Anders Ruhwald
If you were to pass Anders Ruhwald in the street, you’d be forgiven for thinking he was a lumberjack or long-haul fisherman instead of a celebrated ceramicist, noted international artist, and a department head at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Detroit. Looks can indeed be deceiving, and looking closer is a common theme in the installation art he’s had featured in more than 20 solo exhibitions around the globe over the last decade. While in town last month to kick off his first solo show in Asia, he spoke to Sean Hebert about inspiration, interpretation, and—ahem—phallic imagery in art.
HK Magazine: I like to say that there are two kinds of artists: those who are inspired by the outside world, and others whose art comes from looking inward. Which most closely describes you?
Anders Ruhwald: I think I’m both, and this show is kind of weird in that normally I don’t deal with personal concerns in very explicit ways. My previous work has been about objects and how they interact with the world, so that’s very much like the first artist’s approach that you described. But there’s just something about how my life is playing out these days that made it feel pertinent to deal with myself right now. This show is about trying to reconcile one’s self in the world, rather than reconciling conditions in the world.
HK: What inspired this exhibition?
AR: The show is called “The View From the Sides of my Nose,” and it’s meant to be a humorous approach to an autobiographical show. I like the idea that you have two eyes that see two individual images that merge as one in your mind, so I have done that in a straightforward way—two pieces are just models of my nose as I saw it from each eye. But other pieces were inspired by a prior exhibition, which was about making one form and having other people translate it into other materials. I got really interested in how a single thing can present itself in different ways. So through this show there are mirrored pairs of things that appear almost the same, but if you look closely, there’s a slight difference. There’s a duality, and even perhaps an uncertainty to the experience.
HK: I see some phallic undertones around the exhibition. How do you respond to those sorts of interpretations?
AR: I’m not interested in that sort of depiction, but know that it’s an interpretation that people often bring to art themselves. Anything that’s upright and standing is phallic. Great—if that’s what you’re going to get from it, good luck! There’s no sexual content in this work, but if you want to see two penises over here and two vaginas over there, where does that lead us? It doesn’t tell us anything. A porn movie would probably do a better job at dealing with those issues than my art. It’s not the conversation that I’m interested in.
HK: Fair enough. But are you at peace with the idea that a viewer can interpret your work any way they’d like?
AR: I’m not very rigid with how people read my work. I will argue with people if I think they misunderstand what I’m trying to do, or try to push on a meaning that I don’t think is there, but I’m totally happy for people to make their own sense of it. If you look at the history of art, all artwork changes through time as it gets interpreted and reinterpreted. The object stays the same but the time around the object changes, and with it our understanding of it. The way I see it, this exhibition is the starting point for this work. It begins to exist when I show it, and then a balloon of meaning slowly gathers around it. I’ve given my five cents about what I think the work means by the way I glaze it, the way I title it, write press releases, and so forth. But now it goes out into the world, and that’s the beauty of art—cultural artifacts must change their meaning over time.
See Anders's work for yourself through Jan 12 at Galerie NEC, 208-218 Hollywood Rd., Sheung Wan, 2547-0000.