An interview with sculptor Adam Distenfeld
by Simon Richardson
SR: You make holes in rocks.
AD: That's it.
SR: You seem to be working with themes of inside and outside. Skin and core.
AD: As a sculptor I'm working with solid and void. The interaction. Whole and hole.
SR: Your rocks remind me of the Willamette meteorite at the American Museum of Natural History. I’ve always been fascinated by that. The form of the metal mass is amazing--
AD: And to think of where it came from, how it got to be that way.
SR: Right, all the softer elements were burned away on entry to the earth's atmosphere so it's like a solid made of holes. But there is still an overall shape of the rock, despite the loss of material. That is how I see your rocks--as they are cut into and cored, light gains entry, the view becomes possible, and the unique shape of the rock is revealed.
AD: And each rock has its own shape and structure. The rock is formed by geological time and gets scarred by incidents with glaciers and bulldozers. Also, then my machine. I study a rock for a long time before I drill.
SR: The raw material is ordinary on one level—rocks, boulders--but on another level it presents an interesting starting point, each rock being totally one of a kind. It almost inverts the notion of where the originality of a piece of art comes in, in a total opposite to Duchamp’s ready-mades.
AD: Right, the origin of uniqueness is the rock. I come to it for an original interaction. I don’t set the terms exactly. Every rock presents certain opportunities and constraints.
SR: There’s an interesting visual contrast created in your sculptures between the two very different kinds of rock surfaces —inside and outside. The surface on the outside is rough and almost rusty.
AD: That's exactly what it is--metal oxidation. Rust makes the skin of the rock.
SR: Meanwhile the interior surface created by your coring the rock with your drill is smooth, highly machined. It bears the marks of the tool too, striations of the cutting process and even paint from the drill worn into the cut. It’s industrial, controlled, curved. There’s an interaction between the core drill teeth and the rock which makes this sort of striped negative cylinder.
AD: Like a ballistic signature.
SR: It exposes the inside of the rock, while fundamentally changing it at the same time, industrializing the center. There’s a real dialectic going on. It’s the juncture between nature and industry that I find compelling, played out between you with your machine and the rock itself.
AD: The machine mediates that relationship between human beings and nature. Me and the rock.
SR: And in the end, there’s the rock with holes, but there’s also the solid hole itself.
AD: The rock and the core.
SR: Interesting how those words are like inverse homophones to each other. So, which one is the art—rock or core? Or is it both?
AD: That’s a good question.
SR: They’re quite different from each other, though they come from the same process.
AD: I’m interested in how they stand on their own as two very distinct forms,
SR: As well as how the one indexes the other.
AD: When I cut two cores from a single rock, the mark of their intersection is left on the second core. That’s a real moment, which only leaves its trace on the second solid core.
SR: An index of the entire process.
AD: And of course because of it, the two cores fit together. Nested.
SR: Like a kiss—
AD: Yes.
SR: --echoing Rodin, Brancusi, in a twist on the long tradition of the kiss as a theme in the history of sculpture.
AD: Okay.
SR: It's an X. Like a Steinmetz solid--that’s the geometrical name for two cylinders at right angles to each other. The spatial intersection that gets formed by your coring the rock twice is like a three dimensional plus sign of negative space. And of course the re-paired cores, its solid counterpart.
AD: Right, it's the same form from two very different perspectives--the extracted solid core pair and the hollowed interior space.
SR: In some pieces, there’s even a sense of contrapasto, a way that the interior space torques as the two holes meet and make a kind of third hole of their own.
AD: The intersection.
SR: Exactly. Infinite passageways are opened there.
AD: I see the rock’s interior as a kind of mental space--
SR: A conceptual or imaginary place?
AD: Like a topology.
SR: What exactly is that anyway?
AD: It’s one of those terms that always escapes--
SR: I think that’s the idea, really.
AD: Most of my thinking about topology comes from reading Robbe-Grillet.
SR: He uses infinitous descriptive writing to reach a conceptual space.
AD: Exactly.
SR: As I understand it, topology is the mathematical description of impossible realities. It’s the use of a theoretical and abstract language to describe three-dimensional mental spaces that cannot exist in reality, but can be imagined, designed, and described.
AD: Sort of a way of articulating the landscape of imagination.
SR: That reminds me of the idea of “psychetecture” from Dean Motter’s “Mr. X” graphic novels.
AD: Yeah, I guess.
SR: -- the notion that physical space is psychological, that architecture has a psychological impact and affects our thinking. In the city that Mr. X designs, there are all these mysterious exits and entrances that only he knows about, impossible egresses that realize fantastical connections and imaginary relations in spatial terms.
AD: Sure.
SR: So let me ask more about the process. What kind of rock is it that you use?
AD: Most of my rocks are a type of granite called gneiss that was brought here by glaciers and deposited when they melted.
SR: It’s interesting to think of your interaction with them as a part of their path.
AD: Rocks have a history that is truly amazing. Here in Brooklyn the rocks I use were brought by glaciers millennia ago.
SR: It’s hard to think about because we take it all so for granted.
AD: Rocks have travelled across the face of the planet, landed, and been buried under the city, to be dug up, harvested, and trucked off again as landfill, making way for the next high-rise. I jump in right at the harvest stage. The city is in a state of constant destruction and construction.
SR: And history is always coming back up to the surface in that process.
AD: Prehistory. Exactly
SR: So where exactly do you get your rocks?
AD: From construction sites here in Brooklyn. For construction crews, it’s just an obstacle to urban development, something in the way of the next sky scraper or boiler room. For me, though, a rock in the mud is like a diamond in the rough. It’s an invitation, an opportunity to see what’s there and bring it out.
SR: It’s like you collect what the ground ejects.
AD: Yeah, or more like what the construction workers reject. Rocks are in their way, and they’re usually quite happy for me to cart them off. Otherwise they have to load them into trucks headed to landfills. I can save the crew some work, even save the company some cost. When I make a good connection with a crew, they’ll push rocks aside for me. They’ll keep me in mind.
SR: It can’t be easy to get them back to your workshop. It sounds Sisyphysian, you lugging rocks from construction sites to your studio.
AD: Yeah, well. Now I have a truck with a gantry and a studio in Williamsburg, Bushwick really. But when I started, it was a hand cart situation.
SR: It seems like there’s an environmental concern underlying your work as well as an objet trouvee aesthetic.
AD: I occupy a niche, where I'm using what someone else needs to get rid of. It works all the way around.
SR: So tell us what came before the rocks.
AD: Like many artists, I’ve been through lots of materials in developing my work.
SR: Right, it seems you worked extensively in wood as well--
AD: Yes. I used to approach sculpture as an additive process, and painting too even. In the Bondage show, I was playing with the ideas of how things are held together, and I was making those huge wood constructions held together by industrial metal straps. Just strings holding these things together. That work was kind of the end of additive sculpture for me, though I didn't know it at the time. When the pieces came tumbling down, so did an entire way of working.
SR: How so?
AD: I let go of the whole project of sculpture as holding things together. Before that, I was using the strongest glues and the largest bolts I could find to put wood pieces together in all kinds of ways. Additively. And as permanently as I could.
SR: Like in the City of Language.
AD: Right. Working subtractively opened up a whole new set of problems to solve, not to mention a range of outcomes to explore. It’s all about art making really. Working from the outside in is just a whole different approach. Working with rock just really changed what I was doing.
SR: So, who else’s work has affected you? How would you describe your artistic lineage?
AD: I was extremely fortunate to meet and talk with Gonzalo Fonseca in 1997 just before he died and to see his studio and his amazing work. That was a turning point for me in my art.
SR: How so?
AD: He turned me on to working in stone and he also was a great example to me of a lifetime artist.
SR: Who else?
AD: Other sculptors. Noguchi. Brancusi. I look at their work with awe and admiration. Rodin and Moore are important. Gordon Matta-Clarke is a real favorite of mine as well-- I like what he did to buildings, coring them.
SR: Like you do to rocks.
AD: Right.
SR: Anyone else?
AD: A lot of my inspiration comes from prehistory, especially the ancient works whose artists we don't know. The stone rings and cities carved into cliffs. Avebury. Petra. Lalibela. Machu Pichu. I’m very interested in archeology and history. I try to think of the future in such long distance terms as well.
SR: What else inspired you?
AD: The idea of the city runs throughout my work. I was raised on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the 70's, so the city and its spatial arrangements have always spurred my thinking. As kids, we played in the center of the block with the buildings all around, inside donut of the block, and I am always noticing the passageways that lead in to those center spaces. My first drawings were of the building being built outside my window.
SR: So your relationship with construction sites goes way back.
AD: I guess you could say that.
SR: Hindsight probably makes the path look more linear than it was.
AD: In fact, I worked with construction site materials for a decade before I started with rocks. My work really started taking on this construction material dimension in the 90’s when I made the “Construction Sight” show and then the “Bondage Show”, though I was still working additively at that point.
SR: You’ve studied art formally as well, I understand.
AD: Right. I studied with Robert Morris, Andrea Blum, Tony Milkowski, and Nade Haley at Hunter. From them, I came to think about sculpture not only in terms of spatial form, but also in terms of time.
SR: Time?
AD: Yeah. Time. The time to see, for instance. Sculpture takes time in that you have to move around it to see it all. For a sculptor, there’s an opportunity to diversify the points of view. When you walk around a cored rock, light works differently at every angle. It takes time to see that.
SR: So you’re working with light as well as rock. Almost like a material in itself.
AD: Of course. But also, there’s the time involved with materials themselves. How long they last, how they weather years. For me, working in rock is very reassuring. I've always sought permanence in my art, and rock as a material satisfies that need more than any other I’ve worked with.
SR: Thank you.