So the house of cards idea, how’d that evolve?

These are pretty tenuous, set up here. When Hills [Snyder, curator at Sala Diaz] approached me…you know, I’d aways thought “if I had a show here, I’d do this,” then three months later you go, “No, no, I’d do this!” So you get all these grandiose plans for what you’re gonna do in this space if you’re asked to, and then Hills finally asked me, and I thought “Fuck, what am I going to do?”…There’ve been some minimalist shows here, which have been pretty cool, like Kristy [Perez]’s piece was really cool, but I decided I wanted to take another tack with it. I wanted to fill the space up. To my wife’s delight, because she wants me to start working in smaller, more packageable stuff [laughs]. So then I thought, I want to build a house of cards. But I don’t want them to be playing cards, because I have this background in Conceptualism, so I’ve gotta have some idea… so I was gonna make portraits of all the dictators and despots that [the U.S. has] embedded into other countries over our history [laughs]. Something political. Then I thought, “nah, I don’t wanna do that”…

So then what?

So then I thought, “no matter what I do, it’s going to be a house of cards,” which is a very powerful metaphor for something that doesn’t have a foundation, it’s shaky, it’s temporary, it’s tenuous, it’s gonna fall…so whatever I did, it was gonna be read as a metaphor, so I thought, “why not just open up the metaphor closet?”

How do you open that, what’s the process there?

It was actually pretty fun for me, because then I started writing down these lists, like all these theatrical, cinematic, literary, artistic [metaphors], and then a little voice said to myself, “Gee, Gary, maybe if your metaphors weren’t so obvious.” And I thought, “what a great title for the show!”

So you started with this overarching concept—

Yeah, then I just started banging it out, and I had these stylistic issues to address, because I wanted to do something different.

Are all the dimensions of each card the same?

Yeah. They’re all exactly proportional to a playing card. They’re all 48 inches by 66 inches. And then I rounded off the edges. So…it wasn’t because I wanted to be a purist [laughs], but because I wanted to make sure they were engineered…I’d never built a house of cards before, even with cards [laughs].

Did you weight [the cards] differently according to where you planned to place them in each house, like heavier at the bottom—

Oh, no.

They’re all equal?

I came here with a big stack of these images…and I leaned them up against the wall and I thought, “I don’t know what I’m doing.” I had a drawing—

Where’d you get the drawing?

Google. I got it off Google, but it was so elaborate, it was like 5 stories tall, and I thought, “OK, I can use this element here…” and anyway I counted out that I could do twelve—

Were there cards that you ended up not using?

No. And I set it up, see…with the lighting, it wound up being theatrical, and I wanted to highlight my favorites. This one here, is from a movie from 1942 [points]—

Is that Alan Ladd?

It is, it’s from This Gun For Hire, [note: the card portrays a film noir image of a man in trenchcoat and fedora, gun drawn, and the caption "Yeah, I know. It's a metaphor. And so is my gun."] so it’s a cinematic metaphor, there are theatrical and literary metaphors.

How long did it take you to set it up?

It took a few of us a few hours. I was a nervous wreck, because I really didn’t want them to fall down, but I really didn’t want to bolt them together or anything. They’re precarious—they’ll move. When I was [putting them up], the [video art duo] the Prime Eights were here, and I had to yell, “Mark, [Walley, one half of the Prime Eights] put down your camera and come grab this thing!”

But the precariousness is part of the idea.

Yeah. Also, the three dimensions…you know, there’s a Zen garden in Kyoto called Ryoan-ji and it’s from the 14^th century and it’s a rock garden. No matter where you stand in the garden, there’s always soemthing hidden. Some art element that’s hidden, so it forces you to walk around to look at the thing. [At the opening] people were walking around, bending down, looking at them from different angles in order to take it all in…and some of these [cards] are just painted, while others are [professionally ink-jet] printed, which is a cool process and one I”ll definitely use again.

So this show’s really opened up some techniques for you with regard to dimension and technique.

Yeah, and I’ve been asked to do a show at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary art this summer, and since it’s a bigger space, I want to construct bigger houses…

How did the individual metaphors come about? How did you choose?

Well, of course there are so many, that at first it was sensory overload. I have an old postcard collection, so I chose this one [indicates card] with the old man in the boat on a giant sea, and I thought “gosh, how many times have we read about this,” then I added [a caption reading] “I feel so insignificant.” And here [indicates a whale illustration with caption] is Moby Dick, and then I was reading an essay about how the image of rebellious youth has been used over and over again since ancient time to signify change, so I thought of Ginsberg’s “Howl,” then thought, “that’s sort of heavy and harsh,” so I cartooned it up a bit by painting these beatniks. Then I read this thing on the language of flowers…[points to a card featuring a beautifully-rendered Victorian-style pansy, with caption] I was over in China, and in China they have flowers that represent everything, and I thought, “what if there was a flower that said, ‘Stop being such a dick’?” So it would just develop like that. This one [indicates] is from New Orleans, an image of flooded houses, and that’s so metaphorical, Biblical, and I wrote “the rich people write history, the poor people write songs.”

Whose quote is that? Is it yours?

No, I can’t take credit for it, but I don’t know where I got it, so I can’t give credit for it, either! It’s a wonderful phrase. And here, see, FEMA came along and on the doors, they have their own language of markings—

…To denote whether there’s a corpse inside, or how many…

That’s exactly right. It’s a code FEMA has, it’s a whole language, and of course I’m into language and codification, so that was powerful to me, the hazards, the classification of the disaster, the victims.

Has text always been a big part of your work?

Yeah, it has. Back when I was in college it was the heyday of Conceptualism, and art and language and all that stuff … and UC Irvine was a great art school, [it had on faculty] everyone from Frank Stella to David Hockney. They’d come in for a quarter and teach, and then leave, so you could take the same class over and over, and it wasn’t like these old tired academics saying the same thing every year, they were the hot shot artists. Jim Turrell was my sculpture professor, Sol Le Witt came in…and if what they said didn’t apply to you then, okay, but it was a big bombardment of influences, so it took a few years after school to sort all that out. And for some reason, I always gravitated towards art and language type stuff. Mine was never of the Lawrence Weiner-type stature or depth, the heavy dogmatic guys [laughs], it was always a sort of low brow comedy level. But I hung out with six or seven brilliant art students, and they taught me as much as professors did…we had Artforum memorized, all the buzzwords… we used to wave it around like Mao’s “Little Red Book.” It was a heavy theory school. But I’d had a couple of years in junior college where I’d learned technical things, like printmaking, and drawing the figure, too, stuff that was out of style in the post-Conceptualist era. So I’d like to think my work has a little craftsmanship, too.

Did you ever consider teaching?

Yeah, but first of all  Well, I do love sitting in on classes that some of my friends teach, like Ken [Little], and I love the academic setting, but no. Actually I did teach for a little while, did a semester program with some high school students at Fox Tech, I taught seven classes one day a week and man, I”ve been a baggage handler for thirty years, but I’ve never been so drained and exhausted as I was by teaching seven classes— and that was just one day a week! It amazes me that people can do that and make art. One of the advantages of being a baggage handler, in addition to getting to travel is that I’m paid…well, I’m solidly middle class. And I’ve been able to afford to just make things. Friends in academia will have ideas, and then it’s a matter of funding, grant proposals, which is one way to go about it. I had the advantage of, when I have an idea, just making the damn thing. Thirty years of working as a baggage handler…back after I graduated, I thought the world would beat a path to my door. It doesn’t work that way, but I didn’t know it at the time. And a buddy of mine back in California who I knew from surfing—I was working construction then—said, “hey, wanna be a baggage handler?” And that had never occurred to me [laughs], but I said, “yeah, OK.”…This eventually took me to Colorado, where I did my first public art [in the Denver International Airport in 1994, an installation entitled “America: Why I Love Her”] … and then to San Antonio. We moved here [in 1994] and one of the first shows I saw was Ken Little’s, and I said to Janet [Sweeney, his wife of twelve years], “I’m going to have to step up my game.” [Laughs.]

Do you come from an artistic family?

Yeah, in a way. My parents made things, like enamel jewelry, and my grandmother was an abstract painter, and used to flatten cans and make portraits—

What was her name?

Maggie Sweeney. Her house was unlike any other grandmother’s house. She had Eames chairs.

Talk a little about humor affects your work. Are you a fan of standup comedy?

Oh, yeah, and I’ve hung out with a lot of brilliant standups, I used to go to this place in Southern California and watch standup comedy all the time and I often thought [stroking chin, striking a pose] “I know I could do that.” So that’s for sure part of it, my thinking. I love how jokes make the mind work, how you go along in one direction, then suddenly switch.

There’s this tension and release thing, where a lot of humor comes from a slight shock, the unexpected.

Yeah! One comic I love, is Kevin Meaney. Louie Anderson, too. But I identfy with [Kevin Meaney] because to understand how funny he is…you have to see him. If you quote him to somebody and just say [imitating Meaney] “that’s not ri-i-i-ght,” it doesn’t do it, it’s not funny. You have to see his delivery, his character of his mother, there’s language and the visual element. Plus, there’s this competitive way of thinking in comedy I relate to. Like when I see the work of an artist that I think is better than mine, it pisses me off! [Laughs]I don’t seem like I’m a competitive person, but really, I am. I remember seeing the Art Guys…they did a piece that was a big wheel made out of suitcases. And I looked at it and I thought [angrily] “FUCK!” But, you know, it makes you work harder to get those ideas out, I guess [laughs].

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