February 17–24, 2000

cover story

Multi Man, part 2

Wunderkind: Chris Garvin, web designer, artist, academic. photo: Michael LeGrand

by Jen Darr

continued from here

You Don’t Know Jackie

The odd cardboard cutouts, sign language alphabets, plastic Fill-Air bags, even the pieces of bubble wrap tacked onto Garvin’s office walls seem like a random collection.

But it’s not, says Garvin. "It’s about putting things together to create new meaning."

He points to a piece of cardboard with an image printed on it. It seems as if it’s warning the user of the box to watch out for the plastic straps binding the package — much like those slip-and-fall signs janitors put on wet floors — but the image is too complicated to decipher.

"Don’t do what?" he laughs. "That’s the worst symbol ever."

His Nexus installation, part of Ohm, a group show which he curated, is a story told almost entirely in symbols, including a lung with a spot on it, a graduation cap, a broken jaw and a car crash (two cars facing each other with a Batman-style red burst between them).

Jackie Nice Guy is about his father, Jack, who worked as a bricklayer in a Buffalo, NY, steel plant.

	Not-so-soft drink: Untitled work from 1995, three paper soda cups filled with concrete.

"I had a strained relationship with my father, as most boys do," says Garvin, the youngest of five children. "I think we said we loved each other when I was 22. I have the letter still."

Around that time, Garvin explains, at a family dinner, his brothers and sisters mentioned a car accident.

"I said, ‘What do you mean, car accident?’ I always knew that my father, when I was a kid, would have something drool down his chin and my mom would say, ‘Jack,’" — he motions to his mouth, and pretends to wipe his chin.

But he was never told about the head-on collision that almost killed his father. There were two cars and four people — the other three died.

"A priest gave my father last rites, they were sure he was going to die."

His father survived the crash, coming away with only a broken jaw.

Garvin says he always had a "weird tension" with his father.

"I really didn’t know about his life. It kind of hit me. I felt bad. You’re in this loving relationship with your parents, but you want to be their friend, you want to know more about them, you want them to care about your life beyond ‘I love you.’"

Garvin says he didn’t understand how his father earned the nickname "Jackie Nice Guy." When he was growing up, he remembers a stoic man.

He has come to realize that the stern patriarch face his father wore at home was a pose.

"While his kids were growing up he wasn’t just working… when he’d come home he was acting."

The only photograph in the installation is an extreme close-up of his father, who is almost smiling.

"With that picture, I was really looking for that kind of Mona Lisa-y smile he has," says Garvin, the smile that says, "‘I’ve had a hard life’ — but it’s still very positive."

He had initially planned to show a video installation for this show, but the gallery did not have the projectors to accommodate it.

"Instead," says Nexus gallery director Joan Wetmore, "he came up with a completely different piece, very low-tech and wonderfully effective. No motion, not much color, but incredibly powerful because of its offhand simplicity."

Video projection, in Garvin’s view, is "about the speed, the quantity of information we take in in our daily life."

Jackie Nice Guy isn’t such a departure, however. Instead of working with speed, he uses narrative.

"The idea was to slow it down so much that they became still images, which are really kind of like a series of paintings."

 

Commercial Breaks

Chris Garvin’s father, Jack: an image from Garvin’s installation piece Jackie Nice Guy.

As professor and as artist, Garvin is open to all kinds of inspiration, even from corporate America. Rather than shy away from commerce, he welcomes the challenge of working in the business world while at the same time appropriating its symbols and technological advances in his artwork.

For instance, when he was living in Columbus, OH, during grad school, advertising billboards and gas station signs punctuated the otherwise charmless landscape — so that's what he painted.

"It was a difficult place to live," he says. He was initially turned off by Columbus' character, but looking back, he sees how it figures into his work. "These subliminal things happened," he explains, "as they're supposed to" with everyday iconography.

He even expresses admiration for one of the most controversial businesses of the moment, online porn.

"Porn has done some of the best R&D on the Web. Some of the things they have done that are incredibly manipulative to keep viewers are picked up by artists and designers and used again.

"If we can take what they are doing advanced-wise, their lack of fear in using these tools, and mix that with an artist’s sensibility, then we can do well."

He offers the motorcycle as a metaphor.

A Harley has a V-twin engine. A Honda’s is a big block. A BMW’s is flat.

"You can tell motorcycles apart by their engine, because the engine is such a big part of the aesthetic," he notes. "How they look and how they work is intrinsically tied together."

Garvin aims to teach those "intangibles," which, he believes, will make his students good artists. If they only want to show their work in a gallery, that’s fine. If they want to work for a design firm, that’s fine, too.

Garvin didn’t incorporate an internship program into the curriculum. He didn’t think it was necessary; it’s easy for students in this field to find part-time work. Unlike many students — art majors or otherwise — almost half of his students have part-time or freelance jobs that pay generously.

Garvin’s own life serves as an example. He chose to keep his place in Queens and continue to freelance. In 1997, while working at Oven Digital, a New York Internet consulting firm, he created Web sites for some of MoMA’s featured exhibitions, including those of German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Mexican photographer Manuel Alvarez Bravo.

Recently, he’s been working with Talk magazine and Gromco, an Internet company that maintains specialized niche sites.

The Web site he created for Talk is very slick and uncomplicated — very Garvin. When visiting the site, www.talkmagazine.com, the viewer is immediately bombarded with a 10-second stream of red and white text on a black background — "Do you talk about sex, politics, love, religion, therapy, Viagra, art, plastic surgery… everything all the time?"

The page then automatically changes to Talk’s index.

(No, he’s not working directly with Talk editorial goddess Tina Brown, though he did bump into her once — and "almost knocked her down.")

Initially, he didn’t think living in two cities and having three professions would work. Surprisingly, he says, it’s actually "normalized" his life.

"The reason I do design work is because the process of being a designer is very exciting. As an artist, it’s your message, your process, you pick the audience you want to speak to. It’s tough to calibrate and grow.

"As a designer," he says, "the message is someone else’s. You have the freedom to solve their problem, to send their message."

For Garvin, maintaining these seemingly different roles — fine artist, designer, teacher — is not only exciting, it’s necessary.

"My industry moves so fast, if I were to be here [at the university] five days a week, within three years the reason they wanted me [to run the department] is gone. By continuing to create and work, "I stay the person they wanted to hire when I was 28."

Ohm, featuring works by Garvin, Matt Owens, Chris Vecchio and Matthew Lewis, runs through Feb. 27. Nexus Foundation for Today’s Art, 137 N. Second St., 215-629-1103.