Matt Siber
Images above from the series Collective Consciousness
Mike Rippy (MR): I want to get some basic background on you. Then we’ll just jump in and talk about the work and how you got from your early years to where you’re at now.
Matt Siber (MS): I was born in Chicago. I live in Chicago now, but that’s just sort of a technicality. When I was a baby, we moved to Boston, which is where I grew up, in Brookline, Massachusetts. My parents were scientists, but they were very into the arts, so I went to a lot of museums and plays and performances and things as a kid, but didn’t really see art as being my career pathway until much later. I ended up at the University of Vermont for my undergraduate, where I studied history and geography. I got tapped into photography after taking a photography class and then getting a job, the summer between my junior and senior year, photographing sailboat races.
When I graduated, I still had this job. It’s like, I don’t have a job in geography and history, so let’s keep doing photography. I ended up as a commercial photographer in a number of different jobs after that. I did a one-hour photo lab for a good time in the ’90s. That was interesting. Just got my feet wet in as many things as I could. I ended up at St. Lawrence University, working as their photographer for three years in the late ’90s before applying to Columbia College here in Chicago for my MFA in photography. I was teaching there for a good long time after school. I taught in a variety of other places as well, ended up at the [School of the] Art Institute in around 2010. That’s about the same time that my practice branched out into media beyond photography. I’ve always been into digital manipulation and other types of photographic postproduction. Now I’m also working in 3D installation, sculpture, and other forms as well. I do not paint or draw. I live here in Chicago with my family. My wife is also an artist, and my kids are in grade school.
MR: You had your early exposure to photography through commercial photography, so you probably have a good handle on the skill set for that. How do you think your work developed into more fine art practice?
MS: It was a tough shift, honestly, working in the commercial world in the ’90s to entering grad school in the year 2000, right at the turn of the millennium. Thankfully for me, Columbia College was running a three-year MFA program at the time. It’s a two-year program now, but I really benefited from that third year because it took me a while to adjust and start thinking about the language of contemporary art. How you infuse meaning into the work that is your own and not the client’s.
Up to that point, I had been beholden mostly to the people who were assigning me the job, which I enjoyed. I still enjoy doing that, by the way. I don’t have any issues making work for other people. I enjoy the puzzle of trying to figure out how to visually communicate some of these ideas, including my own. I had some really good teachers, really influential people, in my post-graduate studies, in my MFA program. People like Dawoud Bey and Barbara Kasten and Bob Thall, and Michael Weinstein, who, sadly, died a few years ago. He was down at Purdue University, a professor there. He came up and taught us theory at Columbia College one semester, and it was very eye-opening for me. He’s really the one who started to steer me towards the consumerism side of things in terms of my main practice and starting to understand how all-encompassing that was, and how much a role photography played in that system, photography and media in general.
It took a little while and then, because I came into the art world through photography, I didn’t feel like I had much license to participate in other media until I got a little more comfortable after being in the art world for a while, getting shows in various places. I started to branch out, even though some of my photo artist friends told me not to. Here I am. I’m talking to you, so I must have done something right. [Laughter.]
MR: You mentioned Dawoud Bey, and you mentioned Barbara Kasten. I can actually see that in the work that we’re going to talk about.
MS: Oh, yes.
MR: Let’s start talking about how you started with Collective Consciousness. You received the grant. It started off as one project and then quickly had to turn into something else, or did you always have these separate ideas in mind going into it?
MS: It’s not so much a grant as a residency actually. The organization is called CPS Lives. I’d love to be able to get the word out about that. This is a friend and colleague of mine, Suzette Bross, who started this organization in 2018. She, like me, is a parent in Chicago and an artist as well whose kids go to Chicago public schools. She wanted to create an organization that would place artists in public schools in Chicago in order to draw attention to them and to place perhaps even a more positive focus on them because of a lot of negativity surrounding the CPS system.
There are a lot of issues, to be fair. We’re not trying to gloss over anything, but trying to maybe focus on some of the more positive aspects of the Chicago Public School system. She asked me in 2018 actually, and she said, “Would you like to be a resident?” I said I’d love to, but it wasn’t going to work out for me that year. I followed up the following year, which was the 2019–2020 school season.
I normally work with consumerism and capitalism and all these other types of issues. I had to figure out how I was going to parlay my practice into a school system, which is quite different. Certainly, there’s some consumerism there. I wanted to do something a little bit different in my focus while maintaining some of my visual approaches and strategies. At the beginning, I was trying everything. I was making portraits of students. I was out on the playground, and that was really fun because I did take a portraiture class with Dawoud Bey back in grad school, and he taught me a few things. I remembered them when I went out to make pictures of people, which I don’t do that often really. That was a way for me to engage with the students and for them to get used to me being in the school. When I started making the assemblage pieces that are in Collective Consciousness, I was limited because I could only do them in hallways, because the classrooms are full of students. I couldn’t go in there. I started building things in hallways and as safely as I could, I didn’t want to hurt anybody.
The students would come by, and they’d start talking to me about it. They’d look at it, and they would nod. See my camera setup and then see me working. The ones that were brave enough to approach the conversation and maybe knew me from the playground where I was photographing them last week. They would start having these conversations like, “What are you doing? I really like that, looks like it’s going to fall over.” “Yes, I know, that’s what I’m going to try.” These great conversations would get started, and for me, both as a professor and an artist working with elementary school students, it was really rewarding to see them engaging with the work I was making right there on the spot, and they could see it in-person being made because they would see the picture later. They would be like, “Oh yes, I remember when he was making that. That’s what it looks like.” In two dimensions. Because when you see it in three, it’s very different. I’m fixing the perspective so you see it in just this one way. I did start making those in the fall of 2019, and then in March we all got sent home, and so there was no more in-person school, no one was allowed back into the school at all for the rest of that school year.
When we went into the summer, Suzette asked me if I wanted to do another year of residency. I was like, “Well, sure, it sounds great.” Then I realized I would have access to the whole school. It was empty, and I could take this approach and do it anywhere I wanted, with anything I wanted really. I was chomping at the bit. I couldn’t wait to get in there at that point and be able to use all the classrooms, to be able to use the lunchroom, the gymnasium, the theater, whatever I wanted, and no one was going to give me any trouble. Every now and then something would come crashing down, and in an empty school, it just reverberates throughout the entire place, so I got a call from the security officer. “Are you okay up there?” “Yes. I’m all right, it’s fine.”
Then everybody got to know me and got used to me and to me being there, and it became a very meditative and therapeutic process for me during that 2020–2021 winter of the pandemic, which was a pretty rough stretch for most of us.
MR: I want to get back to how you started the project. You went into it, and it was almost like a double project. I guess both of them could relate to the same thing in some ways, but you were doing portraiture.
MS: Yes.
MR: How did you approach the portraiture, and what does that mean conceptually to you? Then the beginnings of Collective Consciousness, how did that conceptually start? Did they happen at the same time, or how did they feed off of each other initially? Then I want to get farther down the road into the Collective Consciousness work.
MS: They definitely started at the same time. Again, it was that kind of thing where I had agreed to the residency, and then I had to figure out what I was going to do. “How does Matt Siber make work in a public school? Let’s figure this out.” On one hand, with the portraiture, I wanted to do something that I wasn’t necessarily known for doing, but I knew I could do an interesting job, and I also wanted to engage with the students. My kids go to this school too, so I already knew some of them, and they knew me, so I already had an in. Now I know even more students than my kids do, which is great.
I wanted to place emphasis on the individual students. I think in general, what we do with young people, particularly elementary school ages, they tend to be somewhat diminished. We look down on them just naturally because we’re taller than they are. I aimed the camera at about their waist or chest, so the tripod was low, so the camera was looking up at them in almost every situation. I limited it to one maybe two or three people in a portrait at once, and largely single, so isolating the students, having them gaze directly into the camera in a somewhat confrontational way. Rather than being the cute kid that we tend to want to see, and making them into individuals. When someone gazes into a camera lens like that—and I was amazed at how quickly they picked this up, by the way, because the first thing they wanted to do was all the TikTok stuff and the Instagram and social media stuff and whatever.
I said, “All right, well go ahead, make that picture. I’ll do that, then now I want you to do what I want you to do.” Once they saw the pictures, because I printed the first round of pictures, I put them in the hallway so they could see what they looked like, and then they all got it. They got to see how they looked in the pictures, and they thought, “Oh yes, I want to look like that too.” Then I would get these lineups in the playground after lunch where they would just come up, and there would be kids lined up behind me going, “I want to be pictured.”
Once they figured out that they could look a certain way that wasn’t the normal social media way, they were very much on board, because I think they are far more visually sophisticated people than I was at that age. Just because proliferation of images is so rampant at this point, so that was fun.
The other track I was taking was objects, which is something I deal with in my main practice, dealing with consumers and capitalism and the physical presence of infrastructure, the things that support the system physically.
One of the things I was doing at the time was asking the teachers for the items that have been confiscated in the classroom. They all have a drawer of things, so I photographed those for a while. Some of them seem very mundane kinds of objects, but then you think about it, like that could be really annoying if the kid is tapping it or what was the kid doing to get that thing confiscated.
Then you have basic things like chairs and tables, the things that frankly looked the same as they did when I was in school in the ’70s and ’80s, they haven’t changed very much. So these infrastructural objects become these sculptures that transcend generations in a way, at least for me at my age. That a lot of that stuff looked pretty much the same as it did when I was a kid, and that we can all relate to this, and when you see that school chair, you place yourself, “Oh yes, I remember when I sat in a chair that size.”
MR: There’s a very odd nostalgia. It’s not something that you’re looking for, but once you see those chairs and tables and what they’re made of and the metal, and it just takes you back. You see those things, and you’re like, “Whoa, I remember sitting in that chair when I was seven.”
MS: Exactly. It calls to mind, and it’s a design thing, it’s a material thing, those metal legs and the plastic seats, all that stuff. As I started photographing those objects, somewhere in December or January of that first year, I started thinking about how they could be combined, and really as a metaphor because I’m thinking, “I’m seeing all these different students.” It’s worth pointing out that there’s no predominant ethnic group in this school. It’s evenly split all the way through.
It’s all these different kids from all these different backgrounds, different religions, different ethnicities, some international kids, immigrant families, et cetera, and they’re all being constructed through the educational system, through the same system. The idea being that you can’t make all the individuals the same, but we’re trying to get them on a level field where they all get the same instruction, and then after that, it’s up to them to figure out.
MR: Creating the good citizen, like we’re going to create these citizens of the United States, and now go out and do your individual thing.
MS: Go be productive citizens. [Laughter.] It’s a little bit idealistic, but I think the truth of the matter is it’s precarious. You don’t know what’s going to come out the other side, and it’s going to work for some, it’s not going to work for others, and that’s why I was initially interested in this balance of objects. If you take the same chairs, and how many different kids have sat in that chair or at that desk or used that item that I’m using. Then balance them together into this fairly useless conglomeration of objects. It only exists as an aesthetic thing at that point because you can’t use it for what it’s designed for.
You’re taking these very utilitarian pieces that have a use, a strong use so much so that we don’t think about them very much, and then turning them into something else that’s purely aesthetic, hopefully, and creates this precarious balance. At the time before the pandemic hit, I was really thinking more about this purpose of education, public education, as a way of assembling, if you will, a body of knowledge and awareness that hopefully produces a citizen that’s productive and useful.
MR: When you were putting these together, and you said the students would come up and talk to you and show an interest, did anything change when they started looking at these things, and did they have a different idea of their own environment after they saw what you were doing? I know they’re younger, and so maybe trying to elaborate on an idea like that might be difficult. Did you get any sense that they were in awe in some way or kind of surprised?
MS: I had a couple of students in particular who would seek me out on the days I was in the school. It would be an empty school hallway mostly, and then this kid would come walking through, and we had these ongoing conversations about what I was doing, and you could see they were really thinking about it and taking what I was doing under consideration.
I hope that those students are thinking about their environment a little bit differently because of that, and maybe thinking about art differently too. If they do go to a museum or to a gallery and see professional art, that they can remember I was making some with their objects in their school which aren’t usually considered art objects at all.
MR: You perfectly touch on the idea of contemporary art through conceptualism. They’re the perfect readymades that you’ve created into something that, like you said, becomes completely aesthetic. You’ve brought the whole idea of contemporary art into a school environment, and you mentioned the therapeutic value of being there also. That’s something that I would like to talk a little more about later, but how did you get going in that direction where the conceptual part started to rise up?
I don’t know in what order some of these objects were made, but some of them seem very straightforward, and I can see the institutional part of you, of your critique on that coming through in some of them. At some point, it seems like you just let yourself go and went completely down this conceptual aesthetic route that had no, I would say, political underpinnings, and it just became pure art.
MS: Pure art. I love it. A big part of that again is the lack of students in the school, and it freed me up to make things that were even more precarious than I was comfortable doing in the hallways when there were students present. A lot of this was done on landings and stairwells, so if things started to topple over, they might fall down the stairwell, and I didn’t know if they were going to hurt somebody. I had to be careful. Having the empty school gave me the license to do whatever I wanted. The only person I had to worry about was myself.
I was able to take it to a place that was far more precarious—it’s maybe not even so obvious in some of them how precarious the balance was. I hope that I get that across, but a lot of those pieces I made fell down several times. I felt a little like Andy Goldsworthy up there trying to put sticks and ice together or something. It falls down, you’ve got to start over again. How do I rebuild this to make it work? I love Andy Goldsworthy, by the way, so another influence there.
MR: Who doesn’t like Andy Goldsworthy.
MS: Totally. I felt very much like him out in the woods building—I’m in an empty school, there’s nobody around. I don’t hear anything but the HVAC system, and I could just go in and do it. On top of that, I couldn’t make portraits anymore. Now I had to throw all my eggs in one basket, and I was very ready to do that because I felt like the place I’d gotten myself to at that stage was just ready for possibilities. I really took it as far as I could, and again, part of that probably has to do with my own psyche during that winter, which was, I don’t know how you felt about it, but it was trying.
MR: That’s the therapeutic part that I’m interested in. I bring this up in almost all the interviews that I have. I think art making alone is a very therapeutic process. A lot of artists, I can’t speak for all artists obviously, but I think a lot of them are probably struggling with something on some level. The human condition, that’s just what you do, and I think art making is a very therapeutic way of working through that or at least separating yourself from it for a while.
Going through this, and then suddenly the pandemic hits and just having this release valve already in place, and like you said, what you’re doing is very playful, and you’re in an environment that’s institutional. You have allowed this place that’s sterile and institutional to become a very playful and energetic space in a way that is completely unsuspecting.
That area where it says a lot more if you take the time and look at it and think about where this occurred and where you’re building these objects, and then the aspects of photography and just about looking. I think you’ve worked really intuitively and it sounds like from the beginning with intention to build these photographs. I think they are just really spectacular.
MS: I appreciate that, and I appreciate your acknowledgment of the photographic side of what I do. You know as well as I do that I’m paying attention to all those little things, but not everyone’s going to notice that. It takes another artist, I think, to recognize the placement of figure-ground and the little details and how things fit together visually, because I really was building these pieces to be photographed.
I’m building for two dimensions in three dimensions. Thinking about the relationship of figure-ground, what’s in the background, what’s in the foreground, how the form of the thing that I’m building is going to play into the details that are inherent in a public-school environment. Things on the wall, blackboards, maps, globes, all these things that are there. Not only that, I had the luxury of time to sit there and think about it, and that doesn’t happen all that often as a contemporary artist, to be able to take as much time as you need to make sure everything’s just right.
To be fair, I had a fairly high success rate in those pictures. There are plenty that didn’t make the cut, but my percentage of pictures that I included in the final cut was much higher than most of my other types of projects.
MR: It’s interesting that you’re an instructor, a teacher, and you’re creating these photographs that I think are very high conceptually. Yet they’re the perfect teaching tool also, and that’s what I mean, there’s so much going on with the process and just visually, what you’re looking at. Having an instructor like Dawoud Bey, who is really well known for going into schools and doing these portraits, and then you go in, and you’re feeling his influences and doing the portraits. Then suddenly you’re stuck in a situation where the kids are out, but you’re still in that public school environment, and so you create something new. It’s great that you had Dawoud as an instructor because it kept you in that space.
MS: I think it’s worth pointing out that both Barbara and Dawoud and most of my professors from twenty years ago in grad school are still influences on me, and we still stay in touch. We’re work colleagues now basically, which is important. I’ve watched Dawoud and his work shift over the past twenty years and the really interesting things he’s been doing lately. Barbara has a studio two doors down from mine here in Chicago, so we help each other out from time to time.
These connections that we make particularly as graduate students but also undergraduates too, if we keep up with them, they remain influences, and they remain important in our lives.
MR: It just goes to show that, as an instructor, you’re influencing future generations. You’re elaborating on the dedication also that you have to put into becoming a visual artist, and it’s very difficult. I would say it’s probably one of the most difficult professions to get into and actually to have some relevance in. It’s understanding that you need to maintain those relationships long term and appreciate the faculty that you’re involved with at that time. You really have to build a sense of community with that and let that evolve into whatever it becomes.
That’s a very good lesson. Hopefully there are some graduate students, undergraduates listening to this. Just understanding that you’re building real connections with people that are going to last a lifetime, and you can’t give up on that stuff.
MS: Exactly. Quite frankly, I’m not very good at this compared to a lot of my colleagues and friends, which is another reason why I teach. I think working in a faculty, especially at the Art Institute, Columbia as well, but where everyone is doing something important, and surrounding yourself with other very dedicated artists who are making a living doing what they’re doing, that’s why they’re there. Having that environment in which to operate, even if we’re not talking with each other about art every day necessarily, you’re still among these very accomplished people.
I’m one of those people too who would much rather be a small fish in a big pond than the other way around. If I’m the big fish in the small pond, I’m probably going to lose my motivation a little bit. I need that—see what that guy just did. Isn’t that amazing? Look what Keith is doing, look at what Bogdan is doing right now, amazing stuff, and that keeps me going.
MR: Just understanding that those influences over time have real impact. The things that you went through with graduate school and the influences on you play into things that you do twenty years later, and same thing with Dawoud and Barbara, is that these things, they’re having influences and having connections in community that allow their work to evolve also. You mentioned Dawoud went in another direction with his work and has received a lot of accolades for that. But he didn’t get stuck and wasn’t afraid, and it probably had a lot to do with, and I can’t speak for him, but a lot to do with community and influences.
MS: No question. Then Dawoud is an amazing networker. That guy, he’s just so good at it. He’s almost the antithesis of me. I’m just not that good at that stuff, but you make it happen whatever way works for your personality. I think more importantly though, if you keep making work, which is the hardest thing, in the end, is just keep putting it out there. You’ve just got to keep making, and people hopefully will take notice if you can get it out there. It’s the reason we became artists. We didn’t become artists to be social networkers. We became artists to make stuff, and that’s important.
MR: You went through the process of creating the Collective Consciousness series. So what’s going on now? I know you’re entering more of the real space, the three-dimensional space. How’s that working?
MS: I finished the residency in June, at the end of the school year. I was offered a third year, and I turned it down because I’ve now set a whole bunch of applications in motion for some grants and some money for a project that is going to combine my approaches with the school and with my Objects in Mirror exhibition, which happened last summer at Ignition Projects here in Chicago. I have a new project idea pathway. It’s a big one. I don’t want to get into specifics yet, but for 2022. Come next spring, I should know if I have the funding that I was looking for, which will affect the way I approach the project. At the moment I’m not producing. I’m more in promotion mode, but I have plans for next year.
MR: Great. A lot of things going on. Is there anything else that you wanted to dig into at all or anything else on your mind?
MS: Maybe I’ll swing back to talk about the relationship of the work in CPS Lives to the rest of my practice. At the beginning of the process, I wasn’t sure how much I should be taking that into consideration and whether I should just consider this something totally different from my main practice or if it was going to relate in some way. Of course, it’s still made by me, so it’s going to connect somehow. It made me think about the overall approach I take to visual art in general, and it probably has something to do with my parents and their scientific background and growing up in that environment and this rationality that comes with it.
I realize it’s large systems that I’m interested in. Whether that’s economic or political or educational, and how they operate, what levels of power do they exert on us, and how do they exist? Much of that is the physicalness of it, and these days, when it comes to advertising and commercialization, we think largely in the ethereal, the digital, which is where most of that happens. There’s a huge amount of infrastructure built physically in the environment to support that system.
Whether I realized it or not at the beginning, when I was doing Collective Consciousness, those objects in the school are a very similar type of object. It’s an object that supports a system, that education is ethereal. It’s in the mind, it’s in the head, and the results are not always easy to measure. It still requires a physicality for it to exist and work and operate. That physicality is often not considered because it’s mundane, you have to make it interesting in order to get people to think about it. That’s where I went with that.
Whereas in the early days I was using digital manipulation to change the picture a little bit, to make you notice the infrastructure I was interested in pointing out to you, in this case, rather than using digital manipulation, I put them into a context that you’re not used to seeing them in.
MR: I think you nailed that perfectly, the whole idea of the school as like a manufacturing plant for children and this industrial feel that, the plastic chairs, they all look the same, the hallways, the cinder block, the floors, the way the floors look, you can smell what these interiors look like. It’s that whole mentality where it throws you back into that time. You’ve broken it all out of that. I think that contrast with the artwork and showing, it’s almost like you see these animated films of all the kids, and they’re all gray, they’re gray-looking kids, and they’re just. . . .
MS: [Singing.] “We don’t need no education.”
MR: Right. Then you come in, and you bring some color to that, in the artwork, and it makes that strong contrast between the environment that they’re normally in and where their mind can release and go into a different place. It’s interesting that, as much as we want to institutionalize everything, it’s our individuality that allows us to break out of that and make things into things that we want them to be versus what other people want them to be, or want us to be.
MS: Then I think you go into the metaphor even further because the objects that I chose to create that construction for that photograph, somebody else coming in with those same objects would come up with a different construction. You’ll never get the same construction twice. You take the same elemental pieces and put them together, and you’re going to end up with different individuals on the other end of the educational system. Then we haven’t even talked about the pandemic putting everything onto the balance and not knowing what’s going to happen next. When that happened, it was like, well, this is obviously perfect. This says exactly what we’re feeling, at least where I was at the time.
MR: Even the isolation and the emptiness, it’s all still there. I think we even mentioned this in a previous conversation, how some of the objects, like you said, they have the scientific element to them. They look like molecules, so they have this connection with the virus in some weird way, and the way you present them is almost like on a slide, like what you could put under a microscope.
These photographs have so many different dimensions, and it’s because of the situation you were in, the situation we all were in with the pandemic. It all comes together. When you bring that and look at the photographs and understand when they were made and the environment that you were in, there were so many layers to it.
MS: Yes. I keep thinking about more too. The pandemic just added another big one to it. As far as the way you want to look at it, those rubber balls, by the way, they’re all over the school. They use them in all the classrooms, and they’re their chairs, and they’re their toys. They’re all kinds of different things, so when I saw the ones with the little prongs on the end, I immediately thought of the representations of the COVID virus you would see in the news, and it’s like, “All right, we’ve got to put this together and make it look a little COVID-y.” [Laughter.]
Sometimes it was a very direct reference being made with those assemblages, but sometimes not. Sometimes it’s just me working visually and formally with the pieces to create that sense of balance and potential disruption. Again, always with a single perspective in mind. I’m building to the camera, which would be very different if I were creating a piece like that for three-dimensional representation. If it were going to be exhibited in a space as a 3D sculpture, I would have a different approach. I would be thinking about all the same things.
MR: I think you’re one of the few people that can actually appreciate COVID in a much different way than the rest of us, because there were so many factors that came together to allow you to make this work. It’s great that you had the opportunity, and despite the horrible circumstances, it produced some really great work.
MS: Thank you, I appreciate that. I feel strongly about this work too. It means things to me that some of my other work didn’t, just because of the time period in which it was made and the connect, my kids go to that school too. There’s that familial connection, and I’ve grown quite fond of this school. We’re very pleased with it. We’ve got funding for four large-scale prints to go up in the school this winter. At the moment, the principal and her cohort are working to choose locations and specifications.
We’re going to try to place the photographs of the assemblages in places close to where the assemblage actually happened, so the students can connect the space with the image and the photograph. Having them go into the school on a permanent level, for me, just completes the circle, and hopefully for students down the road, who may not remember the pandemic, eventually this will be part of that reminder of that crazy time period where things went off the rails for a while.
MR: You really are giving those students something that they could latch on to and start to appreciate. Even though it’s a very industrial and sterile environment, it’s really going to allow them to see things in a different way. It’s going to allow them to get outside that space and think of things more creatively. I think that’s a great gift that you’re giving them. Like you said, it’s coming full circle, and it’s going to have a lasting impact.
MS: I hope so. Yes, I hope so. It’s getting some attention. We have potential exhibitions lined up in a couple of different places right now. The wheels start to speed up a little bit with the art world. I think people are still re-emerging from the pandemic mode. Hopefully we’ll get more out there. I think, though, it’s another thing worth pointing out: when the pandemic hit in March, it set me on fire, I just started making all kinds of work. It was my go-to mode for coping. A lot of work you’re never going to see, but I did a lot of stuff on my Instagram feed at the beginning of the pandemic.
I actually made a book, self-published. It’s called Mitigating Entropy, about architectural examples around my walkable neighborhood, because we go on walks every day. I would take an example in my neighborhood in Chicago, and I’d look it up, and I’d learn about the history, and I’d do a little post on Instagram every day to keep it out there and keep people engaged. It was also a reminder, because there’s so much history in the architecture around us, especially in Chicago, that it offers a certain sense of permanence, that when everything is on shaky ground, like, “This building was built in 1896.” The house I live in was built in 1893. It’s still here.
There’s a certain comfort in engaging with that history of the built environment, that although everything looks really dismal right now, there’s some comfort in knowing that all of this stuff around us is still here, and it’s going to probably be here for a lot longer, hopefully. I took some comfort in that, and people started to engage on social media, so I made a little publication about it as well.
MR: Nice. The idea that you can be in different environments and still thrive and be a success, and then putting that in this history, the architecture helps support that idea that no matter what conditions you’re under at the time, there’s some permanence. There’s an end, and there’s a way out.
MS: Hopefully, yes. [Laughter.] I’m hoping. I think that too. Again, I made the book for myself, but I’m not sure it really holds together as an art book per se, so I don’t think it’s going to get a major release in any way. But if you’re interested in looking at some of those, you can go back through my Instagram feed to that time, you’re going to see a daily post of the architectural examples.
We weren’t driving anywhere, we were just walking every day. It was a way for us to kill time and get outside. Those were weird times walking around the neighborhood because we weren’t wearing masks or anything outside yet because we weren’t sure what was going on. “When do we wear a mask? Everyone wear a mask or just some people?” Nobody really knew what the hell to do. We all looked at each other on the sidewalk as we’re passing like, “Okay, nice to see you.” It’s almost like we didn’t even want to look at each other, that we might actually give each other COVID just by meeting each other’s gaze as we pass on the street. It was so strange. [Laughter.]
MR: That year was so surreal. Staying inside, going outside, you were nervous, but you were still frustrated, so you had to get out.
MS: Confused.
MR: Yes, confusion. Looking back on it, it was such a remarkable time because we all went through so many different emotions.
MS: The very first thing I did at the beginning when everyone got sent home—I got sent home from SAIC [School of the Art Institute of Chicago], my kids got sent home from school a couple of days later. We all ended up just sitting around for a couple of weeks while we waited for things to settle out. I collaborated with my daughters, and I turned them into coronavirus warriors, and I asked them to create weapons with their toys. They built these wands, and they were going to be superheroes and stuff. I photographed them as warriors against the coronavirus, a thing we can’t see.
Again, those will probably never see the light of day, but it was a fun activity to do with my daughters. We could collaborate, and we could use it as a way to pretend like we were actually doing something to fight against this thing that was affecting our lives so much. That only lasted a couple of weeks, but you come up with these things as an artist. It’s just a way to process, a way to deal and cope with a difficult situation. I surprised myself with all the different things I ended up doing. I thought I might just shut down and do nothing, but I did the opposite. I was very pleased that that turned out to be the way I dealt with this type of situation.
MR: I think there was a very large chance of us all shutting down. That just shows you the human condition. I’m sure there were some people that were just completely miserable, and I completely understand why they would be, but the human condition just forces us to move along and get through things. Thank goodness.
MS: The only other option is throwing in the towel altogether, and I’m not ready to do that. [Laughter.]
MR: Let’s hope most people aren’t.
MS: Let’s hope, exactly. I also think back to my family history, my dad was born in Germany in 1944, right in the middle of the war. My German family saw their entire country get taken over and then destroyed. We’re not even close to that stage yet. Someone else always had it more challenging than you did. I think that helps to keep things a little bit in perspective. It doesn’t totally make everything feel better, but it does sort of, okay, there are definitely periods in history that were more challenging than this one, depending on where you were living.
MR: Yes. We’re still in a good environment. People still are able to communicate, and a lot of us don’t like what some of the others are saying potentially, but at least we’re still talking, even if it feels like a lot of arguing.
MS: Yes, at least there’s that. We’ll see where it all ends up, and it looks like I’ll continue to be making work one way or another, regardless of what happens.
MR: That’s the great thing about being an artist. The idea of the therapeutic value of being an artist is you have an escape, and you can either wallow in the frustrations of the world, or you can at least take yourself out for a while.
MS: This activity that I was doing in the school, I am shifting now towards my studio. The next round of work is going to involve preemptively doing 3D work in my studio that will then be taken to another location to be rebuilt. I’ll have a whole process in there between very meditative building and then documenting, taking down, rebuilding somewhere else and photographing and then bringing back to my studio. I’m looking forward to that meditative visual engagement with objects and also with the two-dimensional plane with photography. We’ll see where that all leads us.
MR: Great. I think you wrapped us up.
MS: Fabulous.
MR: I definitely will get ahold of you in the future and find out how the new projects are moving along, but I really appreciate the time to talk about Collective Consciousness and get more insight on how that was created and the future of the project to some extent.
MS: Thank you, Mike. I appreciate this. It is fun to talk to you, and I’m excited to see what happens with all your upcoming changes at the school and the museums.
For information on the work of Matt Siber visit his website at https://siberart.com/.