An Eloquent Conversation with Daniel R. Small

Photo credit: Erica Blumenthal

Daniel R. Small is a Los Angeles-based Multi-Disciplined Artist. His work has been shown at the Hammer Museum, the Sculpture Center, the Musee d’Art Contemporain Lyon, and galleries nationally and internationally. I got the pleasure of asking Daniel about what has changed since he became an artist, to the visual references he draws upon and his process when generating ideas.

UZOMAH: For your exhibit, Excavation II at MADE IN LA, where did you get the inspiration to use aspects from the Cecil B. DeMille's 1923 film The Ten Commandments?

DANIEL: The project Excavation II started as a speculative idea to excavate the simulacra of ancient Egypt in the ersatz Egyptian city that Cecil B DeMille blew up and buried after filming was finished in 1923. What interested me the most was that this faux excavation was concerned not with Hollywood history or with movie memorabilia, but with the conditions and exchanges that created the narratives we live with in the present. So the excavation effort was more about excavating an idea of linear historical progress and how by attempting to excavate the fake history we might better extrapolate the narratives that were left behind, and this methodology just happened to create all kinds of bizarre parallels and uncanny resonances across time. In this case, there has never been any evidence found that the Exodus happened, but there is something more intriguing about our will to project onto a narrative 3,000 years old that has no referent back in time that became endlessly intriguing to me as it is just an abyss of representation that the narrative forms around based on who is telling it. It’s really a case study of history acting as a time machine but finding the sameness of things in each era the project drops you off in.

U: What has changed about you since becoming an artist?

D: The most noteworthy aspect that has changed is not holding onto the vestigial idea that everything I do must somehow conform to ideas about what art is, what it must look like, and how its operation is channeled in these specific and rather uninteresting ways most of the time. I’m more interested now in the horizon of potential that art holds not only as an aesthetic engagement with materiality, but an investment in the narratives and shifts that it claims to address. Things seem to be shifting more away from ideas of the Avant-garde in favor of political alignments but most of the time this falls far short of the bigger ideologies that underscore its importance and then art just becomes ornamental and more like moral memorabilia. I’m interested still in the potential of art to provide an illumination and its ability to bridge more into cultural anthropology. Once you break away from art being a monolithic value that operates only in one context it’s quite amazing what opens up.

Animus Mneme, 2018, installation view at Sculpture Center, Long Island City, NY

U: How old were you when you first started creating art?

D: I believe I was 10 years old.

 
U: If you could work within a past art movement, which would it be?

D: I’m not sure I would pick a movement per se because then it might denote wanting to become a part of that lineage. Right now, if this is an acceptable answer, I would probably pick visiting the Pirahā people of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil because they have no history beyond living memory. This phenomenon interests me because I think in our contemporary society that despite moving towards a more connected technocratic society that we are also moving ever more to a pre-modern animist way of thinking that by accident seems to be about a willful amnesia and having no history so the distance between spirits in trees and rocks and the hyper contemporary grows closer together while on the surface looking very far apart.

Animus Mneme (5D Eternal Disc), 2020, creation myths etched onto fused quartz disc with femtosecond laser

U: How has technology influenced your work?

D: Technology is as much our phones and computers as it is the systems and institutions we have built around us that are also equally machine like so there is no way to even begin to measure. I believe even language is technology because it is the first time we ordered our thoughts into being and by default the world. It’s hard to quantify the measure of technology because like with language we are so used to thinking within it we have no way to step outside of it. Even when we dream it is still language and this is the way I feel about technology.

U: How have the aspects of technology made your work as an artist more creative or easier?

D: Well for instance now I am working on an AI project that involves generative adversarial networks and creating a kind of data democratization platform that will eventually be available to the public. I do believe the role of an artist is shifting to encompass being more of an engineer and designer so I would like to think of ways my work and practice can invent the parameters of technological tools as much as being a user of them.

Arc, 2020, book page with 3-D print of ancient viral capsid in artist frame

U: What visual references do you draw upon in your work?

D: It is so vast and contingent on the projects and research I develop at any given time it is hard to say definitively. Recently, I’ve been looking at morphologies of an ancient viral protein from 400 million years ago called Arc for a new series of works I have been making.

Excavation II, 2016, installation view at Hammer Museum's Made in LA exhibition, excavated remains of The Ten Commandments film set with excised paintings from the Luxor Las Vegas

U: What artwork that you have made stands out to you most and that you are most proud of?

D: Probably an artwork that is equal parts artwork and equal parts intervention in an institution, and it also happens to be a design project as well that will eventually travel to the planet Venus. The project I am referring to involved developing the symbology for a rover called the Automaton Rover for Extreme Environments (AREE) that is being built at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena California. My contribution was designing the logo using an ancient alchemical sigil book and translating these symbols like they did in medieval times where you would write a sentence then stack the characters or glyphs on top of one another, then edit the form until it conjured your wishes. This methodology was used as a kind of analog form of engineering translated into a visual language, as the premise for this rover is to use the most ancient clock computer, the Antikythera mechanism as its engineering basis for the rover. The engineers had to use this design as the surface temperature of the planet Venus is too hot to host a rover with electrical components so had to use the most ancient of analog computers. So once it is built this symbol will be on the side of the rover that will travel to Venus.

For more information about Daniel’s work you can find it here.