Oliver Herring

From watching the Art21 video it is evident that Oliver Herring’s work is about process. He himself states that he “doesn’t care about the medium…[or] the object” but he “care[s] very much about the process.” Moreover, his work also seems to be fuelled by his emotions and his desire to connect with people and reflect this connection in his work.

To me, this is most evident in his knitting practice, which he states was borne out of the sadness that overcame him after the suicide of an artist who had idolised. He states that knitting took all the “colour and expressiveness” out of his work, and instead he subjected himself to the monotony of the task, never making more than one kind of stitch. Herring himself admits that turning to knitting wasn’t “a conceptual decision” rather it was “an emotional one,” and engaging in this act was “never about knitting it was about performance, going through one motion repetitively for ten years.” To me this is quite powerful evidence of the fact that in Herring’s work, process is the method by which he constructs meaning. The very fact that his knitted works show the transition in his work from impressionistic to uniform as a result of an emotional trauma, is a testament to the role of time in developing his works. The process metaphor of a work of art being the sole product of time and one, singular action, as well as the statement that Herring makes by openly subjecting himself to the rhythm of monotony is indicative of the personal investment he makes into his work, as a mode through which he resolves whatever emotional turmoil he has internalised. Moreover, the simplicity of his work, and his knitting specifically I think is something to be acknowledged. He mentions right at the beginning of the Art21 video that he likes to boil things down to an essence, which results from the fact that english is a foreign language to him and only having been able to express himself in crude ways, he was forced to make himself clear (which to me raises the question of why english is often considered the “default” language when it is not even the most widely spoken language by number of native speakers, but I think that is a whole other discussion to be had). I think this desire to be concise is heavily reflected in his works, which often are a product of a complex process but in themselves are quite simple. Personally, I believe this makes the legacy of his processes and the meaning that they hold, all the more accessible for an audience. When you know an artist has spent 10 years doing the exact same thing constantly, and you are consciously aware of how demanding and possibly torturous that can be, it is easier to comprehend the intensity of the emotion that fuelled the creation of the work.

This self-submission to monotony reminds me of Tehching Hsieh’s One Year Performance (1980 – 1981) (Fig 2) in which he captured 8627 mugshots of himself in his Manhattan studio where he spent 12 months punching a time clock every hour, on the hour, 24 hours a day. According to the Guardian the photographs in this work “chronicle a period during which the….performance artist subjected himself to an extraordinary ordeal of sleep deprivation in a relentless quest to investigate the nature of time and methodically observe time’s passing.” Both Herring and Hsieh’s work according to the artists themselves constitutes a performance that is intend to convey meaning symbolically rather than literally, and in my opinion the former also investigates time in the same way as the latter as when Herring was “locked into a project the only thing that could really move was [his] mind.” This act of purposefully caging in the mind, to investigate and work through a personal trauma is a reflection of how Herring employs time as a medium to construct meaning.

Furthermore, Herring also mentions that as a result of this caging in, his videos were produced as a mode through which he could “express what was going on in his mind.” The notion of using video as an escapist fantasy is something that he repeatedly emphasises as he recalls how his work Exit is based on dreams he has while knitting, and reiterates how his video practice was a way for him to be “flamboyant.” This is intriguing to me as it shows how new and innovative ideas can really be birthed out of monotony or repetition, which is quite a paradoxical concept in my opinion. It shows how the mind can become liberated from its constraints, through the imposition of constraints itself, which is not something that is very common, yet Herring shows how effective and interesting it can be. The incorporation of strangers into his video practice again goes back to Herring’s desire to integrate emotion into his works. He explicitly states that what he is really after in his videos is finding “a personal connection with a stranger in some way” and that he doesn’t see the people who participate in his videos as “actors or models.” Additionally, he also states that the eccentricity of his process as he photographs or records strangers gives rise to a sense of intimacy that transcends the awkward formality that might normally accompany a new relationship, and in establishing such a close connection with his participants, what he really seeks to capture is that one moment of intimate and real connect between himself and this stranger. I find this to be quite a profound implication of his work as it is a reminder that simplicity and the attempts to appeal to the humanity of others often yield the most successful works of art.

Provided References:
Oliver Herring
Max Neuhaus
Max Neuhaus in Times Square

Work from:
12th Nov 2020 – Daily Vitamins Assignment
Time with Professor Mike Rader