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Fritz Haeg
Fritz Haeg works between his art, architecture and design practice Fritz Haeg Studio (though the currently preferred clients are animals), the happenings and gatherings of Sundown Salon (now Sundown Schoolhouse),[…]
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The particulars of place.

Question: Is there something particular about New York?

Fritz Haeg: Yeah, each project that I do in always the first thing I think about is what can I do here that I can do anywhere else, what’s uniquely possible in this location and that drives almost everything that I do. So, in the case of the sculpture court at Whitney Biennial that huge is such a particular place. First of all the museum is design my Marsha Bryer [phonetic] who had a huge influence on me, I grow up around one of his building in Minnesota. So, there is this building that almost really feel secrete to me when you cross, you cross this bridge to get into museum and you are going from the world of daily been our life to almost spiritual secrets sort of experience with art that made very clear by this bridge, across this mode really of the sculpture court. So, it is all of very similar to the front lawn, this movement where the private secrets space of the home meets the public Biennial space of the streets. So, it is that thrash hold that I have been working with in lot of ways lately anyway. So, I really wanted to create a project that some how bridge the two, have the museum come out to meet the people on this street and conversely have the street come in meet the people in the museum. So, these animal homes in the stories of them become a way to bridge those two and to have this conversation between what we think about is the preciousness of the sculptural objects meeting the junky quality of the stuff we have in this street like lamp post and newspaper dispenser and benches and things like that. So, that how mix box up in a post of the corner of 75th of the Madison in one hand is just this junky piece of wood that anyone can make at home over a weekend, but at the same time it is part of the museum installation that has all this aura around it. So, I would like the idea taking these animal homes and raising them up to the level of sculpture, but at the same time reducing in that down to this all meets of daily life.

 

Recorded On: 3/10/08

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