Q: Most of the reviews seem to suggest that “We Have Mice” is your take on the living conditions of artists in Williamsburg. The first thing that came to my mind were the mice in Bruce Nauman’s video of his studio at night. What did actually inspire you to do the “Mice” projects?

A: Two things happened in a brief period to inspire these projects.  

1. I was invited to do an exhibition in Poland at a space that turned out to be double booked. I was regretfully informed of this and I asked to come look over the site to see if I could come up with a plan B. The museum was to be hung with traditional framed artworks. While exploring, I found some very evocative spaces inside the walls which appealed to me; probably as an echo of my  tunnel pieces.

2. A close friend of mine lost his home and started living in my studio. I found him bathing in the slop sink one day and was struck by the image. Mentioning it to friends, I started to hear of other improvised living situations, some very creative and devious, and rents were skyrocketing in Williamsburg. The whole thing came together.

I did the show in Poland in this way: I made small interventions, signs usually, around the museum, you would not normally see. Behind the wall I placed hidden video cameras that pointed at these works, and they were displayed on monitors at a central location just outside the normal exhibition. But the works were in the exhibition. On the monitors they looked large and imposing, with people walking around them, but in the actual space, you almost couldn't find them. That was my guerilla mouse action called "Operation Mice".

Then, at Pierogi Gallery, I just took the idea to its higher level with the living/ performance, and I used that experience to inspire the drawings that I added to the show each day.

I would like to say that, as an experience, it was very profound. It had a potent and immediate psychological effect on me and caused an enduring point of view shift.

Q: By living as a mouse in the walls of the Pierogi Gallery were you trying to achieve an inner mouseness or was your aim simply to live and to act the way a mouse might?

A: The second might be closer. It was my idea that the life of an artist, in terms of his participation in the economy and social life of our culture, is marginal. We work around the edges with the leftovers and discards. We move into the places that have been left or abandoned. I thought the mouse was a very nice metaphor for this point of view.

Q: Did the drawings and objects you created while being a mouse differ from the work you create as a man?

A: It might be worth mentioning that I was not trying to be a mouse; I was accepting some mouse-like limits to my life for the purposes of a performance.

A performance can be a gesture to communicate some ideas, and, as in this case, it can be a learning experience for the performer. My drawings, largely text based, were attempts to clarify and express what I was learning. A lot of it was about realizing I was a mid-career artist, sort of a midlife art-crisis, and I was being disabused of quite a few naive idealisms.

Q: Why a mouse and not a rat?

A: Rats are too loaded with negative connotations. To claim to be a rat, in my case, would feel a little braggadocio.

Q: When you are not being a mouse, you are tunneling, building cocoon-like structures, living in nests and climbing walls. Do you see yourself as a kind of fantastic creature?

A: Well, of course, we are fantastic creatures, also quite ridiculous and pathetic, in turns. I think of my projects as being in the tradition of grotesques, distorted reflections of what we think of as normal. They are about proposing a model of otherness. As activities,they are just exaggerations of our normal occupations or strategies, for instance, as alternatives chosen by other species. I think they point out a certain arbitrariness or contingency in our evolved living patterns. In fact, I don't really think our patterns are arbitrary; quite the opposite: they are probably very determined. It is just that our minds are capable of seeing and then stepping outside of them.

And it is worth looking at things this way, looking for radical perspectives and other possibilities, if for no other reason than gaining an appreciation of things normally taken for granted. It is aesthetic at the least. Or, it can initiate questions, possibilities, choices.

Q: I’ve read that you are interested in science.

A: I am.

Q: If it’s not a secret, what is your next project?

A: It is a secret.

Q: Anything you would like to add?

A: I think we take "the way things are" casually, too much for granted. I think posing alternatives, making comparisons, can make us more interested in examining "the way things are". It starts critical thinking about the routine.

That is my philosophy for Tuesday, February 21.

Pierogi Gallery on the last day of "We Have Mice"