Interview

O’BRIEN: Semi-heroism? Mock heroism?

FEINSTEIN: Something like that. But it definitely involves that aspect of the male sculptor quandary, where you’re making big art that lasts for 300 years.

O’BRIEN: You have to have a little architect in you for that.

FEINSTEIN: And I don’t think I’m good at that.

O’BRIEN: Maybe that’s something you grow into.

FEINSTEIN: I’m not an architect. It’s been hard just doing our apartment. It’s very hard for me to imagine what something will look like. I need to actually physically see it. I’m not good at imagining, “Well, I need the refrigerator over here because of the traffic flow . . .” I have to be able to live in it and see. I don’t know why.

O’BRIEN: So when you’re making sculpture, you don’t start with a drawing?

FEINSTEIN: Basically, what’s happened in the last few years is that I’ll see an image that I like, and it’s usually something from, like, an old book, like a nice black-and-white . . . Did you see Rudy Stingel’s show at Paula Cooper?

O’BRIEN: No.

FEINSTEIN: It was medieval-like stone sculptures from an old 1930s-like book. A lot of times an old book with images will get the juices flowing. I could tell that he and I were kind of looking at the same sources, things that you would find at the Strand Bookstore for 50 cents. There’ll be something about the form, some aspect of the light, or the way an arm is too long or a piece of drapery is blowing a certain way . . . And then I’ll somehow take that one aspect of it and try to piece a whole thing together from it. I’ll do a drawing, and then drawings of the drawing, and keep getting away from the source as many times over as I can so I don’t just replicate. I’m not interested in trying to copy the object itself. And then sometimes I’ll cut up the drawing and hot-glue-gun the whole thing into a three-dimensional paper drawing, and either that will become a sculpture on its own—because that weird flattened, planed wood sculpture will be really beautiful—or I’ll use that as a skeleton, and then I’ll add stuff on top. Either they’re really round or they’re kind of these cubist-looking things, and it just kind of happens, like all of a sudden I’ll think, “God, that looks really good as is. I’m not gonna mess with it.” I’m not going to gild it, you know?

O’BRIEN: Your cubist-like things sort of look like they’re improvised on that scale.

FEINSTEIN: It’s true. It’s not that they have less freedom, but it’s strange that they are kind of more dictated by the model. And then the big round sculptural ones with the resin . . . There’s one I just had in the “the Glamour Project” show at Lehmann Maupin gallery. They take much longer because it’s about building it all up and making it really huge and then sawing pieces off. That’s much more physical—and it’s disgusting, sanding with big masks on. I stopped making those for a couple of years because it was just not very enjoyable to wear the whole sanding suit and deal with the venting system. But I like those pieces. They’re also just massive—they can weigh 500 pounds. There are many layers, a bit like that gigantic piece like a rose that was called The Stone Rose or something at the Whitney.

O’BRIEN: Oh, yeah—Jay DeFeo’s The Rose. It was in the “Beat Culture” show at the Whitney.

FEINSTEIN: She kept adding to it. The thing supposedly weighs like 2,000 pounds or something. That’s what these are about, these bizarre things where you could keep going and never let it end. You can literally keep shaving things off, adding things on.

O’BRIEN: It’s funny, though, that sometimes things that are monumental start out as small gestures.

FEINSTEIN: It’s true.

O’BRIEN: Maybe that’s how it works with -Richard Serra. I was in Beijing recently and I was taken to the CCTV Tower by Rem Koolhaas—this monumental building that’s like a cubist donut. It’s this amazing structure that kind of goes straight up and then, at about 40 stories, it makes a 90-degree turn and goes hundreds of feet without support, and then it goes down to the ground. It’s extraordinary. Somebody said he drew it on the back of an envelope—probably in about two minutes.

FEINSTEIN: It’s amazing that they can make it. The truth is that sculpture has probably a lot more in common with architecture than with painting, because when you’re building it, you have to think about gravity and if the thing’s gonna fall over. It’s very nerve-wracking in that way. But it’s also furniture.

O’BRIEN: You’re a secret engineer. When I was looking at this Rem Koolhaas building, somebody was saying, “Why would somebody do this?” And I said, “Well, obviously to show that they can.” Because it’s really about exploring the limits of the possibilities of engineering.