In the Studio with Maskull Lasserre
INTERVIEW
Published Mar 5, 2021
Maskull Lasserre in the studio.
You currently live and work in Squamish, British Columbia, which is a town about an hour north of Vancouver. You are someone whose artwork is very informed by experiences, and you have completed many artist residencies in your career. In a moment where we have all been spending more time at home, do you find that the way you work in the studio has shifted at all?
It turns out experience is a pretty easy thing to come by if you’re willing to look carefully. Many of the most curious and surprising adventures I’ve had through my work found their beginnings in the most mundane scenarios. The quotidian world exists dangerously close to us in our everyday lives, and its potency is easy to miss while we’re busy looking for inspiration farther afield. I’ve been both lucky and grateful to be able to watch the world slow down around me while work in the studio has remained challenging and productive. I’m sure the different speed, the shifted priorities, and unexpected challenges of this time will gradually filter into my work over time. Experience for me burns slowly, and the origin of the work it generates often remains unclear until the end. It’s the mystery that keeps me working.
Craftsmanship (such as carving and foundry work) is a large aspect of your artistic practice. Can you speak on how you go about the process of developing your skills, and choosing the right type of material to execute your ideas?
I think craftsmanship is like grammar; it’s useful for scaffolding clear and cohesive ideas but knowing when to let it go is equally important when the subject demands it. My most important skill has nothing to do with tools or materials, but with tracking, finding and listening to what it is that the work is after. I’m not especially into grammar. At the end of his book ‘The Periodic Table’, Primo Levi traces the history of a single carbon atom from imagined ancient geological beginning to the literal, material, final period; the dot of ink that ends his book (actually to his decision to place it). If I do things right, craftsmanship and material are inseparable parts of the work, but only because they’re necessary to bind the human processes of thought and action to an idea.
One example of your work being informed by an experience is the time you traveled to Afghanistan with the Canadian Special Forces Artist Program. For those who are unfamiliar with the program, could you give us a rundown of your experience?
The CFAP offers an opportunity to artists to embed with Canadian Forces in a “theatre of engagement”. I would describe my experience with the ISAF forces as a difficult one, but it is something for which I am profoundly grateful and one that divided my life, and my work, into a before and after. I think Alice Munroe said something about not allowing truth to interfere with its own representation. Although it changed my approach to my practice from the instant I touched down, it took me several years before this subject conceded to be translated into any terms other than its own and found its way into my work. Even now, I’m not convinced that I’ve found a sharable place where art and war overlap. In these works I only explore a short and remote place where they share a troubled boundary.
The works on view at Arsenal Contemporary Art New York are sculptures you made in reflection of your time in Afghanistan. The works themselves are functional instruments, outfitted with accessories that can be found on military weaponry. Can you speak about how the idea of merging musical instruments and weapons came to be?
It's critical to remember that every component of these works retains its suggested function, both musical and military. These objects are not props for cosplay. Stark utility preserves the authenticity of these objects and the integrity of the worlds from which they come. In many ways, up to this point of the exercise, art has had little to do with it. But an encounter with such polar objects, bound in uneasy equilibrium, emplore the mind for reconciliation. The journey, if we chose to undertake it, leads to all kinds of interesting places where isomorphisms between music and war make sense; compressive waves compose both melodic sound and exploding ordnance, both arms and instruments affect their targets at distance, and so forth. Art is definitely implicated here, and not just as a mode of critical thought - remember the uncomfortable ties between major art institutions and profits from the arms trade. My experience in Afghanistan forced me to reconsider my past as a musician, my practice as a sculptor, and my responsibility as a human being. Merging musical instruments and weapons might appear on the surface as a catchy visual syllogism, but these objects guard something profound not captured by their literal description.
One obstacle we ran into while preparing for Theory of Prose was shipping your artworks from Canada to the United States, given that the sculptures have gun parts on them. Despite them ultimately being artworks, as well as functional musical instruments, they were still perceived as dangerous objects to import into the states. While this was a problem we had to solve, it ended up adding an interesting unintentional conceptual layer to the body of work. How did you perceive this situation, and is it something you considered while making the work?
The way the work intersects with the world is the whole point of the work. These pieces are probes, “instruments”, or apparatus that are designed to induce an effect in their surroundings - be that in an art gallery, concert hall, or a border customs office. The objects I create are often mistaken for the focal point of my practice. They are much more accurately described as the artifacts of a private performance, or the tools of an evolving philosophical inquiry. In either case, my work does not converge to a point contained within the physical objects it generates. Instead it resolves to a point located in an imagined past or a possible future. In the case of these works, Tools for a Second Eden, neutrality of both instrument and weapon is lost the moment it is taken up by the hand, or the mind of the viewer. Or the ATF agent at the border for that matter. What each does with it next is where this work gets interesting.
Do you have any upcoming projects that you are working on that you can share with us?
At the moment I have a publicly commissioned work in the installation phase, and a couple others on the go. There’s also a large carving, (or a small carving in a big old-growth tree trunk) on the way to the Bank of Montreal Project Room in Toronto later this year. Otherwise there’s always a collection of equally irresistible and insoluble problems to get lost in at the studio, or in the mountains around it...
