Toys are us - artist Jarvis Rockwell's studio

ArtForum, Oct, 1997 by Laurie Simmons

JR: Well, it's like what color are you going to use. You just sort of have a preference. I'm always wondering and worrying about this collection - what I'm going do with it. I had mentioned it to this friend of mine, who has a studio upstairs, and he said: Well, why don't you put some in boxes, or something like that, you know?

LS: Like Joseph Cornell.

JR: Yeah, Cornell - right, exactly, right. And so then I found a small box company, and then I ordered some boxes. And, I got them so these little carpets would fit. I mean, anybody can do it. You just set them up. The thing is that I find that every toy has some kind of a story that goes with it, you know. Like the crash dummies, or even figures that come from railroads have a story that has to do with that railroad company. It's sort of a scene, with a sense of story, which a person makes up in their own mind. It's a fantasy, you know. The boxes just fell out of me; they were so easy to do.

LS: And those you regard as artworks - the tableaux in the boxes.

JR: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it's artwork - you'd have to.

LS: In the boxes, within the narratives I noticed that lots of times you take the toys and you behead them.

JR: Let's say move the heads around. There's the idea or the concept of masks, you know? They're not real people. And then there's just the idea that you could take the head off one and put on another head that maybe had nothing to do with it. Do you know what I mean?

LS: Who's the tiny little man sitting in a tiny chair. Can you tell me his story?

JR: Well, he is - behind him there are two people who are the managers - it's a man and a woman - who are the managers of the whole collection. They make sure that everybody's where they're supposed to be when I come in the room. Because sometimes at night they have parties. They're the managers, you know, from the toy side. Well, this one little man sitting in the chair is asleep, and he has his legs crossed, and his arms crossed like that, and he's sound asleep. And he's about an inch tall, if he's standing erect. And the thing is, if he wakes up, then everything here vanishes everything that we know vanishes.

LS: The work of many young artists today deals with issues that have been central to your work for almost twenty years - everything from repetition, accumulation, and appropriation as formal strategies, to themes like adolescence, gender stereotyping, commodification, and masquerade. You're in your mid-sixties, though, and I think you're coming at all of this from a different place. How did It feel to see your work in the Casey Kaplan gallery with all those young artists?

JR: I didn't feel like I was from the same group of people, but I was very pleased to be there and to sell something after all this time.

LS: Can you describe your earlier work?

JR: I used to string colored thread between trees and over a pond. I took it from tree to tree. I had to wear waders. I saw a deer go through - it was like a phantasm. The changing sun would catch on this orange industrial thread. It was absolutely breathtaking. I took it down because I didn't want the deer to get tangled in it. And another thing I got into was having a structure, which was done by, you know, drawing two lines close to each other. And then I would try to rid myself of the structure. And, somehow, finally, I sorted it out. It was really - it was very difficult. I didn't really know what to do. And so, you know, I had a hard time with that. And then my father died -