A Conversation with TODT: flexible logistics
by D. Dominick Lombardi
first appeared in SCULPTURE MAGAZINE MAY 2007
It would be difficult to find an art group with a greater influence on contemporary installation art than TODT. The collaborative goes back to 1978, and I can distinctly remember being moved viscerally the first time I saw Womb Wars. In my mind, that piece changed everything about how we look at the limitations or structuring of the artwork. Perhaps as much as Duchamp’s Large Glass, the work seemed to demonstrate the limitless possibilities of the art object. Like Duchamp’s work, Womb Wars fractured, then reconstructed reality, adding science industry, and technology while maintaining a creepy, implied human presence.
I recently interviewed the three remaining members of TODT at Yellow Bird, a gallery in Newburgh, New York, during their “Maps and Models” show. Elizabeth Stevens, director of Yellow Bird, also participated in the discussion. The artists use only their first names to maintain their anonymity. TODT has recently shown at the Lab Gallery and Side Show in New York. The group’s installation Exurbia will be at the Hyde Collection in New York for the spring/summer 2007 season; “Weapons and Products,” an exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Cajarc, France, is planned for summer 2007.
D. Dominick Lombardi: Why the name TODT?
Jennifer: It’s a Dutch/German word for dead, or very dead.
Jerome: It’s a negative theology to a certain extent.
Joseph: It’s a complete annihilation of a material existence—an annihilation of everything that makes reference to you, or to anything or anyone that has come in contact with you. It’s all erased.
Jennifer: Actually it was by coincidence that we found out what it meant. Before, we were interested in the name as a type of acronym that would allow us to remain anonymous.
Jerome: The name came from Fritz Todt, a German engineer and the predecessor of Albert Speer as Hitler’s Minister of Armaments and War Production. Recently I found out that in Catalan, todt means “everything.” In New York, in Staten Island, there’s a Todt Hill cemetery. There are lots of references.
Jennifer: That section was a Dutch area years ago, and Todt Hill means Death Hill.
DDL: Why collaborate?
Joseph: It’s a kind of a throwback to medieval art practice, when the artisans were more collaborative. The artist’s name wasn’t important. The work itself would be its own image.
Jennifer: The strategy, in my view, came from the mechanisms of play. That was the way we operated as kids. And now, we continue it in an academic or intellectual endeavor. We maintained our anonymity so we could have more fluidity, so we
would all be able to grasp or embrace each other’s work more easily.
Joseph: Single artists come out with a stamp, which give them a lot of flexibility. Once they get into the industry, that all has to remain intact. It’s also very hard for individual artists to move to left field if they are dependent on sales or the industry There are other responsibilities that come into their market.
Jennifer: As a matter of fact, we were talking about flexibility one night, and one of the Pop aspects of what we do is to create our own sense of history. We could become historical figures, or create our own references, and in a way, establish another persona.
Joseph: It’s like that figure by Murakami—I thinks it’s called DOB. He was our studio assistant years ago, and that’s what he learned from us. It becomes like a tag, instead of the artist’s name. But getting back to the collaborative—I think we are the first of this type of group, and it has worked, as suggested by its longevity. The flexibility is what keeps it together.
DDL: You must have strong common beliefs, as well as disparate beliefs. And these things have to be worked out in your imagery, your direction, or your materials. Does this divide you as far as what one person does in the collaboration? Your not all working on the same piece at the same time, I assume. You’re doing components of a piece, then collaborating and pulling things together. How much planning do you do together, how much are you each on your own, or is it just organic like anything else?
Joseph: I would say organic. Even the planning comes through a certain object, or a site or color will set things in motion.
Jerome: And you want TODT to expand, so you want us not conforming to TODT. We wanted to invent a form wide enough to take in new concerns, just like society is wide enough to take in a boat, an atom bomb, or forks and battleships.
Joseph: If anything, the work itself would imply a totality of all that is and the converse of what might be—a human destiny of sorts. As a group, our approach is on the modern dilemma—the human being caught in a historical situation. That’s an evolutionary statement, rather than a revolutionary concept. The body is actually going through mental and physical changes in this new environment. So our work aims at some of the possible problems-and potential benefits, although I feel that most of our work approaches negative issues.
Jennifer: Not so much “approaches,” I think it talks about negativity. We were talking last night about Hegel’s concept of the negative, of approaching that subject, not neglecting it. It’s not a celebration of the negative, but an acknowledgment of what is rare in object-making.
DDL: You’re all talking about the same thing, but in different ways.
I want to get back to a statement that you made earlier, when you were developing your own sense of history, talking about the past and the future. Is that the essence of what you create, if there is a common thread in the way you see your history?
Joseph: In the modern situation, everything is now available. The information you talk about is everything we have become. TODT is caught up in instant history, whether or not the information is historical.
Jerome: The methodology is like having combined arms. Each piece adds to the whole. Each piece could be on its own, but it takes on new meanings in the overall history of TODT itself. TODT is an ongoing evolution of itself. It’s like I was saying before: we live in a society that has battleships and forks, so TODT has minor
objects that are almost incidental and major ones, large public pieces. Each one carries traces of the society of TODT. Each piece is playing up to a cumulative effect of TODT. The collaboration becomes a sculpture in time. And it runs the gamut from playful to tragic.
Joseph: The collaboration becomes the sculptural focal point, and all these other things get added on.
Jennifer: It’s also quintessentially American in the sense of its materiality, which thrives on an anonymous accumulation of stuff.
Jerome: Yes, there’s a gluttonous mobility or antagonism.
Jennifer: It’s about accessing it, having it, the availability of it, the fluidity.
Jerome: It’s like mobilizing marches and re-assembling them.
Joseph: Yeah, mobilizing different marches and then re-assembling
them at a different location. It’s logistical art.
Jerome: And the work refers to that. When we first started, we talked about TODT as being a logistical organization. It was the first of its type.
Jennifer: It’s mechanized muscle in a way.
Elizabeth Stevens: So much so that after seeing some thing or some place, I’ve heard you call things TODTonian.
DDL: Yes. It’s like your own universe.
Jennifer: It’s about looking at or thinking about something, andthen thinking, “What would be TODT?” It’s about the observation, and that’s where the work takes on a deliberate form. It captures the negativity that we were discussing earlier: people can recognize that sentiment in the work.
ES: I think that there is a common thread. I can remember, when I first started following your work, I would always refer to you as fraternal triplets. Even though you were in different studios, working on different projects, you were communicating with one another—you always had common goals.
Jennifer: We’ve also had huge fights. You sometimes cross over to where individuals want to assert themselves, and you lose the common ground. Then you step back and ask, “What’s the objective?” You have to avoid disparate points of view so you can make everything work and meld and look as if one person did it. That’s
where things can get critical—trying to maintain that integrity. And those discussions can get animated at times.
Jerome: These are the same conflicts you have in society—for instance, where people are building their houses and doing their jobs. There are going to be conflicts in that process.
DDL: Are there any specific influences in your work?
Joseph: I would have to say Dada, which was a social commentary on the negative. The Dada artists were all moving out of that first phase of Modernism; it was the Dada revolt. Then things started getting more classical again in Surrealism.
ES: You have a very Pop feel in your work. I see a lot of Oldenburg and Warhol.
Jerome: Well, TODT doesn’t have the same rude and crude feature of the Dada look. But Dada opened up that methodology and allowed 20th-century art to be what it became. If anything, it was a major material revolution.
DDL: So, you look at everything, anything can end up in your work. But you definitely have some specific interests. What are, for lack of a better term, your subjects or interests? Besides war that is.
Jennifer: Agriculture, medicine, sex, religion, boredom.
Joseph: But they all tie into that activity that seems to lead the human into conflict.
Jennifer: Yes, but that is inferring that all subjects are yielding to the predicament of war. That is a part of human culture, as is entertainment, but not the entire culture.
DDL: Within this organic process you seem to be working in, what comes first, the idea or the object?
Joseph: I think the idea spins off of something I might see- one thing works into something else, and all of a sudden, the idea starts to shape itself. The approach of the arts, and of the human in general, is one of appropriation. Human beings do not have the ability, I think, to create from nothing.
Jerome: You don’t build a bridge until you come to a river.
Jennifer: It’s the idea that the object can create its own imaginary life. In a way, we are reacting to the material.
Jerome: The idea could just be a surplus profit connected to the processes. And it may not be the most important thing. Maybe it’s just an alibi for the process. And you know, as an artist, that it’s more about the process than the idea.
Jennifer: I’m always asked what our work is about, and my answer always the same: we did our part, now it’s up to you to figure it out. Once you make a social contract of bringing it out to the public, then you establish that dialogue. Anyway, I may not discover what it all means for sometime myself.
Joseph: I think that was the strength of Dada. They allowed these things to come into play.
DDL:We are all about the same age and were all exposed to basically the same things. We experienced war in our homes for the first time watching the Vietnam War on the TV in our living rooms. You address war in your art, whether or not people get what you are doing. Deconstructing war and analyzing war are better than not addressing it at all. And it has now become part of popular culture. Or more precisely, unpopular culture.
Jerome: It’s constantly promoted -on TV, in video games, in toys, it’s one of our greatest creations.
Jennifer: It’s a phenomenally interesting subject-an interest that cannot be denied because of what it brings out in people. I don’t just want this to be what TODT is about. We are not celebrating war. It’s an analysis that fulfills our own curiosity.
DDL: And it would be nearly impossible to study the history of art without looking at the times in which an artist lived, which were very often influenced by the effects of war.
Jerome: But it’s important to note that TODT is now on a more ecological track or eco-logistical. War was one of the first tools of the logistical. And now we are working on the eco-logistical. It was medical at one time, then it was sexual-it changes constantly.
DDL: It seems that if there is one common thread in your work,
it is an interest in invention.
Jennifer: It’s more that the structural, the psychological, and the inventions that result are what you are looking for.
Jerome: Or just psychology.
DDL: I also see humor in your work, as black as it is.
Joseph: I think that is what we are as creatures. Someone falls,
and that gets a laugh.
Jennifer: Then there’s irony-there are so many aspects to humor.
We sense that and try to expose it for our own amusement more
than anyone else’s.
Joseph: It is probably a play on our own vulnerability and absurdity. Humor takes the edge off of vulnerability. And there are those ridiculous sayings: “Die healthy” That signifies what people want. No one wants to get old, but no one wants to die young. That sets up the humor.
Jerome: It’s everywhere, like the comedy found in mortuaries
or the guy in the sinking ship laughing at the people on the
shore. It’s that kind of thing.
D. Dominick Lombardi is an artist who has written for the New York
Times, Sculpture, Art Papers, Art Lies, and other publications.