The vehicle is the destination!

This interview between Claire Healy, Sean Cordeiro and Hou Hanru took place by email across the oceans, from San Francisco to Sydney via Beijing and Paris after an initial meeting in Sydney earlier in 2012. This process reflects coherently the nature of Healy and Cordeiro’s work as well as how art in general unfolds in our time…
Claire Healy & Sean Cordeiro

Hou Hanru: You have both worked as individual artists. When did you start working together? What’s the motivation to decide to work together? What does collaboration mean to you?
Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro: Yes, we each had solo careers for approximately a decade, and it was not until we had a show together in Kudos Gallery in 2001, that we decided to do an installation together.
The space was large, and we both intended to show a collection of individual works but actually thought it would be more fun to create something that responded to the space. So we staged a mock
sale of the property. We placed a huge real estate advertisement using real estate jargon out the front of the gallery. We also had a contact phone number one could call if they were interested. Upon calling the phone number one was confronted with war sounds and an estate agent never making it to the phone amongst every sound of a war zone we could collect. The project was called Location to Die For, the space was mapped out as if a floor plan for a house, using sand bags to demarcate each room. On the opening night there was a military drill, (at the time we were both living in pre-Olympic Sydney, in spaces that were being renovated, which we thought was akin to living in a war zone).
We didn’t seriously think that we would begin collaborating from that point on, as we each had our
solo practices. We had discussed our idea for the Cordial Home Project, but realised it would need major funding, and so applied for our first grant together. We were both doing our graduate studies at the time with very large-scale works and we were forever helping each other out, either with logistics, or technical support and even financial support.
We were very lucky and our grant application for the Cordial Home Project was successful, so we embarked on this, which took more than a year to produce and meanwhile our solo practices were merging in a sense too. Conceptual ideas were coming up in each other’s work, and the physical help continued. We reached a point when we realised we were already collaborating in a sense.
Collaboration means we are never lonely; a lot of
our artist friends, particularly painters, express that they feel so isolated in the studio. You can often get bogged down with an idea or have no idea and start feeling insecure about it all, and if another is around the dialogue can often pull you out of that frame of mind and get things moving! Collaboration means you can chat about work over breakfast or in the car.
There are also many facets to being an artist, so
it seems easier to carry out certain tasks, and to see it through to the very end. So often works can get dropped, but when you collaborate, it seems important to carry out a specific task in order for another part of the project to be realised, which may be getting done at the same time. It keeps up momentum. It feels more efficient: different skills can be brought together to make a stronger unit. On another note, working as a collaboration can be a little more honest; how many solo artists out there are actually employing nameless others to create their work at every level of the creative process?
So collaboration leads to embracing the other…
Embracing the other… Well, as for the way we
work, there needs to be a period of time to pass
and distill the initial concept or idea that the other person proposes. We often dislike each other’s initial concepts, and end up having to write them down and shelve them until the right moment comes along. Sometimes it’s like the movie ‘Inception’: one person talks about an idea and then that
idea grows in the other person’s head and then suddenly they feel it’s their idea! We have very different ideas about everything but somehow we have a very similar understanding when it comes to spatial formalities and aesthetic decisions.
The notion of inhabiting is somehow another key element
in your thoughts and work when your life has become more nomadic. You were living in Berlin before returning to Australia. How has this tension influenced your new thoughts and work?
Our artwork and lifestyle really inform each other. Throughout our artistic collaboration we have
investigated various modes of living and working and this feeds into our creative output. It’s a
funny thing but in many ways it is easier to be an Australian artist living overseas, than to be an artist at home in Australia. But that’s another story.
Because we are sculptors, our attention naturally gravitates towards mass, form and space – when you combine these elements with movement – ideas that are sculptural mutate into ideas that are more often considered in terms of international shipping and global marketing. But these are the themes
that drive our work. Living in Europe gave us the opportunity to watch the way things move and flow across the continent. At one time we were squatting
in a warehouse behind a giant supermarket on the border of Germany and Switzerland. Chestnuts were sold from China, pineapples from Cuba, tomatoes from Israel; the networking it involved boggled our minds. But in the end all it meant to us was that we didn’t have to pay for any fresh produce. We just ate the stuff that they threw out to make more room
for the next shipment from a corner of the globe.
Now, being back in Australia… some people talk about Los Angeles in terms of it being built to the scale of a car rather than human scale. Maybe Australia has been built to the scale of the airplane. Australia is a huge country but there is very little dialectic difference in language from one edge to the other. If someone were to drug you and fly from Sydney to Perth (a four hour trip), on waking from your induced sleep, you might think that you had been dropped off in Parramatta (a thirty minute car ride); the language and architecture are so similar. Our interest in movement is piqued by the systems that operate in Australia to create this kind of homogeny and our new work explores this.
This leads to my next question: nomadism seems to be at the heart of your way of living, thoughts
and practice. With a recent work involving a dismantled plane mailed in pieces to a gallery in
San Francisco, and your latest project installing a whole plane in front of the MCA for your solo exhibition, this reaches a pinnacle!
Traditional nomads move around to seek different food sources and also to inhabit spaces that offer the best environment according to the particular season. International artists and curators do the same thing: they follow the exhibitions and the residencies, which basically boils down to the search for optimum food and shelter!
We are interested in nomadism but we are not interested in utopian ideas of freedom commonly associated with nomadism; we are more interested
in the parameters that modern nomadism operates within. For instance our work Par Avion is informed by our previous work Wohnwagon. For Wohnwagon we shipped an old caravan from Germany to Australia.
The caravan was irrevocably altered by this shift after it was cut into sections that were able to
fit on Euro pallets. In Par Avion the international airmail system was used to transport a Cessna 172 from Roma Queensland, to San Francisco and then to Sydney for the MCA exhibition. The plane was cut into pieces that fit within the standards dictated by the postal service. These pieces were then treated as giant postcards: addresses and stamps were directly fixed to the parts and these parts duly airmailed to their destination.
These works are made to highlight the tension between the individual will to move and the systematic constrictions that are at work within these structures.
I’m also interested in, once again, the tension between travelling and dwelling. Over recent years, you have developed projects
that involved existing furniture, housewares, and personal effects of the inhabitants of given sites in various parts of the world. I have seen this part of the work generate a very interesting social dimension.

Can you elaborate more on this?
Aside from the systematic parameters that make international travel possible there are also the internal, psychological buffers that make travel possible. Not every traveler has the savoir-faire of Sir Richard Burton. Nomadism not only offers an expanded
vision of the world, it also involves culture shock, alienation and loneliness. The story of the modern nomad is the quest for novelty versus the need for comfort and familiarity. In this sense, the ghost of Howard Hughes haunts our practice. Howard Hughes had the monetary means to be anywhere in the world, anytime he wished. But he had to try
creating buffers to deal with this omnipresence. Like Phileas Fogg he kept to a single time wherever he was in the world. He blocked out windows, replicated his living spaces with the same furnishings, ate
the same meals and drove the same model car in
an attempt to help his mind cope with the change. People who work in the diplomatic corps or travel a lot for business or culture do similar things, such as buying the same IKEA furniture for each continent they live on, eating at Paul’s patisserie and shopping at Carrefour. Our works I Hope Tomorrow is Just Like
Today and Takadanobaba address how consumption is used to create these generic comfort zones.
Conrad sums it up well in his description of seamen in Heart of Darkness:
Their minds are of the stay-at-home order, and their home is always with them—the ship; and so is their country—the sea. One ship is very much like another, and the sea is always the same. In the immutability of their surroundings the foreign shores, the foreign faces, the changing immensity of life, glide past, veiled not by a sense of mystery but by a slightly disdainful ignorance.1
Which brings us back to your mention of Stasis, our aeroplane suspended in scaffolding in front of the Museum of Contemporary Art. The vehicle is the destination! And when the vehicle is the destination,
why not just fly straight into a building rather than hassling around with customs at the airport?
With a certain sense of humour, and even irony, you are proposing to see the vehicle as the destination. This reminds me of English architect Cedric Price’s proposal to build
an airport that flies with the plane, or a bird cage that flies with the bird. Your project is located at the Museum of Contemporary Art. But it intends to go beyond the spatial constraints of the institution.

Furthermore, it invites us to skip
the bureaucratic constraints of border control, customs and the airport – one of the most evident and overwhelmingly impressive symbols of the power of the State institution. Doesn’t this manifest a strong will
to challenge the established order defined by the ideology of stability and control of institutional powers in general? Then, the nice-looking but slightly misplaced plane, somehow highlighting your artistic and even
political intentions, seems to become a conveyor of social and political critique. Do you agree, in the end, despite
your refusal of utopianism, that one should understand your work, as well as your lifestyle, as an attempt to resist being institutionalised? Perhaps, this
is exactly what inhabiting really means in our time: inevitably oscillating between settling and nomadism.
We only refuse utopianism in the same way a jilted partner refuses love: we have been let down by something we want to believe in, boo hoo to us!
Our relationship to the institution is much like any individual’s relationship to larger society. There
is the illusion of personal free will and personal vision but in the end, every action we undertake is all part of a complex web of human networks.
We believe the artist must challenge the established order, but in what way? The super-rich challenge the order of the State by simply not paying taxes;
it is estimated that there is currently $US21
trillion stashed away in tax havens such as Switzerland and the Cayman Islands. It is crucial for the artist to operate in the slipstream. But is this the model that we ought to aspire to? Albert Einstein covers the issue in ‘Why Socialism?’
Man is, at one and the same time, a solitary being and a social being … and their specific combination determines the extent to which an individual can achieve an inner equilibrium and can contribute to the well-being of society.2
As artists we employ a combination of nomadism and permanence to achieve the best situation to create work and live, or as you describe it – ‘inhabiting’.
As artists we exploit the freedom of travel to produce the headspace and conditions necessary
to create work but we also rely upon the support
of our native society. The trick is how to gain the support of the society we live within while still maintaining a critical stance towards the institution.

Stasis illustrates this point. A plane flying towards a building represents the will of an individual to take a stand against an institution. Although this is a lone gesture, it can never really be free from the society that it seeks to fight against – hence the supporting scaffolding around the plane. A parallel idea could be the image of a man buying petrol
to throw a Molotov cocktail at a gas company.
Then again, a plane flying into a building may be the opposite of an act of protest; it may represent an act of colonialism. Our conflation of vehicle and destination illustrates touristic colonialism:
it is Starbucks in the Forbidden Palace; it is the flipside of nomadism. It is the philosophy of the Winnebago Warrior, where every place is the same because you have brought your house with you.
As artists, it is easy for us to claim to be nomadic. But what we offer or what we represent to the countries that we visit should also be questioned. It is a sad position to be in when you believe that you are a cultural critic but in reality you are the inheritor of Gauguin’s syphilitic wanderings.
But that is a depressing way to finish. Maybe the greatest gift that travel or nomadism can offer is humility, in the words of that great traveller Henry Miller:
Over there you think of nothing but becoming President of the United States some day. Potentially every man is Presidential timber. Here it’s different. Here every man is potentially a zero.3

Notes
Hou Hanru
Chinese born writer and curator Hou Hanru is currently Director of Exhibitions and Public Programs and the Chair of the Exhibitions and Museum
Studies program at the San Francisco Art Institute.

Hou is the curator of the 2013 Auckland Triennial
and has previously curated the Shanghai Biennale (2000), the Gwangju Biennale (2002), 2nd Guangzhou Triennial (2005), the 10th Istanbul Biennial (2007), The 10th Lyon Biennale” (Lyon, 2009) and the French Pavilion (1999), Z.O.U. – Zone of Urgency and the Chinese Pavilion (2007) at the Venice Biennale.

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, Penguin Classics, UK, 1988, pps. 29–30.
Albert Einstein, ‘Why Socialism?’, The Monthly Review, vol. 1, no. 1, May 1949, New York, http://monthlyreview. org/2009/05/01/why-socialism (accessed 10/08/2012).
Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, Granada Publishing Limited, Panther Books Limited, UK , 1974, pps. 154-5.