Lightning: OK > Your work is awesome and inspiring / visceral and humorous - we’ve really enjoyed finding out about it and can’t wait to see it in person. Can you tell us about how you got into working with cars?
Jesse Sugarmann: I grew up pretty isolated in rural Connecti- cut, far away from everything. And from the beginning, as a
kid, distance was the enemy. I wanted to escape from there so badly. Cars, to me, were this sort of antidote to distance, and so I became obsessed with the idea of cars from an early age. And it stuck with me, this idea of a car as a freeing object, something that could help me get away from where I was.
I got my first car when I was 16. I was an emancipated minor by then, and there really wasn’t anyone telling me what I could or couldn’t do. So I drove from Connecticut down to New Orleans right off ...I think it was in a 1980 Plymouth Horizon. It was a stick shift, and I couldn’t really drive it that well. I spent the next 10 years, really, just sort of driving around the country. I mean, I finished school and was a citizen and everything, but I would drive cross country 5 to 10 times a year.
L: How do you source and move them?
J: I have a pickup truck and a flatbed trailer and I just haul them around one at a time. The bulk of my art practice is towing, re- ally, bringing things where they don’t belong. I usually buy cars on Craigslist ...but for the High Desert Test Sites show I actually rented cars from a salvage yard in 29 Palms. I don’t think I’ll do that again. The guy at the salvage yard was a dick.
L: Do you think of new ideas often while driving around CA? We imagine you can’t pull off every car idea you have. Can you tell us some far fetched unrealized auto sculpture ideas?
J: That’s a hard question for an artist, since you don’t really want to admit to yourself that some of your ideas are never going to happen. But yeah, I want to build a pyramid out of Ford Aerostar minivans in the desert outside of Mojave. The Aerostar has this beautiful, flat hood and windshield plane that angles up at like 50 degrees. I want to build a pyramid, several stories high, out of these minivans. The slope of the pyramid (on all four sides) would be defined by the plane of the hood and windshield. I guess there would have to be some steel structure to keep the whole thing from falling down. I can say with some confidence that this project will never happen.
L: I really like your video work. It seems suspenseful, creative, humorous, many things I don’t often associate with video - did you start from object and get into video or the other way around?
J: I started off with the video. I was actually a video editor for a bit...I moved to LA after college, and did the normal film industry “paying my dues” thing. I worked on a lousy TV show call Conan the Adventurer, and then went on to do some slightly more cred- ible work. But after a while I got sick of it; people in the film industry are really mean. So I started teaching and eventually ended up in graduate school for art. That is where I got into mak- ing objects.
L: You mentioned you lived with the Man Is the Bastard guys in Claremont - can you tell us what those days were like?
J: I was roommates with Isreal L. in a punk house called the Twin Palms in Pomona in the mid-90’s. That was it ...I don’t really
want to seem like I’m trying to glean any credibility off of MITB; I can guarantee you that those dudes just thought of me as some annoying kid who didn’t do enough drugs to be trustworthy. But really, punk and hardcore in Southern California in the early to mid 90’s was the best thing that ever happened to me. I grew up with late-80’s NY hardcore as my escape from normal ...and it was a violent, fratty, angrily hetero scene. I mean, I still love some of it quite dearly; I was listening to the Raw Deal demo yesterday, and the earnest anger of that stuff still really pulls me, you know, 25 years later. But going to Antioch Arrow shows in 1993 is where I first had my mind blown by music, where I learned that art was a flexible and open field and that it was something I wanted to be a part of.
L: What kind of sculptures were you making back then?
J: None. Just a bunch of videos that, considered as a whole, are united more by their drunken execution than by any conceptual or aesthetic value. All of these masters are on VHS ...and that is how they will stay.
L: Do you make music? Maybe we can put out a tape? We love the sound of cars falling.
J: Ha. I am a shoddy musician. We should absolutely.
