JOEL HOLUB
- John LeKay: When brought about the making of the heads on the water bottles, paint cans, milk cartons and nail polish removers and what are they made out of?
Joel Holub: The heads began when I was working on performances using puppets. I stuck one puppet head on a liter bottle of Coke - just as a
support. Like many of my works in progress in my studio, I liked the way it looked, but I also had a surprising recollection. I remembered
an elementary school project my brother had made--a simple bottle with a plaster of Paris head. As a five year old, I was fascinated by the
head and the bottleıs hollowness, and I remember longing to make one also.
A year after I made the first puppets, I was working on landscape drawings and watercolors reconstructed from memory. These works were
un-peopled, so the idea came to me to begin sculptural portraits which were as ephemeral as the memory paintings. The supports for these ³heads² became mostly empty or half spent household containers.
When I began making them two influences hovered about me: one was an image on an old Brooklyn Museum postcard of Egyptian canopic jars that was kicking around my studio and the other was the wax on plaster works of Medardo Rosso.
- The heads I make are made from Sculpey, epoxy, then painted in acrylic, and finally dipped into a wax. While I love Rossoıs process and effect, I wanted to footnote my work with late Romanticism and use wax to bridge other ideas. With the wax Iım thinking of such things as the act of sealing to candles stuck in the necks of wine bottles.
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JL: Were all of these heads made form memory?
Joel Holub: All the heads are done from memory. Theyıre all made from drawings that are rendered anywhere from an hour to a few days after
seeing a subject. A lot of these subjects are seen for only a second in passing. A very small amount of the subjects are people I know, so, I
can take more mental notes, but I still use no models or photos.
JL: I notice quite a few have bald heads and goatees. Do the goatees signify anything?
Joel Holub: Yes, the bald men with goatees. I have been collecting, singling out, a type of male look that has fascinated and
amused me. Most of these types are mounted on the many water-bottles Iıve collected. I felt the bald, goatee look was a very contemporary
American male thing. My original approach was wrong; like so much with memory in general, my approach was contaminated by prejudice. I feltthe look was a physical manifestation of a conservative manly man, WWF, biker, jock thing. I originally called them my ³Kerik² type, because in my mind I was sure that was how Bernard Kerik looked. But, nope, bald yes, only a mustache though, no goatee. Further observation revealed that the look crossed political and cultural boundaries. I suspect the recent incarnation of this look was originally a kind of hipster response to baldness.
JL: The half filled liquid water bottles attached to the heads, brings to mind Vietnam and Iraq war vets, with no arms and legs, having to urinate into bottles or urine bags. Did this thought ever cross your mind in making these pieces?
Joel Holub: Fantastic interpretation John! Well, the water bottles do bring to my mind the piss bottles that those whoıve done construction/renovation have fond memories off. But, no, not veterans.
Lurking around any sculpted, isolated body part always is an implication of violence and morbid materialism. A sculpture of a head always strikes me as resting on some brutal invisible pike.
I realize there is a psychic despair about these pieces: just heads, the bodies are half weighted containers, pragmatic structures of depleted use-value. Worse yet, no limbs, no means to action.But, you are sensing a direction Iıve been thinking off! As I have mentioned, a seed has sprouted from these subjects? Over the past two years, photos and articles about veterans coupled with my looking at early George Grosz drawings and paintings have been making me think about phantom limbs and prosthesis. Where I go with this? Itıs to soon to say.
JL: Can you tell me more about your working process. Do you have a particular method, system that works for you in making art in general?
Joel Holub: Projects beget new projects in a flowing conversational way. Occasionally, there are digressions. But on the whole a kind of slow refinement is how I illustrate ideas and feelings. Extremely slow.
- Most projects take time to gestate. Often the research and development can bog down and temporarily stop an idea from being materially realized. My core ideas often have within their orbit source materials: people, text, all manner of popular culture and always lifeıs little prosaic details, all of which contain the seeds for new projects.
- JL: What I
really like about this work and your work in general is that
I'm not sure how to take it. I find it really funny, but
also disturbing. How important is humor to you and your
work and where do you think this un-ordinary sense of humour
comes from?
Joel Holub: Yeah, humor is real important especially to keep dangerously seductive tendencies in check. Itıs also unavoidable when youıve grown up with a sarcastic, wisecracking Dad.
In my work Iım drawn to Romanticism - and end up snuggling up to and attempting to deal with the failure of sentiment. So humor is not so much armor, as protective gloves and long handled tongs.
- Like many,
Iım drawn to the subtle absurdities that surround us, but a
frustrating tension always remains. Strangely, I keep
putting pebbles in my shoes
Humor, yes, but thereıs a lot of anger in the mix. All these people, and places Iım attracted to but can make no real connection with. This is the case for how I treat masculinity with some of the male portraits, and partially why I chose to mount them on something ubiquitous like water bottles.
JL: How did you decide on which head went with the type of bottle. Was it based on colour or something else?
Joel Holub: On the whole, the choice of bottle or container is arbitrary. Color and shape have to feel right with the portrait. Itıs nice to have some things under-determined. In some cases, I aim for an ironic coupling between head and container. Itıs risky, though.Thereıs always a danger of it becoming trite.
JL: Why are they placed on the floor as opposed to having then on a pedestal?
Joel Holub: I'm still testing this out. I have not ruled out elevating them on a platform. Either way I've been thinking of having them rest on a white reflective surface.
JL: What else are you working on?
Iım working on a project dealing with what has now become the second official flag of the United States; the POW/MIA flag. The project is a
continuation of my work with memory but on a wider political and cultural level. The bulk of this work to date involves bleaching different sizes of POW/MIA flags to various degrees of whiteness, making them a white flag, almost. The bleach creates all sorts of beautiful color shifts.
The flag is an emblem for a type of victim in war in which there can be no closure, and the fear of not remembering.
Iım always thinking about this fear, of forgetting, of losing oneıs memory.