Hope Atherton: to anyone who has ever complained that fantasy had disappeared from the art scene, here's your answer

Interview, April, 2004 by Neville Wakefield

HA: In some ways, but it's autobiographical in the sense of a collector, of the cabinet of curiosities--you know, a box full of plaster casts of tigers' brains and other things that add up to the vision of the collector.

NW: From furniture to skulls to clothes, everything around you seems to bear scars of a previous existence.

HA: I want everything to have a sense of scarring or a history so it doesn't seem false, even if it's man-made or fabricated. I still want it to carry the same element of the theatrical, which sort of relates to the idea of the cabinet of curiosities, which involved a lot of tweaking and faking and claiming that things were what they're not. Even with objects that are found, real things, I want them to take on a campy falseness too, where there's just no way it's actually a shrunken head.

NW: Does the new repulse you?

HA: It doesn't repulse me, it just doesn't engage me. I don't like the flatness of new things. Often when something is old, it takes on a different life or a different feel, even if it's something as mundane as an old book or a stool or a chunk of wood. When something's been run over by a car, it takes on a second vein; even if the history of the object is only 15 minutes long, the more that happens to it, the more complex it becomes. To me, something that's perfect and shiny is ugh.

NW: So what are your plans after this show?

HA: TO go out and start digging around. I have to go exploring again. I want to go to India, actually. But I'd be happy just to go back to the scrap yard upstate and get some more clumps of crushed engines. As soon as one project's done, I like to get back to researching the next.

Neville Wakefield is producing a series of short films with directors including Matthew Barney, Larry Clark, Gaspar Noe, and Tilda Swinton.