Transcript: Michael McMillen - Multimedia

For arts sake
Episode “Michael McMillen”

Michael McMillen: People say what kind of artists are you? And I say well I am a visual artist, and I say that because I do not want to define myself too narrowly. To me photography, filmmaking, and sculpture installation, printmaking, drawing are all fair game. They are all things I like to experiment with, because they’re all experiments. So I think visual art kind of covers all the bases.
I try to create situations that I myself would like to fall upon totally by surprise. I think a lot of it came from my dad; my dad had been an actor and he and worked many years behind the cameras in Hollywood as a scenic artist. I would watch him make these sets that kind of looked one way on television and quite different person. That seemed like a very at the time potent metaphor for what I was seeing in life, of the different aspects of the same situation.
I wanted to explore that duality of reality. I wanted to present things that weren’t as they seemed. So in a lot of my pieces, the installations if you look closely you’ll see what they really are. For the casual observer at first glance you think there is something else.
So for as an example in the garage piece at LACMA, it appears to be a maid 20th century urban garage and on one level it appears to be that but it is really something else it is a metaphorical picture of Los Angeles. Then I don’t expect anyone else to get that except for me because I was making it an expression of my interest in that subject at the time. A lot of the installations have little clues to their true identity in them if you look close enough, so the idea of the more you look of the more you see has been very appealing to me.
As a kid I had a wagon than I would pull around behind me and I would go down my alleys here, way before they were paved, they were tar and sand it that point back in the 50’s. I would find I would hunt through trash and find old tube radios and record players and bits of world war two tossed out, like an aviator’s cap or something like that. I would drag it home and I had this little collection of objects, I would take the radios apart with little pliers that I would borrow from my grandfather.
I had a little box of tubes, resistors, and capacitors in tuners and knobs. So there’s some sense of ordering things and deconstructing things and trying to understand what they were. Things that seemed interesting for whatever reason I would want to look at, I guess maybe because they were visually appealing. I would also make up stories about what they were for. I think all of that idea of finding objects of interests continued into adulthood as you can see it has gotten out of control.
The problem is that I see too much potential in anything that I look at, gee I could use this for that or one of these or one of those, and pretty soon I am awash in stuff. The appeal that objects that are used have for me, perhaps it comes from my elderly grandparents as parent figures. I grew up in their house, with their furniture, and their photographs and all their friends were elderly so I was as little kid always with these very mature adults for my company for the very early years of my life so perhaps that sense of history translated over to objects that had had a previous life before I got them, had some sort of resonance to me.
What I am doing more now, my interest is going to film, making my own little films and with that it allows me not to have to own so much stuff anymore. Film really allows me to go back and really mind my own history of images and recontextuailize them. They’re like visual collages, almost a series of stream of consciousness images that you look at and move on to the next. And there is a, I guess Dalt created the mind of this totality that forms an impression in the viewer, hopefully at the end of the film.
I want to compare images that are sometimes startling and sometimes illogical so we never quite know where it is going but it leads you. It is like a dream you know every dream is new and they’re usually quite fascinating because we don’t know where they’re going, and at the end we wake up. I like that about film, is the closest thing we can get the dreaming I guess and share it with someone else is making a film.
I keep hoping to be surprised and amazed by art and every so often happens and that is why I like museums so much because the work there has been gleaned from the history of art and the good pieces are generally in museums now and when I find it, it is, how do you describe it? There is always something so satisfying and amazing. I guess I like things that amaze me and art does that when it is good.