WITH KEEP ADDING
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How did the art collective Keep Adding get the Center for Contemporary Arts to let you flood its gallery?
A few years ago we submitted a DVD portfolio to the CCA and nothing ever really happened. [Visual Arts Director] Cyndi Conn was looking through the archives and found our catalog. She was very curious about what we were doing. We pitched a really small, modest idea. The artists' committee liked it but said it wasn't big enough, which is a pretty crazy thing to hear. They really liked the first
Wrekage
, which was done in 2000/2001 in a burned-down building. It rained and flooded, which gave it a reflective quality. They asked, 'If money wasn't an issue, what would you do?' So we went back to the drawing board and came up with a piece where we would build a structure in the gallery, fill it with a mirror pond and have multiple layers of painting.
Have you ever built a building before?
No, this is the first time. Our curator, Craig Anderson, has done a lot of things for SITE Santa Fe over the years and built his own house, so he has a lot of experience. We spent months with him figuring out the details of the structure. It's pretty unique because it was built to be destroyed; it never actually was, it never existed as it would have if it'd been a house, so all the cuts in the walls were planned out in the frame.
And the name Wrekage comes from the temporary nature of the work?
Yeah, when the first piece was put up, the building was just trashed, and we literally had to haul the ceiling out and pick all this junk up and throw it out, shovel all the debris out, so it was cleaning up a destroyed building. The description in my mind was this wreckage in the middle of nowhere, and it just kind of stuck.
Did you get permission to paint the first building?
I did actually get permission for the first one, but after I'd already started because it was taking too long. I'd started painting and no one bothered me. A few people walked by while walking dogs and came in, so I thought I should probably find out who owned the building. I eventually got in touch with the owner and told him I was doing an art piece. He was cool and told me I could keep going, which was good because I probably would have finished anyway. The second one was in an abandoned silo in El Paso, Texas. That was a legal piece. And this one, of course, is legal…and funded.
In
Wrekage
, you're using old-school spray-paint techniques [see Zane's World]. Where did that idea come from?
I've been spray-painting for about 15 years, something I got into as a teenager. I liked the allure of going out at night and running from the cops, but I've pretty much dropped that whole style of thinking about it. It's a beautiful artistic tool, like a skin covering this destroyed structure. And the style of painting is more of a hybrid, contemporary style of painting, with elements of graffiti and traditional painting.
Do the members of Keep Adding make livings as artists or are you the kind of Santa Feans who have to work six jobs just to pay the bills?
We are actually making a living as artists, but it's a fine line because we're also designers, which is a different kind of art. But I do consider that a part of what we do. Most of the shows we've done have been for educational purposes. We're much more interested in getting people to understand this kind of work, especially the digital work. I firmly believe that digital art is the next generation of art. There are some gorgeous things coming out of the digital world, and just because they're made on a computer people think that you just push a button and out comes this work. Computers are very complicated, and on average we spend months, even up to two years, on our print works. I see a lot of shitty digital art, and it sucks. I understand why people have a bad idea of it. That doesn't mean there isn't good digital art as well; people just don't know yet how to differentiate the good from the bad. Digital work is still inventing itself, which gives it so much more to explore than, say, painting.
One of Keep Adding's digital pieces is on the Apple Web site?
Yeah, [laughs] we did some work with Scott Pagano, who was working with the LA-based musician BT. We supplied them with a lot of digital files. We don't get any credit for it, though. You work with those big LA cats and you sign away your artwork. But it's no big deal. It's still cool to see. I got a call while installing and my buddy said, 'Go to
' and, sure enough, there's our piece with somebody else's name, which is funny, a little bit. All of our friends who were there when we were working on those pieces were pretty excited for us. But still, we didn't get any credit.
Why do you like to keep your anonymity and go by the name Keep Adding rather than using your names as artists working together?
We were influenced by design work coming out of Europe. Artists were starting groups and no one ever knew their names, just their moniker. We could create an identity for these people because there wasn't a physical one, just an idea, a name. I would imagine that these guys were a group of businessmen in suits and that if you saw them walking down the street you'd never think they'd make such modern, cutting-edge work. The idea is that when we work together, it's not really about X doing this and Y doing that, it's more about the group. When you see a Keep Adding show, it could be one person or up to eight people-you never really know. It gives an imaginative quality to the viewer. I've heard all kinds of crazy ideas about who we are, and it's always interesting to hear what those ideas of us are.
