The last thing sculpture needs to be is about anything. It’s a beautiful way of approaching the world: avalanching things with meaning, having them implode on themselves

TESS POLLOK: Your new solo show, Queues, is on view now through March 9 at Kapp Kapp in Lower Manhattan. Queues draws points of reference between commodity, art-making, iconography, and the lines and lineage of ideas. What made you interested in exploring these concepts?

LOUIS OSMOSIS: It’s really about iteration and its affect; what does it mean to iterate something to the point that it actually starts to feel resuscitative, or becomes managerial and custodial? Insofar as the optics are concerned of what constitutes an artist or cultural output, I was thinking about traction, which brings in professionalism, and then the whole infrastructure of creative production starts to scale up. It would be remiss of me not to gamify my position within that framework. My homegirl Olivia [Rodrigues], who wrote the press release, also really aptly signaled that there’s a deep-seated hilarity to this show, which I agree with; it brings out the latent stupidity in art-making that I really enjoy.

POLLOK: You’ve mentioned Pope.L as one of your biggest inspirations as a sculptor. How did he influence Queues and how does he influence your thinking about sculpture in general?

OSMOSIS: He’s just the greatest of all time. The Pope.L term that I really enjoy with reference to Queues is the management object–the management object being a thing that affords itself the level of object but has to maintain that position against, like, becoming a mode of output or a mode of production. So the management object becomes a vessel, an infrastructure for maintaining objecthood. Queues has a lot to do with the distillation of meaning in art objects and nods to the fact that the value system with art-making is essentially the same as any other commodity. Which is maybe endemic to our late capitalist mode, I don’t know.

POLLOK: You’ve previously described one of the works in Queues, the stanchions, as a “bad version of Serra.” Do you play with tensions between high and low art on purpose in your work?

OSMOSIS: I actually don’t like the genre of high-low categorization. I tend to shy away from that term.

POLLOK: Oh, really? Why?

OSMOSIS: I think it’s fine if people use it because it’s in the popular lexicon of how people understand art and I don’t necessarily have an aversion to it, but I don’t see the high-low binary as helping to understand my work. I mean, I understand why people use it, because there’s a silliness and irreverence inherent to the show, but I’m just not interested in the hierarchy of values it implies because any object that occupies that “high-low” zone signals that it has already gone through some life cycle of consumption. You know what I’m saying? Its lifestyle has already been substantiated to some extent. Per your example, when I say the stanchions are a “bad version of Serra,” people know what I’m talking about, so the stanchions speak to this cachet afforded to a certain work by that canon. This is why I love the counter-politics of the silly object, because it’s able to enter a space and flip it on its head, kind of, like, how the class clown can disrupt the whole curriculum.

POLLOK: That’s very “art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable” of you.

OSMOSIS: [Laughs] For sure. I like being perturbed and I think being disturbed is the square one of any participation in art and culture. Obviously, the culture industry is kind of sickening and psychotic, but so are we, and what of that? I’m interested in the threshold of entry into the art game, emphasis on game, and I try to own my own position within it with my materials and optics–with references to, like, a Richard Serra or a Robert Morris, I’m exploiting the cachet of the canon, but, again, this is why I love the silly object–it basically enters the room with no clothes on and everyone who sees it goes, “Oh my god, it’s naked,” but it also reminds them that they’re wearing clothes. Seeing a silly object is like seeing a naked person; it makes you go, “Whoa, that’s crazy,” but then you start thinking about, like, all the clothes that you have, and what you did or didn’t wear that day. That’s the thought model that I’m considering here.

POLLOK: So Queues is like an inverted version of that Hans Christian Andersen fable, The Emperor’s New Clothes. The emperor is vain and bankrupting the kingdom buying expensive clothes, so two swindlers sell him the most exquisite clothes, which are nothing, by pretending that the clothes are too great to even be seen by fools. The emperor pretends that he can see the clothes and he processes down the main street completely naked, and everyone else pretends, too.

OSMOSIS: That’s a really cool reference, I’ve never heard of that fable before. I think it’s doubly applicable to Queues in the sense that these medieval theologies were motivated by self-preservation and belief, which makes me think of, like, the hypebeast. That sort of trope, which I’m fully a part of, has to do with how cultural production is bottom-up, and art-making always involves collective making and participation. Like, thinking about all these platforms that came up after sneaker reselling took off, and referencing my earlier point about scaling up production and art-making, that’s where administration and automation come into play–it’s kind of like an art farm, or, should I even say, a rhizome.

POLLOK: [Laughs] Yes, one could say that.

OSMOSIS: Look. It’s what it is.

POLLOK: There’s a lot of cum in Queues. What was the significance of making a giant sperm the mascot?

OSMOSIS: That comes from an obsession I had with these Mucinex and Nasonex commercials back in the day. The mascot Mucinex chose for their decongestant was this booger, a schlubby hyper-localized booger who kind of talks like me, and for Nasonex they chose this Parisian flâneur of a bumblebee who’s very, like, broken-wristed. So I was thinking about how these allergy medications chose hyper-pollinators for their mascot, the booger and the bumblebee, and how that brings up problems with objecthood twofold. One, it offers a representational paradigm of how representation actually finds its voice, and two, how does an expanded mode of representation then find its mode of performance? Maybe this is writ large to causality in general, but I really enjoyed the redundancy of that. This thinking also falls in line with what I love about disease and epidemiology, that layers of redundancy snuff each other out, yet are able to form some kind of “meaningful” image, nonetheless. So I started thinking about where I could introduce redundancy in a serialized fashion, and I thought about sperm, literally, because I was thinking, like, “a bust of a bust.” The image of a sperm tends to conjure a sex-ed illustration of one rather than actually cum, for obvious reasons, and I think that implicates a kind of pedagogy in the image. If you take that a step further, it also becomes this bad symbol for untapped potential or aspirations. I’m less concerned with the symbology of sperm than I am with sperm as a medium for propagation, ideological or familial. It’s a naughty placeholder for serialization that continues the show’s obsession with iteration. The interior logic of it–that mascots rarely speak, they just perform–underscores sportsmanship and this idea of, like, all the sperm racing for the proverbial egg. It speaks to a collective that is hyper-individuated at the same time.

POLLOK: Did you read the ScienceNews article about how sperm don’t actually swim, they spiral? That was a huge day for cum fans. Basically, we were only ever looking at cum through a microscope, in 2-D, so everyone thought they were swimming by nodding back and forth–but when they finally looked at cum in 3-D way, straight on, they saw that they actually can only move one direction, and they just sort of corkscrew through the birth canal to the egg.

OSMOSIS: You’re the real master of cum.

POLLOK: [Laughs] Yeah, that’s me. Moving on–you also use an image of the Statue of Liberty in your show that’s from Getty Images.

OSMOSIS: Yeah, so, it’s an image of freedom that’s printed with no concern for the fidelity of the image itself–it’s just printed to the dimensions of the wall. I think the fidelity of the image is a facet of sculpture that people are always trying to locate, and I think the piece is about defying that immediate instinct to locate what the thing is quote unquote about. The last thing sculpture needs to be is about anything. That piece kind of dangles the American empire, “the evil empire,” but it only does it to the extent that it’s, like, “that sounds like a you problem.” It’s a bait and switch thing. It’s bluish gray, red, and silver, so it’s so close to the colorway–specifically colorway, not color palette–of the American flag. It’s this bastardization of the Statue of Liberty, imaged even more by the stanchions that blockade you from it. I just decided to fuck with the notion of it being about something, to object to the notion of where the artist stands. That’s why I like to start with stupid prompts from the beginning, like “bust of a bust,” with the sperm mascot, this one was like, how do I make the wall-iest wall I can make? So it’s wallpaper, against some boarded up windows, across from stanchions–that’s my wall-iest wall.

POLLOK: You also use a two-way mirror, which you’ve said is about audience subjectivity.

OSMOSIS: That piece is at the end, when you get spit out into this sort of purgatory zone, which I thought of as being about the life cycle of objects. It’s a storage room–it’s framed over the actual gallery storage–for objects that reach the end of their life cycle, either they’re destined to sit where they’re going to sit or they’re being punished for not being sold. The implication of Queues is that it inherently has to finalize itself with some destination, so this was it. The lighting of that room is also timed with that of a thunderstorm, which is meant to dramatize the objects, dramatize the inventory. The two-way mirror is a really good formalized on-the-nose type of way of playing with people’s patience for duration. When the light isn’t on, it just looks like a mirror, so it’s been fun to see who just walks right by and who, like, peers in to try and figure out what’s behind it. It’s teetering on both sides of individuation.

POLLOK: Are there any artists working today that inspire you?

OSMOSIS: My favorite artists are my friends. So, my boy Laszlo [Horvath], Aria [Dean], Jasper Marsalis, Thomas Blair. My boy Kunning Huang.

POLLOK: Who are your biggest artistic inspirations?

OSMOSIS: Pope.L all day long. I think what I got from him is silliness as an impetus, silliness as a lens by which you navigate the world. It glitches the matrix, insofar as you don’t have to serve meaning up on a platter to people, instead it gets displaced into a lot of differentiated affective modes. Like, it’s just a sperm with a hat, you know what I’m saying? But when you take things at face value the way he did, and the way I’m trying to do, you afford yourself a certain brand of mutability that might be more difficult in other modes. Pope.L really, like, looked at a Robert Ryman and put it into words in any way a high schooler would, like, “Damn, this man really just put white on white.” He took that shit to task. Isa Genzken. I really respect any artist who can beat themselves as if they are their own allegations, to pin themselves up as if they are as material as anything else. The redundancy thing I really got from her, specifically her mannequin pieces. Before they’re a placeholder for a subject or a would-be consumer, they’re a display apparatus for clothing. She just doubles down on that. She looked at a mannequin and said, “Okay, it displays clothes,” so she avalanched it with clothes and its own internal logic. It’s a really beautiful way of approaching the world: having things implode on themselves.

Louis Osmosis is an artist and sculptor living in New York City. His third solo show, Queues, is on view now through March 9 at Kapp Kapp Gallery.

Tess Pollok is a writer and the editor-in-chief of Animal Blood.

All images credit Jason Mandella.