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Vice Blog

THE ONLY LIVING ARTIST IN BARCELONA

Mike Swaney's ginormous collages look like storyboards for a yet-to-be-made TV cartoon where everybody you've ever met is shrunk down to a third of their size and forced to live inside sets designed by whoever invented the hamster cage. Have you ever tried simultaneously imagining the Smurfs with a cast of alcoholic hipsters, transexual clowns, Renaissance painters, and a karaoke-singing Frida Kahlo long enough to draw it out? Then congratulations, psycho, your head is probably as fucked in the one Mike lives in. Like a lot of the

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around at the moment, Mike's pieces are stuffed full of details whose meaning seems impossible to pin down Those two trophies with beachballs on top of them in one of his bedroom scenes look suspiciously like a pair of cartoon eyes. Or tits, depending on your mindset. I met Swaney at his most recent opening, and last week we sat down for a natter.

Vice: You've been in Barcelona for four years, what made you come here? Mike Swaney:

This kinda sounds stupid but it was instinct. I was always attracted by the word Barcelona, and i just had this big picturesque image of Barcelona in my head for a long time. Like a vision from a past life or something.

I see. Wait, do you actually believe in reincarnation or are you being flippant?

I'm being flippant. I don't know what I think about all of that. But that's kind of the only way I can explain the feeling of a strange nostalgia I have for this place. It's like in a dream.

Some Indian from Canada I think I read about somewhere once might have said something to the effect of "dreams are memories we haven't made yet."

Crazy. That's really cool.

Thanks. Anyways, yeah, I like things that you can't really get your head around but ring true

That's how good art functions for me. There's no definite ending to what it means.

I found your twitter, but it wasn't your twitter, it was another Mike Swaney in Texas.

The car dealership?

No, some other guy. He described himself with a list of adjectives, and i wanted to see which ones applied to you. So, first one; Christ Follower.

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I like Christmas but… nah.

Husband

I guess I am.

Father… wait, is this a stupid idea?

I like it… Not yet on the father thing. I'm really scared about that actually. I've got a niece and it's taken me like 3 years to learn how to be an uncle and how to deal with kids. I tend to only get along with very certain kids… You definitely can have strong connections with kids as with people. I was teaching an art class recently, and some of the kids warm up to you right away and talk to you the whole time you're there, and other ones want to keep you far away… With kids the connections way more immediate and less contrived than with grown ups. They know that they like you just by looking at your face.

I don't know why but I came out of your exhibition thinking about dinosaurs, and how no-one knows what color they were, so there's all this artistic license when it comes to painting them.

I used to really love dinosaurs as a kid and collected fossils. There's this really cool prehistoric park in Canada called the Badlands. It's just like desert with all these exposed dinosaur bones and this museum. There's another one in Calgary, with these life-size dinosaur sculptures that are all really 80's and weathered.

There's a place like that in Berlin, that's been closed for 10 years and all the dinosaurs have fallen over.

There's stuff like that just outside Barcelona too. Have you seen the huge ape?

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No! In Canada do they have that thing where everything is a museum?

Yeah, you'll be driving down the highway for two hours and there'll be a museum for quilts, then one for totem poles or wicker art. It's weird that they turn everything into a museum. There's so much more outsider and folk-art stuff like that in the States. They make these shrines…There was this Swiss guy in British Columbia, who built this massive tree fort with all these carvings and traps inside. He dressed kind of like a Dr. Suess character in rags and a top hat, and he sat inside this control tower with windows overlooking the whole thing. From up there he'd operate a squirt gun system…

Ha.

So as soon as you went to pose for a photo or whatever he'd nail you right in the balls.

What a bastard.

He was a super-funny man…. There were goats walking around on the rooftops.

When did you start doing sculptures?

I guess it's always been a part of it. The 3d contrasting with the 2d.

Oh you mean with collages? You also have a thing with impossible lines and perspectives, like the little people in your work.

Oh the little people came about by accident. I was doing scenes, and they were more or less to the right scale. But then I decided to blow the scenes up and keep the people the same size because I liked them better that way. People ask me about what it means, but there's no real explanation. They also say it's like Bosch, but that wasn't part of the process. I do like his work though.

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I'm also really into the titles. It's something that's difficult to get right, like with songs or novels.

The thing with contemporary art titles these days is that they tend to sound so pompous. Everybody just comes up with a collection of the fanciest words they know. It's boring.

Agreed. Will you tell me about this painting?

This is called

No Time for Mucking Around When There's Pancakes in the Oven

. It stems from a series i've been doing about the idea of performance art and the idea of performance as a static object. So in a sense these people are in a bedroom, and they could be posing or spontaneously performing or just hanging out. But… yeah. I think it's pretty open ended. Do you base the people you draw on people you know? A lot of them come from photos of friends I have in an archive, but some of them are drawn just from my head.

So they have stories behind them. Their own little histories?

Yeah there's a lot of friends and family in the pieces. This one is pretty much all people I know: Myself, my girl, my niece. It's also kind of about the absurdities in society and the really banal things that go by and get missed. Akward situations and clumsy moments on the street when stuff happens to you and you're like "I wish there was somebody watching me right now."

I love that there's a photo on your website of a shop window that sells doorhandles.

Oh man, all those kiosks that come off the fronts of buildings with the keys, or metal stamps, or labels, all laid out in a perfect composition….

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It's almost absurd that they seem so absurd cause it's all really practical stuff.

I'm really attracted to that. To me they look like installations on the street. The really cool thing about Spain is that there's still this deal where everybody has a separate and really particular function in society: The cheese man, the bread man… so I like that aspect, and also all those objects are super old somehow.

Do you like objects associated with an obvious purpose, or more as random things?

You mean, like doorstops? I think I just like them as an object, not for their use. I'm actually trying to collect doorstops. Whenever I see one I snag it. Which probably really pisses people off.

Just wooden ones?

Oh no, I'll take any kind I can find. I'm trying to get as many as I can.

So… i only had three questions really. Dinosaurs, little people, and I've forgotten the other one. Wait, here it comes. There's one of your pieces that has a box with some Indians inside, and then some headphones coming out of it--

That's called

Blowing Hot Air and Smoke Signals

. It's part of the performance series.

You mean that all of these paintings are actually sketches for performances?

Yeah. I'm actually doing my first video piece right now, and it's a performance video piece called

Assemblage Boy

. The video stems from these sorts of pieces. There's a table, and me as the actor, and a series of found domestic objects which i start placing on the table as if I'm making a collage. Each object corresponds to a sound…. That's the first, but I want to make this kind of stuff full-scale in a gallery, with all these things as models and sculptures. Eventually I want to do this with live actors and choreographed dance moves in sequences that repeat.

Woah. Is that a tapir?

Yep, that's a tapir. INTERVIEW BY PAUL GEDDIS