ARTHUR TRESS off the wall
ANDREA BLANCH : Let ’ s talk about the hospital series , you stumbled upon this hospital at Roosevelt Island , what brought you there ?
ARTHUR TRESS : I ’ m kind of an urban explorer ; it ’ s always been apart of the way I work . At that time Roosevelt Island , which was known formerly as Welfare Island , was in the process of transformation and the lower end of the island had a series of five or six hospital buildings . I was just wandering around and I found this huge building that had 500 rooms . It was a nurses ’ training center and for many years the city of New York had used it as a storage facility for all of its outdated , antiquated hospital equipment . There were floors full of old x-ray machines and iron lungs and I thought it would be a great place to make a studio . Previously I had been working in an abandoned railroad station that I found overlooking the Hudson River and I made that my studio for about four years . I ’ ve done many bodies of work in abandoned buildings . I did a series of male nudes from 1977 to 1981 in that building and around 1982 , I decided to make giant still lifes there .
ANDREA : Why did you change to still life ?
ARTHUR : I got tired of working with people . New York at that time was filled with all sorts of junk that people would take out into the street , so I gathered it all in this building and began making what I called , altars . There were some old desks left in the office and I would make altars of these various objects , I shot them mostly in black and white . I had been this self-appointed folklorist , ethnographical photographer in my early years and that became a job for a while but I just got tired working with people .
ANDREA : You say you like to express that ethnographic aspect in all of your work . How do you express that in the hospital series ?
ARTHUR : I was doing these sacred altars in the abandoned railroad station and then I found the hospital buildings , which had beautiful light since the operating rooms had skylights . When I first got there I started making these strange sculptures , relating a little bit to tribal art . Then I began painting the walls , the machinery and medical equipment that I found . Gradually I moved from room to room , like an archeological dig . Some of the ceilings had collapsed so I ’ d find all sorts of interesting medical charts and things that had been in these buildings for fifty years . As I was filling up the hospital with my sculptures , I felt that I was making my own mausoleum of funerary objects . They ’ re funerary sculptures , like a tomb sculpture in a way , when they gather the different objects to take with them to the afterlife . A young author named Richard Green wrote an imaginary catalogue as though these were an archeology discovery on a distant planet . He created a civilization where these were rediscovered artifacts and he tried to recreate what the objects were for . The sad thing is , Richard was only about thirty years old , and he was dying of AIDS in a hospital while he was writing it . I ’ ve never been able to get the book published , maybe it was too ahead of
Self portrait by Arthur Tress .
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