on the edge – an interview of kerry skarbakka

Risk is a magnet for artist Kerry Skarbakka. His photographs present predicaments that appear both life-threatening and strangely seductive: a man crashing through a window head-first, a figure who appears to be falling from a tree. Initial questions include “how does he survive?” “is the image photo-shopped?” Then the deeper questions emerge: “how does this work resonate with a society that is infatuated with success, with not failing, not falling?” “how does Skarbakka further a lineage of artists who inserted themselves into their art - placing their bodies in danger - like Chris Burden, Marina Abramovic, Stelarc?” and ultimately, “does the image that captures such an extreme situation enable us to cope in this age of uncertainty or lead us mourn the loss of stability and guarantees?”

I interviewed Kerry Skarbakka by phone on January 14 while he was at home in Pittsburgh and I was at his exhibit at Irvine Contemporary. In many ways Skarbakka is the man living on the edge: he is an adventurer as well as a thinker. In an economy that is fragile and risk-adverse, he is an outlier, someone who is incredibly forthcoming as he perseveres on his path, shedding light on the forces that are shaping our future.

His images are on view until January 30 at Irvine Contemporary, 1412 14th Street, NW.

PLP: I just entered the gallery and wonder if there is a progression to viewing these photographs?

Skarbakka: The show is not necessarily in chronological order, but more of a survey of my body of work as a whole. The pieces represent the performative aspect of my work, what I call my “performance-based photography.” I am actually a mixed media artist: my undergraduate degree was in sculpture. I consider myself part of a generation of artists responding to 9/11. I was in graduate school at the time and not really happy with what I was making. My previous work had a lot to do with death, but I realized I was not a documentarist. I realized I wanted to create my own stories. The events of 9/11 served as a catalyst that sparked my work. The anxiety, the tension, the feeling of loss that everyone had, I was sharing this. After years of rock-climbing and martial arts, I had learned how to fall. I discovered that in putting yourself into a situation where you lose control, where you let yourself go, can be intensely illuminating. I think that somewhere between flying over the handle-bars and hitting the dirt there is something very sublime that can be beautiful and terrifying at the same time. My work has progressed as I have created new pieces: often people bring something to the conversation about an image that I had not considered.

PLP: I am interested in how you describe the unknown, the loss of control, as a site of possibility, of potential. This seems to run counter to a culture that emphasizes order and perfection.

Skarbakka: I will be 40 this year so maybe the work reflects what it means to age, to face the inevitable. The pieces celebrate the strength and virility of the human body, but also its fragility: that simultaneously indestructible and destructible quality that we embody.

PLP: It is interesting to listen to your comments as I look at the piece called “Plato’s Cave.” Does this image connect to your philosophy of man’s relation to his environment?

Skarbakka: I realized that aficionados needed to have their taste buds whetted. Usually I name something in a more straightforward way, and then change the title later. I like the title “Plato’s Cave” because we as a society are rather in the dark. As Plato said “we are all chained inside a cave and we learn to live, to accept the shadows on the wall as real. By exiting the cave we can see the world that has been hidden…” Enlightenment can be seen as a kind of birth, the attainment of a more enlightened status. In my photograph, the viewer can see the man as falling into or being thrust from the cave, a kind of entering into the world. Each of my images is left to the viewer’s resolution. These pieces make you question what you see. They are reflections of where you believe you are.

PLP: An interesting analysis and intention.  I like the way your work encompasses elements that are intellectually provocative and visually captivating. 

Skarbakka: I always try to make work that is accessible. I refer to myself as a blue-collar artist. I believe that pleasure and enjoyment are part of art. Accessibility is key.

PLP: when you mentioned that you listen to feedback from people: are these fellow artists, critics, academics?

Skarbakka: Everybody and anybody. Through people, on blogs. There is so much out there, and there is a lot of misinformation. In 2005 my work received negative press due to an event at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art. Originally the performance was supposed to happen indoors, then, due to scheduling, I was asked if I could work outside. Falling from the roof of the building, I was linked to images of people falling from buildings on 9/11. Even though I fell in different outfits, and one of them happened to be a business-suit, the media was vicious. It turns out that at that time there a commemoration being planned for Ground Zero and the journalist was looking for a story. My images became synonymous with controversy as people incorrectly associated the work with 9/11. Associated Press did not do any fact-checking of the article, and the dialogue that ensued was all over the place. It was interesting to me because there were people who were very upset. One reporter contacted family members of victims of 9/11 who said things like “Tell him to go paint a bowl of fruit if he wants to make art.” The Daily News ran a cover with my image and the headline “Kick him in the Arts,” while the story about the new Yankee Stadium got a corner spot. The media blew it up. In fact I emailed Andres Serrano, the artist linked to the controversy with the media and the NEA, to ask advice. He emailed me back to say “If you believe in your work, stand by it.”

It was one of those moments when art imitates life and life becomes art. Falling is a theme in my work, and in this situation I was falling. I had no control. I went into hiding for a while. I still don’t know the total implications of that time. Maybe one reason why I do not have a gallery in New York City is because of this controversy. Today especially, galleries do not want to take on controversy.

When I was in Costa Rica on a vacation, nothing to do with my art, a man from Ireland turned to me and said “You are THAT guy.” He recognized me when I described my career, and he had read some of the stories.

PLP: That highly reactive response of the media exemplifies the volatility and lack of constructive dialogue that existed – or continues to exist? – in America.

Skarbakka: What was interesting was I got a lot of support from Europe – particularly from the Netherlands – where people could not believe the misrepresentation and mistreatment I was getting. Finally in April [2009] I had a chance to make my peace when Matt Lauer had me on NBC’s Today Show.

If I am such a small entity in the world of politics and events, and such a huge deal could be made of misconstruing my work, what are the larger issues that are being hidden or overlooked?

Through the experience, I learned first-hand that the media is not to be trusted and you have to be careful with every word you say. Even a letter I sent to the Daily News was edited to read like an apology even though I never intended that. As I said on the Today Show “I know that everybody is not going to like the work I make… I regret that people’s feelings were unearthed four years later. It was not my intention. I love what I do. I don’t regret making my work.”

I think the public is so fear-mongered that people tend to believe what they read or see on television. Now hopefully this is changing. I think we are becoming more savvy about the media.

PLP: there are plenty of examples of ways in which the media can direct attention towards elements of a project or performance which are not the artist’s focus.

Skarbakka: This can happen with my photographs when reporters emphasize the stunt activity – the jack-ass photographer – and I need to be aware of positioning my work so I do not become the geek-of-the-week. This gets irritating for me because it detracts from the concept of my work: what are the consequences of giving up control or of holding on too tightly?

When people draw comparisons between my work and a photographer like Li Wei I think ‘For everybody, everywhere, the last decade has given those of us who work within this climate of anxiety a lot to chew on.’ When I started photographing I thought I was the only one doing these projects about loss of balance. I now know of a whole group of artists with similar themes – from Yves Klein to Denis Darzacq. Most of them do not insert themselves into the image, except for Klein. I think it is interesting that he had a background in Judo and that in Leap into the Void, he had a group of judo practitioners holding a blanket outside of the frame of the image. Ultimately I do not know anyone willing to take the idea as far as I am willing to go.

To be clear, I try to stay away from the idea of falling: the images present ways of losing balance. They transcend the idea of falling. Falling boxes me in too much. The project I am working on now is a book that compiles 10 years of work on this theme. I want it to be a serious investigation of this project, which takes time: I need to get through these 10 years in order to see how it relates to the next 10 years.

PLP: the fact that you place primacy of using your own body makes me think of artists like Marina Abramovic and Chris Burden who put their bodies at risk to create.

Skarbakka: I think my inspiration comes from movements like Gutai in Japan and Aktionism in Austria where artists created performances that involved extreme states of being. In the 1950s in Japan artists became interested in the beauty of things as they become damaged or decayed [link to Gutai manifesto: http://www.ashiya-web.or.jp/museum/10us/103education/nyumon_us/manifest_us.htm] Their priority was on performance, but they took pictures of these events that included people running through glass or rolling in the mud. I think one reason why I switched from projects that were about death and blood and mayhem to these created scenes is because I needed to make images that were resolved y the viewer. Unlike the Gutai artists who used pictures to supplement a live event, my photographs are the focal point. I believe there needs to be ways of representing danger and death without making it into spectacle.

PLP: How much pain do you encounter to make an image, such as the one I am looking at now, where you are diving through a window?

Skarbakka: I am really happy with that one. It usually takes me 10 shots to make an image, since that is how many I can get on a roll of film, whereas with this image the process was slightly different. It was shot in Pittsburgh and I built the window and was setting it up, when a contractor who was nearby happened to see what I was doing and came over to me. He was very concerned because he thought I was trying to make something permanent, not something made to be shattered. He showed me a scar he had on his torso from rib to rib from an accident where he went through a plate-glass window. He recommended that I make cuts with a saw in the pane, and that I pad myself. When I initially went through the window, I was wearing a motorcycle jacket underneath the suit. It was the loudest crash I had heard, and I landed on a small mattress on the other side of the wall. I was videotaping as well as shooting. I usually try to keep my whole body in the frame of the shot, but in this shot my body wasn’t in the frame so I ended up re-creating the image, changing the color of the shirt from white to yellow, and then re-shooting it four times. I love it for the explosiveness. The impossibility. The fact that it is not real, but it is real.

Currently there are three projects I want to continue: the first is “Clean and Jerk” which I made at the same time as the window picture. It shows a weight-lifting accident and is part of “The Struggle to Right Oneself.” It speaks about the lengths we will go to in our image-orientated culture, with nutrition, fitness, dieting, to live longer.

There is another image I am thinking about of a car dealership here in Pittsburgh that has a collapsed ceiling. I want to create a picture that will probably be called “Auto Industry USA.” The building currently contains a grid-work of metal and dust and it is absolutely beautiful. I am hoping to get in there before they clean it up.

A third image I have been thinking about is falling through ice, but after a knee injury from jiu-jitsu I have not been able to make it.

I would like to be more political, and I am trying to infuse this into my work, but with subtlety. I would rather bring the viewer into an idea, than hit them overhead with it.

While I was in DC I thought of re-making an image by Cartier-Bresson of a man jumping across a muddy open space at a construction zone. [link here: http://www.henricartierbresson.org/hcb/home_en.htm]

His foot is almost touching the water and it is clear that he is about to get wet. I want to remake that in my style. I try to make images that connect to the history of photography, the history of art. And I continue to work on the “Fight Club” series which pits man against man, but which turns out to be man against himself. It shows that our strength is internal, but the environments where these fights take place are really great spaces. Arenas for a test of the will.

PLP: do you think that capturing these extreme moments, freezing gestures that are on the brink of disaster, gives the viewer a way of coping with chaos, or do responses tend towards safeguarding the familiar?

Skarbakka: I would like to say that these images are reassuring. I get a lot of emails -- from people who have severe vertigo to someone who survived 9/11 – and they write to me because they think my work is therapeutic. A lot of people who see the work that I did with my mother understand that my intent is not sensational or exploitative. The work is about transcendence. It is about different states of consciousness, about losing yourself. In fact a conflict I have as an artist is that nature has always been a source of rejuvenation. There is no better way to feel yourself on this planet than to be in the National Parks. I regain and refresh myself in nature, but art happens in the cities.