THE LIFT TRILOGY  2006-2011

“Sometimes it takes an artist to know an artist…”

The Lift Trilogy (2006-2011) explores the evolution of my complex interactions with personal trainer Joshua Van Schaick. The Lift Trilogy comprises three videos along with related paintings and sculpture. Each of the three videos is integrated into a unique installation delivering its own, self-contained pleasures, while together the three form a chain of revelations that establish a narrative arc and the exhibition whole.

The Lift Trilogy developed from a video initially undertaken to convey a sense of what it is like to train with Van Schaick. The resulting video, Lift (2006/2011), a portrait of a young man who transformed himself from a hot-tempered, violent adolescent into a compassionate and philosophical personal trainer, has been praised as “a new kind of monument” and is now included in several museum collections. In the course of the project, our multi-tiered roles — artist & model, director & subject, client & trainer — deepened and overlapped, with Van Schaick becoming muse to the artist. Gradually I came to perceive Van Schaick as himself a kind of instinctive conceptual artist. As an exhibition, The Lift Trilogy presents an artist using the exhibition format to argue that someone else is an artist — an approach in pointed contrast to the prevailing conception, carried over from modernism, that an exhibition directly indexes an artist’s “self-expression.” Offered instead is art that celebrates and promotes another’s achievement.

The Lift Trilogy exhibition charts the course of the project and attendant discoveries. In so doing it confronts our definition of “artist.” Who is an artist? How do we define art? Is “art” restricted to the art context?

JVS & DR IN CONVERSATION  8/12/06

Joshua: There’s always a part of me who’s the athlete but wanted to be, you know, you. And maybe there was a small part of you, when you were growing up, that wanted to be a guy like me. So now, because of the Fitness Center, it has overlapped, now it’s…we just keep weaving things together.

David: There are lots of people who have an artist inside them but who weren’t exposed to the tools or the education so that they could become the kind of artist that we recognize, but that doesn’t mean the artist inside them went away.

Yeah, for sure.

Look, to me you are an artist of a kind. You arrived at it instinctively and you arrived at it your way, in your field, within the context of your knowledge…

Mmm-hmm.

Right? In the art world you really wouldn’t quite know what to do. So you’re not that kind of artist.

Pretty safe to say, yeah.

You don’t know that language yet.

No. That is a foreign language.

But you arrived at your version of it. The way that you arrived at…who you are. I know from working with you that you really explore the role–

Yeah.

The trainer’s role.

Part of being fit is being mentally and spiritually fit. So if I can give that to them also, I can give them the whole ball of wax.

It’s like, the same time that you’re working as a personal trainer, you’re asking “what is personal training?” And that’s the same thing that artists do. While making art, they ask, “what is art?”. The answer… is discovered… and built into the thing that they’re making. I think you’re doing the same thing. From working with you that’s what it feels like to me.

Maybe it just feels good…making life.

Y’know sometimes it takes an artist to know an artist.

Mmm hmm, yeah, okay.

Is your medium…what’s your medium, “training”? But you work with an expanded idea of training…

Sometimes I don’t understand how that term is used.

Medium?

Uh huh.

Writing is a medium, film is a medium, paint is a medium. Regardless of what you’re saying, it’s the means by which you’re saying it. That’s the medium.

Okay.

I don’t know what we’d call your medium, but just because we can’t name it, that doesn’t mean you don’t have one! (Pause.) I’ve made a lot of art but this is the first time I’ve ever had a muse–

Mmm hmm–

–always worked from ideas and stuff, and–

Mmmm hmmm–

...it’s fascinating: I can’t tell where the muse stops and I, the artist, begin!