Hans-Ulrich Obrist: What are you working on now? The last work I saw was what you had done in São Paulo.

Meyer Vaisman: What I'm doing now-as well as the work you saw in São Paulo-is work that I began thinking about maybe six or seven years ago. It took me a long time to decide to do it because of the nature of it. I am portraying myself as I will be when I am dead, so that naturally gave me the creeps. It also took me some time to found out a process that could transform 2-D information into a 3-D model. My decision to go ahead and do it took a good six years, then the research took about a year.

HUO: How did you begin the research?

MV: I began looking on the Web, and hit on some Web-sites that dealt with Stereolithography and Rapid Prototyping. I began corresponding via e-mail with people all over the world. I finally found an outfit in Colorado that specializes in Stereolithography for medical purposes-normally the process is used to make prototypes for machinery parts rather than body parts. I got in touch with them and they made the first set of models for me. The CT scans were made in a Venezuelan hospital and the results were recorded on a 8mm DAT tape which I sent to Colorado and they made the models and sent them to me via Fedex days later. It was all very fast.

HUO: I was wondering to what extent the changing of context, and specifically moving to Caracas is related with the fact that centers are changing. During the Eighties, there was a lot of discussion about the modification of centers, but it was not a reality in the sense that it is now. I spent my last two years in Asia. In the architectural context a lot of things have happened there throughout the Nineties. There is a new generation of urbanists and architects who are all in their mid- and late-thirties. They started to work in the Nineties, and did not necessarily have a discourse tied to New York or London, or have to work through institutions. They were exhibiting there, but their exchange began between Seoul and Singapore and Beijing and Shanghai. Maybe this is too far-fetched, but it came to my mind.

MV: My move back home was not meant to happen in the way it did. I was responding to a need to get reacquainted with the place where I was born, and where I had lived until I was eighteen. I figured I would spend part of the year there and the rest in New York. I went for a summer, and just as I was ready to return, my dad became very ill. So I stayed, and then he recovered some, but when I was about to leave again, he had another crisis. Life got in the way of life and I stayed longer and longer. It is interesting that my desire to get reinvolved happened at a time when things were opening up and artists formed in the main art centers began looking elsewhere.

HUO: Through my research in Asia, I met Ken Lum, who exhibited a lot in the Eighties and was considered a Canadian-American artist. In the Nineties he also became interested in finding his roots and began working a lot in China. I think this personal dimension-which you had mentioned- is interesting, but maybe there's more to it. Rupert Sheldrake would call it a morphogenetic feeling.

MV: I believe that's entirely possible and viable. I was born in Venezuela of middle-European stock, so I actually grew up in a very middle-European home set in the middle of the Caribbean.

HUO: Where did your parents come from?

MV. Transylvania.

HUO: Was your decision to move to Caracas also a decision to leave New York? Could you talk about the paradigm shift in New York from the Eighties to the Nineties?

MV: As I said, I went to Venezuela because I had an inner need, but at the same time it was made clear to me by the sheriff that I wasn't welcome in New York anymore. It was high noon and I had to skip town until the dust settled.

HUO: You mentioned that when you worked in Caracas on this self-portrait you were in contact with other researchers and databases through the Internet. You also worked between the United States and Caracas, so it seems you did not have a closed studio, but rather a collaborative space, which was like a laboratory, in the sense that the studio became a network. Could you say more about the notion of a post-studio and the post-studio practice, which means that the artist travels around the world? I am curious about how you redefine this idea by working in a city but also within a global network.

MV: It is interesting that you bring that up, because it is something I recently began thinking about. Until the early Nineties, I worked in a studio context and felt comfortable doing that. Once I began working on the shanties, I had build them on-site and leave. Later they were taken down and stored until the next time they were shown. That took me far away from my usual mode of working. When I began doing the suicide series, I was having trouble finding a way of showing it, because I felt like being creative, but the work only needed to be placed on a pedestal. I spent a great deal of time trying to figure out ways of becoming engaged with the work on a more manual level, but it became impossible. It really was work that happened over the Net, inside a CT scanner and shipped via Fedex.

HUO: Were body fragments passing through customs in Fedex envelopes?

MV: That is how it happened. The other sets are shipped directly from the company that makes the models since they have the DAT tape on file. All I have to do is send them an e-mail with instructions to make another set of all eight parts, or make a skull or a rib or whatever part, and it gets shipped directly to whoever's going to show it. My involvement was strictly digital. I have never even spoken to anyone at this outfit. They now allow their customers to pay for the models with their credit cards. That was my suggestion.

HUO: Several years ago I had an astonishing discussion with Walter Hopps, who said he was waiting for a Warhol-type artist who would define a different "Net" kind of economy and have his own shipping catalogue and dealing with Fedex, in other word, making another economy. I wonder whether creating a new economy necessarily means the old one becomes redundant. Galleries won't disappear-they will always be there. But have you seen changes in how you define your economy as an artist?

MV: I have not given all this a lot of thought, but I had an embarrassing experience recently because I wanted to take my skull and make it up as a clown for my new show but I had forgotten all about the different types of paints and brushes. I was in an art supply store feeling like I had stepped into one for the first time in my life. It was uncanny. I wonder if I'll feel the same way ten years from now when I step into a gallery.

HUO: Where will the new show be?

MV: Gavin Brown's Enterprise.

HUO: Is there a title for the overall piece in São Paulo?

MV: "Meyer Vaisman."

HUO: So there is a vanity element to it, and also a kind of time-machine momentum. Is there a new relation to the notion of death? I read this text last night about comedy . . .

MV: My work used to be humorous. For a long time I wanted to erase the difference between comedy and tragedy. The turkeys from 1992 were extremely funny to look at, but ultimately you were looking at a dead animal, which is not that comical. The shanties followed, and as I conceptualized them, I tried to inject some kind of comedy into them but it was impossible. I realized that there was no sense in trying to bring comedy into a completely tragic situation.

HUO: Did you begin the shanties while you were still living in New York?

MV: I was living in New York and I was invited to participate in an exhibition at the National Gallery in Caracas. I wanted to do a piece that involved my life in Venezuela. It turned out my parents had left my room intact from the day I left, in 1978. Every book was there; every object remained in the drawers. It made me very uncomfortable that every time I would go to Venezuela I had find this room exactly as I had left it, because my life had changed tremendously, but for them it was the same. It made me mad, so I decided to take this room out of their house. I was conscious that I was making an artwork for an audience, but for me it went far beyond that. I was exorcising that fucking room from my life-and theirs.

HUO What came next?

MV. The suicide pieces, and after that what I am doing now, which is a portrait of my psychiatrist holding a clown suit made for me out of my parents' clothing.

HUO: Will it be one sculpture or a series of sculptures?

MV: It will be the first of a series. I have been thinking that I like to touch on this idea of the women in my life, the surrogate mothers I have had. The first person I thought about was my psychiatrist. Next will be Arantxa, the nanny I had when I was a toddler. She lives in the Basque Country, and now that I am spending so much time in Spain, I'm going to pay her a visit.

HUO: Earlier when you mentioned the project with the skull-- which in a way is almost like clothing the skull-- came to my mind the incredible catacombs in Palermo, where hundreds of bodies are preserved in such a way that they are actually not mummified, but only the bones and the clothing remain. This image also cross my mind when I read that you use comedy as a defense mechanism- it is interesting the analogy between the comedian on stage and the artist with the exhibition of his/her work.

MV: My psychiatrist was asking me about the comedy in my work and how that disappeared. I was bringing back all the aspects of my work. The clown suit goes back to the turkeys, and dressing up as something else. I am thinking about doing different versions of it: the first will be the clown, then I will do another with a turkey hunter suit. A third may be holding a Border Patrolman suit, and so on. I felt that once I killed myself, I had to bring myself back to life.
Also the idea of a studio and a post-studio is an issue for me right now, because I long to work in a studio situation. I don't have the manual skills other artists have. I wish I could draw, but I must have some kind of neurological damage because my hand moves faster than my brain, so whatever I draw ends up looking like...I don't know what. But I am all for using new technologies, and I am surprised how many artists know little or nothing about technology, while musicians, at least the more interesting ones, are very much aware of it and employ it to great results. I find the art world to be still stuck in the art supply store. I am more in tune in a crowd listening to Herbert than at an art opening.

HUO: When I saw the wonderful retrospective of El Lissitsky's work in France in the Nineties, I was struck by how closely those artists followed the development of new materials: a material would be invented, and literally the day of its invention, the artist would test it out.

MV: That brings up the role of art in society-I find sad that there is little crossover between the art industry and other cultural industries. It is like art exists separately from the rest of the culture, and the way the art world is set up reinforces that. There have to be ways of opening it up. The audience for art, from what I have read, is getting bigger and bigger. I just wonder what other ways there are to transmit it, and also what the viewers think they are looking at.

HUO: There is a question of transmission, and also of translation. How do you breach the gap? How do you establish a concrete dialogue? When we spoke about this studio-post-studio practice, I was wondering whom you are in a dialogue with now. Because in the eighties there was an hermetic art field that was self-contained. When the Internet was a reality there was really a flux and an exchange.
In your practice, you try to bridge the gap. You mentioned you use the Internet as an important tool. We could say that in the nineteenth century, or even in the twentieth, it was all about the salon, but in the late-twentieth century, the Internet replaced it to a certain degree.

MV: It probably will. One of the reasons I do not have a Web page is because I do not want to have a self-aggrandizing site with ten pictures of each body of work, my biography and a contact number. I would like to figure out a way to make something out of it rather than have others see the work in a conventional way. I do not know any artists who have done work on the Web that has turned out to be successful and interesting. Do you know of any?

HUO: It's not so much artists realizing artworks on the Internet. There were some guys who set up a Web-site in France that had almost the same name as the Venice Biennale website last year. If you searched for "Biennale," you were led to their site, which had the wrong artists listed. It does not happen in an art context necessarily, but using the medium in new situations. It also has to do with the interface not being there yet. I have introduced artists to the Internet, and every time, they said how very communicative the interface is. That is perhaps also a problem. We need artists to invent these interfaces, because the industry is really stuck as far as experimental designs.

MV: It has not been fully explored. Part of the problem is that corporations have taken over the Web, as they have taken over everything. They leave everybody else out and make it less interesting. More useful, but less interesting.

HUO: Could you talk a bit more about the shanties? Do they have a political connotation...?

MV: A lot of people read that work in a political context-it happened at a time when the art world was becoming globalized. I was not responding to that, but to very personal needs. I see why people take it as a political statement, but to me it never really was one. There had not been any artists in Latin America who had used the shanty as a subject in their work. I also think that if I had stayed in Venezuela, I would have never had arrived at that piece. There is something blinding about being that close.

HUO: It is not an image that Venezuela wants to promote. Maybe you could talk about the personal and the political, and how the work almost created a crisis.

MV: What happened was exactly that-Venezuela did not want to be portrayed that way. Venezuela is a country known for supplying oil, and for having very beautiful women. Even some people who thought the work was important did not want it to represent the country in Venice. Part of the piece was the shanty, and the rest was this shack built on stilts, which represented the Guajiro tribe, who live on the coast near the border with Colombia, on a lake in houses that sit on stilts. The name "Venezuela" supposedly means "little Venice." But in Spanish, when you end words with "zuela," it connotes something negative, poor, sleazy. "Mujerzuela" is a small, cheap woman; "callejuella" is a narrow, dark street. As far as the personal becoming political, it can. Some of the most interesting works of art do precisely that. It was not really my intention to do it that way, but it became that. If that is another reading to the work, I am OK with that, but I would hate for it to be the only reading.

HUO: I am always curious about the road not taken. Were there projects that were too small or too large to be biult?

MV: There have been a couple. A while ago I did a piece that was unfinished, and I will take it up again at some point. It is called the Travelling Bean. I built the second shanty in Porto for the show Threshold. The piece was built outside, at the end of a formal English garden. The shanty had as its interior the dressing room of my parents' bedroom. I went into the garden and removed large bands of grass and planted black beans. Black beans are native to America. In this case, they came from Brazil and I planted them in Portugal as a cross-colonial gesture. I later took part of the harvest to Venezuela and planted it. From that particular harvest I took some and planted them in the greenhouse at the Walker Art Center, and that is where that project stopped. I have this idea of doing a large plantation of beans in Scotland, then shaving into them a pattern derived from one of the designs of Scottish clans. I then would have the beans photographed from a satellite...

HUO: Do you believe in reincarnation?

MV: No, I don't.

HUO: Who would you want to be reincarnated as if you did?

MV: Shirley McLaine.