Antiques from the Future: A conversation with artist Jesse Small of Torrance, California who also works in a studio in southern China. Recorded at Moberg Gallery, Des Moines, Iowa, USA. February, 2011

By Jim Duncan

(This interview was conducted through a voice recorder, transcription has been edited to make sense.)

Q - You've done quite a bit of public art so I imagine a lot of folks in Des Moines might have seen your work without realizing it. Where in Central Iowa have you completed projects?

A - In 2009 I created public art at the Wellness Center in Clive. That's a series of nine large steel pieces like trees, grouped together to form a "canopy" for pedestrians. The site is an entrance to a hospital, so I created forms that celebrate biological growth and survival. I want the mood to be as uplifting as possible.

The other project in Iowa is in Marshalltown at a new library. There is a beautiful large atrium. They had seen my hanging sculptures and thought it would be really cool if I came up with some hanging pieces designed specifically for that atrium. I am really happy with that project - a dozen or so chandelier-like pieces floating around. Each piece represents different branches of research, while remaining quite abstract. I was designing the work for the Libraries dominant theme of study and organization. Many children notice it and respond to it, it appeals to the broad range of Library users.

Since then, I have shown here at Moberg Gallery and I was in a group show at the Des Moines Art Center in 2008. I think that's it for public displays here of my work. There have also been some private collectors here who commissioned major pieces for their home.

Q - Your art has long been influenced by weaponry. What about weapons fascinates you?

A - Vandalizing them. For as long I have been studying and making art I have been interested in the idea of ornamentation - the idea of taking a plain object and beautifying it. This is what we have been doing since the dawn of civilization, to create value and identity. You may need a simple bag to carry your stuff but you also need to embellish it. Today it's gone crazy, we exist within layers of digital and theoretical ornament. Extremely few people want true Minimalism... which is itself a product of ornament's ubiquity. Let loose, contemporary architecture is covered in ornamentation. Products are the same.

Taking something so purely functional, like army helmets and Jeep tires, and converting them into porcelain and glazes and filigree, I think I have converted something brutal into something decorative. Function is sucked out and symbolism remains. The ornament cannot coexist with the function, it overwrites as the dominant theme, therefore vandalizing the object. Form may follow function, but ornament muds over the agenda. Ornamentationism believes it can convert brutality into something beautiful by rendering it useless. Put simpler, kill with kindness.

Q- Lately you have implemented this same process on less militaristic objects. How did that develop?

A - I am representing items we interact with everyday, items which have a deep historical discontinuity. My attention turned to resurrecting the classics while traveling and working outside the US, which I started doing a lot in 2006. Getting away from American culture, I realized that objects that are readily recognized in America, such as Jeeps and army helmets, have obscure meanings elsewhere. I wanted to dig locally. While working in China I got interested in more internationally recognized symbols and found that video games were pan cultural and pan generational. Pac Man was invented in Japan but spread everywhere in the world. Other games are just as international. I guess I started weaving these influences into a fabric.

Now I feel I am going for the throat of ornamentation: making pieces that inch beyond representation- actual folding screens and functional chandeliers. They might be stylistically unusual, but they are functioning in their traditional roles. My new chandeliers, unlike the ones in Marshalltown, are actual functioning chandeliers - with lights and wiring. It's a new conceptual level for me to re-inact timeless creative agendas, and I'm seeing it as the poison that is the cure.

Q - How does that change the dynamic between art and audience?

A - Here the chandelier is in this art gallery. Is it design? Is it a product? Being in the Art context helps make it harder to answer yes or no. Opening a conversation with the audience with this ambiguity, where they can approach the work and have a dialogue about what's going on without ever being wrong is my goal. Functional pieces in an art context become a kind of anti-matter / anti-product. A little bit of ambiguity is essential here.

For centuries, the same ornamental styles have been regurgitated ad infinitum. The molding in the kitchen cabinets of a brand new suburban tract home are thousands of years old. All that changes is that context they are used in, which is becoming increasingly naive. Look at a typical suburban house and you see Neo Classical stuff going on and French Colonial stuff and Baroque stuff all going on and most people aren't translating any of it. They just call it “fancy.” What they see is a mish mash of many decorative styles that originally had no geographic relationship to each other.

So within that chaos, I see things like this: If everything around us is smashed together from 4000 years of ornamental history, then where is the rule book? Every ornamental style had a birth point at some place by a particular creator. Well, I can do that too. We are all doing it with our Facebooks and blogs already...Rapid Customization has arrived, now lets hack into it.

Q- What are some of styles that clash in your own personal creative dialectic then?

A - I am interested in the idea of antiques of the future. Since we have been using chandeliers for the last 4000 years, probably we'll be using them for the next 4000 years. What will a chandelier look like then? I am interested in how the future will continue to digest the classics... and what meanings they will embody then. Influences that came out of the 1980's - when I went to dark places where video games stood in their unique big boxes and had their own decorations in neon and grids and light bulbs... it may have been too campy and cheap looking. The reach I am doing in my work here is to imagine the result of what another 4000 years of geographic recontextualization and hybridization "did" to it.