel like a double agent in the cold war between Hegel’s hunt for mediation and Existentialism’s assertive value for the real.

And this is by far, not the end of the concern. For example, how these objects define the scope of the individual: the garage, the basement, the kitchen, etc, as a rhetorical notion and to treat it with
rhetorical importance in mind. I’m interested in what individuals have to offer, in the same sense as Montaigne did in 16th century France. The individual as worthy of study. The individual has been under siege in contemporary society. “The self under siege” titles a contemporary university lecture. Or the contemporary conception of the part as it relates to the whole. We can keep going I think. It’s an expansive concern.

From Dr Strangelove Dr Strangelove, 2003-2006

” ”

J: Are we then to interpret these objects as part of highly devised personal vocabulary aiming to articulate the contemporary state of being? And if these objects “define the scope of the individual” and that same individual is “under siege in contemporary society” is there an inherent conflict at play in your work since the elements that define your world (coke cans, cigarettes, etc…), are also some of the most recognizable culprits of our materially saturated modern life?



Cig2Coke2Tin2Coff2Milk, 2006
6 minute stop motion animation


K: That’s a great observation and it brings up a point. These are not moral or ethical imperatives for me. For example, ‘articulat[ing] the contemporary state of being’ would just be another point of rhetoric to me, something worth looking at. The salient definition of philosophy follows that if you believe it, it is no longer philosophy. I’m interested in these things from a complex of perspectives. So you are quite correct to locate the inherent conflicts, without which these issues fall flat for me. It would follow to interrogate the various articulations of rhetoric, ie., why is this, now, for who, to what end? But not like a journalist, not like a scientist, not for politics, but as an artist. [and I look to history to help define what the artist response has been in order to inform what it can be today]


J: Your practice is quite multi-disciplinary, (drawing, sculpture, photography and video) and seemingly driven by your interest to experiment with new materials. What are the other driving forces in your work? As an artist, what excites you?

K: Actually, I would not say that experimentation with new material is the starting point for me. Its
almost exclusively in thought that a beginning could be identified. At the same time I would agree
with you that I like to experiment with media, and shift media, and try new things. It is probably a
reciprocating situation or a tautology of sorts.

Considering the ‘driving forces’ in my work, I get a vision of Caligula charging in a multi-horse chariot.


J: Components of your ever-evolving project ‘Oracle’ are featured in the current Mercer exhibition ‘Out of Print’, can you discuss the project? And do you view it as a homage to the book?

K: The scope of Oracle does seem to have expanded over time. It was never the intention. In fact, Oracle began as a proposition within another artwork operating under the title The Magazine Project. That project consisted of presenting artwork in the form of a periodical. Oracle’s origin grew from that manifestation. The Magazine Project was initiated to follow a certain line of thought, or maybe a conviction. If it were true that a great deal of knowledge of artworks comes from secondary sources like catalogs, magazines, coffee-table books etc., then it seemed trivial to actually make the work when clearly a simulation functioned. Oracle emerged from this simulation and became its own simulation as a separate work entitled Oracle. And if I work a little harder I might make that last sentence into a palindrome. Now Oracle is the machine that turns books-on-tape back into books. It’s what I would call a highly realized artwork. I built various machines, I researched all the technology and made working local solutions, I built scale models, etc. I seemed to do everything short of actually building the final machine. And I was documenting all these changes, although I wasn’t really sure about it all. To return to the opening remark about the scope of Oracle, I seem to have just let it expand and be remade and represented and remade again as a kind of evolving proposition. And it continues with the ephemera version currently at Mercer. In a more abstract sense, Oracle is the result of varying resistance to its own definition.

I don’t see Oracle’s various propositions as an homage to the book. No. If anything it is a question
about the forms of media, the form of the book. In the Oracle catalog there is an artist interview, which doesn’t make a lot of sense because I never went back and edited it properly [which is probably the best thing about it now]. There is a passage about the shift from a dynamic oral tradition of telling stories, to a Gutenberg-like stasis and reorganization of story into textual referent. It’s a question about knowledge and how we acquire it and the nature of our source.


J: Both ‘Oracle’ and the series ‘Drawing of A History of the First World War’ are based on audio books, what is your interest in books on tape?



Drawing Of The History Of The First World War, 2008


K: Or books on disc, or tape, or vinyl, or acetate, or …? Part of the interest is how content can travel
through what we are calling media. Media, etymologically, refers to being literally between. So we
are starting to conjure the general apparatus of communication; in its simplest form A is speaking to B = I speaking to You. Media allows us to expand the relationships of communication over space and time. The contemporary interest in the archive has never seemed stronger than today. So there are all these conversations going on in the world, some immediate, and some not. Some of us are speaking to our neighbors and some of us are speaking with Thomas Jefferson, or Susan Sontag, or Liberace. And they to us. When I listen to the actor Simon Prebble read the British historian John Keegan’s account of The First World War and feel I understand something about that war, it registers for me as a small miracle. But it also heightens my sense of never having the truth, or the real, or whatever we would like to call the source. There are competing voices. When I work through such media it is an attempt to join this flow. The result is a manifestation of another encounter that registers as unique and at the same time recapitulated.

As a side note: The structures of media attract me. There’s that joke that without time everything
would happen at once. So there is a history of structure responsible for holding time and space apart. The sequential tiling of ancient mosaics, the ribbon spiral of Trajan’s column, the inverted conical conception of hell in Dante’s Inferno [for a realm without time even!], the story of Christ depicted in a single painting by Memling Passie, the scroll, the book, the tape, the record, the disc, the drive,. et. al. And watching what happens when one [media] shifts into another into another.


J: Your interest in the “shift” is quite evident as it occurs often in your work; in ‘Dr. Strangelove Dr. Strangelove’ you shifted from the film still to the still life, in ‘Cig2Coke2Tin2Coff2Milk’ you shifted from one material to another and even in ‘Orbits’ there is an actual physical “shifting” that is required by your body (albeit in a circular motion) to render the kaleidoscopic portraits of objects piled on your studio floor. Perhaps it is not the structures of media but their malleability that interests you most?




Orbits: Dark Center, 2009

K: Both are of vital interest to me. But I think you are correct in the sense that my work is not about formal structural concerns like a systematic study or architectural appraisal or some such approach.

I think it would be misleading to defer my practice to simply what happens when content moves through media. That would bore the hell out of me. My interests aren’t in what passively occurs. I am keen on the intervention. I think its been more about paying attention and responding and directing what happens.