Shaun M. Baer was born on Halloween in 1983 in Reading, PA. He studied sculpture at the Tyler School of Art and graduated with a BFA in 2007. Shaun regretfully works at a sign shop, but in his spare time has been making furniture in his studio at Flux Space for the past few years.
I interviewed Shaun first because truthfully I wanted to get to know him better. He is one of my friends that I see a lot and we have discussions about beer, baseball, and music. However, we rarely talk about art and up until this interview we had discussed his art twice. I wanted to talk about what he did in school and what he was up to these days when he’s hard at work in his studio.
After the 2nd annual Fishtown Shad Fest, we headed over to Beer City, picked up a case of Black Label, and we were off to Flux Space.
Shaun’s studio is on the top corner of the building. The walls look as though Bob Vila or the guys from This Old House were in charge of the décor. Nail guns and pipe clamps hang from the walls and a drill press sits near the corner. The floor is covered in dirt and fine saw dust. There’s a large desk in the middle of the studio that looks somewhat new. Shaun said he made it recently but that he doesn’t like it. “I think it’s too big” he says. On a hanging rack, halfway up the wall is what Shaun calls his “storage”. There are a few large bins and four oversized fake heads stacked on top of each other in the style of a totem pole.
As we cracked open our first beers we jumped right in and started discussing a show Shaun had at Flux after his BFA show.
SB: I had a show here, actually.
TL: Right, I saw the video you made, what was it called?
SB: The video was called the UnJewlating Contemporary.
TL: That was the first time I ever saw any of your work
SB: Yeah, I made that video because Dustin [Metz] was in Germany and Melissa [McFeeters] was in Rome. I didn’t want to send them, just like, ‘I made a video,’ I wanted it to be funny.
TL: Yeah there was the chair and the light. Do you still have the stuff for that?
SB: Yeah…no I think I got rid of all that
TL: I guess it is just a chair and a light
SB: But it was a very specific chair. There was something about that chair that I really liked. It was something like, very like…I dunno.
TL: It was classy
SB: Yeah. I had that show and then, I had another show at some gallery, or I was in another show that also involved another fluorescent light and a pair of rain pants that I fucked up a lot and the fluorescent lights were the legs coming out of it into a pile of flour. And I never went back to clean it up. Austin Lee called me up and was like ‘There are bugs coming out of the flour, can I throw it away?’ (laughs). I was like, ‘Yes. I’m sorry’. It was all about setting it up and I was not at all about cleaning it up. That was like, um, I dunno. I don’t remember anything. I don’t know anything about time.
On the door to Shuan’s studio is a large letter S made out of plywood, and inside is a large letter M. I asked him what these were for and why he had them.
SB: I used these letters and LED rope light, you know? And I was making it around Christmastime so I was able to get LED rope for dirt cheap. And they were on a scaffold and it looked all nice. And it was like back in the woods and it said “Speak To Me”. But that was like 2 years ago.
TL: Yeah but you have other things going on so like…I mean what do you have to make art for?
SB: Mm, yeah I mean there’s also that.
TL: You seem like you’re not concerned about showing it to anybody.
SB: Yeah, because it’s not…So I, I like making so much that there has to be a function for it, in order for it to be like “This is why I should be making this”. I mean, that’s kinda why I stared doing wood working. And I also wanted to start making stuff nice and see how that related to my art, back to making art.
TL: Is that what you’re trying to do?
SB: Oh yeah, I mean I still do drawings and stuff, I’m just not really into showing them to anyone.
TL: Oh really, you have like a secret notebook?
SB: Well they’re not secret, I mean they’re all over the book case by my desk. But like all my tattoos are my drawings.
TL: You drew that?
SB: Yeah, I don’t think you’ve ever seen my drawings.
TL: Nope.
SB: I actually just bought shaunmbear.com and I can’t decide if I’m gonna turn it into a blog where once a week or once a month, I haven’t decided, I’m gonna put up a drawing. And there’ll be no backlog.
TL: Why won’t there be a backlog? Just a one time deal?
SB: Yeah, I dunno. I’m not sure. To a certain extent I…don’t want there to be a backlog because the way that I make them…OK this is what I’ve decided recently about what I like about art is that there’s some kind of…there’s…I like art that’s honest. And that…you can tell there’s more to it than what is there in terms of you look at it and it’s ‘That’s a shoe, that’s what you put on your foot’ and you know, something like that. That was a really bad example. (laughter) But um, you can tell that there’s something more, there’s something like buried deep within it. And when I look at art, I try to make a mental image of what the artist was thinking about, then make a judgment. I think that’s kind of what I’ve realized.
TL: You like to see what the artist was thinking, or what you think they were thinking.
SB: Yeah, and if I like it then I like it. And if I don’t then I don’t. Because I feel like there’s art out there that’s bullshit. And people who make it are ‘You mean I can hang out all day, and then go to the studio at night and paint for two hours and sell it for ten grand? Fuck yeah I’ll do that!’ I mean, and who wouldn’t? But then it’s total bullshit and that’s not the point.
TL: Well Shaun, what is the point of making art?
SB: I dunno, I think art has to be beautiful, I think it has to be honest
I felt stupid asking this question, but since it was such a great set up I went for it. Shaun gave me an answer that I was not expecting to hear from him. Up until this point, I had only seen a few of Shaun’s pieces and most of them didn’t seem incredibly “serious” to me. His answer, however, was serious and quick, like he had thought it out before hand. The beautiful part, he explained, was something that had come to him lately, “I think that’s why I got so into crafting.” Throughout our discussion, I found out honesty is a large theme in Shaun’s life.
TL: What about these (pointing to the Totem Pole of monster masks)? Are these beautiful? Or are these more old school Shaun Baer where you just wanted to do it to do it?
SB: I think they’re kind of in-between. I mean not so much as in beautiful as in honesty and what I was thinking about doing at the time. I feel like my brain kinda goes back and forth about…I mean this is something that I didn’t get into, is that when I make something, it’s more about the act of making. And then afterwards I can see what I was thinking about and what was going on with me psychologically. I feel like I hold a whole lot back from the public and people in general. Like when I used to smoke a lot of pot and think that I could read people’s minds and I never told anybody about that then one day I did and they were like ‘You’re and idiot’ and was like ‘Oh yeah, you’re right, why didn’t I say something sooner and not drive myself crazy.’
Later in the interview however, Shaun divulged a rather juicy piece of information. We all struggle with honesty and being true to ourselves and none of us are free from lapses such as Shaun’s.
SB: Every once in a while, I will go to Wendy’s and I will get a junior bacon cheeseburger. And I will eat it on my way home, and I hope that nobody else happens to pass by me because it’s like ‘I’m eating this gross cheeseburger’. But I don’t want anybody, I just want nobody to know. I have to lie to myself. I can’t go home and say, well have Melissa say ‘Where were you?’ and I can’t say ‘I just stuffed my face with a junior bacon cheeseburger.’ I don’t want her to know that. So that kind of stuff is weird in terms of me being honest in terms of art making, but there’s also the conversation of me being honest with myself.
Shaun has a theory about people. He says there are two kinds, a “clubber” which is someone who doesn’t really think things through, they just know what they want to do and they find the easiest way to do it, and a “trapper”, a person puts a lot of thought and effort into everything they do. Shaun views himself as a clubber. He knows what he wants his work to look like and, up until recently, he didn’t care how it was built as long as it worked.
TL: Kinda
SB: Yeah, maybe I’m just lying and I think that I double-check myself. I think I probably don’t cause on my entertainment center I made the drawers a quarter inch narrower than they should have been, cause I was like ‘This is how big they should be’ but now ‘Ugh um uh, I was wrong.’ And now, then I was like ‘Fuck now what do I do?’ and I just put 16th inch material underneath to make up for it, to make up for it being off. So, maybe I’m not double-checking myself.
Shaun told me that while he was in school, he didn’t care much about the long lasting qualities of his work. It was more about just getting it done, even if done meant he would have to keep working on them throughout the opening.
SB: The very last show that I had at school and the show that I had here, were completely different from everything else. And before those shows it was all about making these machines as shitty as I can and they’re gonna die before the end of the opening. But during the opening I would nurse them back to health, like you know, tightening up screws, make sure the motor’s not burning out and all this other stuff.
TL: So the opening was still sort of like your art project?
SB: Kinda, even though it wasn’t…it wasn’t specific to the point where it was like ‘I’m going to be doing a performance tonight’. It was like ‘Somebody’s gonna be coming in in an hour and I want them to see this thing working’ so I wanted to make sure it worked. But then I developed a thing where I would nurse them back to health.
TL: Uh-huh, so were you walking around in a like a white lab coat?
SB: No, I was walking around sweating, in my normal clothes (laughs). But then that all kinda…I thought it was stupid, it was like ‘I’m lying to myself, I’m not nursing them back to health, I’m fixing them because they broke because I made them shitty’
TL: Cause you made them break.
SB: Right, because I said ‘Screw it, and if it doesn’t screw just hot glue it’.
TL: Do you think people, when they saw your art in school, thought that you were just a bullshitter? Cause you didn’t really care about it?
SB: I hope not, because I did.
I wanted to know why Shaun went to art school in the first place. Deciding factors, I guessed, were his family and his first experiences with art.
TL: When did you know you wanted to go to art school? Was there like an art class in high school that you really liked?
SB: Yeah, I used to skip class to go hang out in the art room.
TL: Was your art teacher super sweet?
SB: He was pretty rad. First of all he was always like ‘If you’re doing nothing in that class like…’ He never explicitly told us this, but it was basically like ‘If you’re not doing anything in this class and you wanna come here, feel free to tell them that I told you you could come here.’ But then I had a 9th period teacher who was like ‘I’m teaching you guys like the way they teach college, I’m not gonna take attendance, if you’re here, you’re here, it’s all about the test.’ It was 12th grade, my senior year in high school, and he taught American history and I knew everything. I wouldn’t show up for a single class, and I would hear from other people that it was test day, and I would go to the class and I would take the test and I would get an A.
TL: Are you interested in history?
SB: Repetition. If you remember the first time you need to be taught it again.
TL: So you just knew you wanted to do art?
SB: Yeah. Because I would cut my 9th period class every day and I wouldn’t go home I would go to the art room. I was always the one making the weirdest…shit.
TL: What like sculpture? Was it like painting?
SB: It was weird drawings, there would be some sculpture, like a pile of trash with hands coming up out of it. Stuff now that if saw it I’d be like ‘this shit sucks’.
TL: Nothing you’re proud of? You weren’t like an art savant?
SB: No, no. I feel like a majority of my work was like ‘Mmm, let’s move on.’ Every now and then my 9th period teacher would give me shit about not coming to class. And, every now and then I would have to check in with him and be like ‘Well, I’m making art!’ I had like a giant pass thing, and it said ‘Can’t go to your class, I gotta make shit.’ And he would be like ‘ok’. I mean that, it was that, and there was another piece I had in this show, and I was all the fuck about this show.
TL: You had art shows in high school?
SB: We had one, well there was like AP art, so I dunno. It was called ‘Portfolio’ which was an AP art class. And…
TL: Did you take that class?
SB: Yeah, I took every single art class they offered (laughs). Because there was like, English, which was kind of interesting, Math, which I couldn’t give a shit about, then art.
TL: What did you’re parents think when you told them you were going to art school?
SB: I don’t know.
TL: Do you still not know?
SB: Yeah, I don’t really know. I mean I’m sure they were like…well neither of my parents went to college. They’re both working class folk. My dad’s been working the same job since he was 18 and my mom has been a secretary all her life. Um, and she works, for the past, I dunno how many years, she’s worked for a drug rehabilitation program. To a certain extent, it was like ‘You should go to college, you can make more money’. Even though now it’s like I went to art school so I’m not going to make any money.
TL: But they weren’t like ‘Ugh, if you go to art school you won’t make any money!’
SB: I think whoever…my dad relies on my mom a lot. Cause he’d be like ‘Let your mom decide if you can go out tonight or not’. Umm, so I think my dad didn’t really care as long as my mom was cool with it. My mom was worried about me going and getting more corrupted.
Shaun chose sculpture because, “With sculpture you have the most open subject. No matter what I wanted to make, it just mattered cause it was fun that I was making stuff, and long as I’m making stuff, I’m making art.” He has a great appreciation for making things in three dimensions, but he has a greater appreciation for two dimensions.
SB: Wait, while I’m thinking of it though I always felt like it was easier to make a really good sculpture that it is to do a really good painting. A really good sculpture is…it’s easy to make like a giant…I dunno…I can’t think of the word, well circus is the first word that made sense to me…Spectacle, ah, it’s easier to make a big spectacle out of something that exists in the real world, but with a painting it’s just you and a brush, and you just touch the canvas with it. So it means a lot more to me to do, to be able to do that really fucking good. Better than anything.
TL: So a really good painting is better than a really good sculpture?
SB: I think so, because, also the reason why I was thinking about this and wanted to say it was because I thought about how when you do a painting you’re much more connected, to what you’re producing.
TL: Why’s that?
SB: Because you have to go through these processes when you’re making something in three dimensions. So it’s like ‘Ah, I want to make this curtain that drapes over something then comes straight up’ so then ‘I gotta put the curtain over it’ then you have to figure out if you want to do plaster or you’re gonna do something when you have to work with plaster, and you have to figure out all these different ways to make it stand up. But if you’re doing it with painting it’s like ‘I’m going to paint this’ and you do it. But it’s just you, brush, canvas. The other way it’s like ‘my hand drills wood, my hand sanded wood, my hand brushes stain on’. I mean I guess it’s still the same kind of thinking, but I feel like you’re able to form it easier.
TL: With painting?
SB: Yeah, with painting.
TL: But that would mean, I feel like sculpture is more involved though.
SB: Not in good painting (laughs).
For Shaun though, it’s not just creating things to put into a gallery or to use as furniture in his house. He has also created alter egos that he sometimes portrays as characters in real life. “Fartpants” is a sex crazed techno artist and Chaley Snakes is a native Northeast Philadelphian.
SB: I think to a certain degree I have multiple personalities. Not in any kind of ‘I should be worried about it’. I kind of like that idea because it can escape out of itself. That’s kind of where Fartpants came about, and Chaley Snakes. Because there’s certain things that get pulled out of the ether for me that I’m really connected to, and I can’t explain why. I mean Chaley Snakes came out of, at the time I was working at a cabinet place in the northeast, and I worked for a guy named…umm, well his last name was Blaze. I couldn’t believe Blaze was a real name cause that seems pretty badass. I also learned around the same time there were people in Northeast that were actually named Chaley, not Charlie, but Chaley. So I thought what else would be a badass name? Snakes. So I invented this guy named Chalie Snakes and he had this whole thing behind him.
TL: So you were like a weird actor.
SB: I was able to escape out of myself. Primarily Chaley Snakes came out when I was drunk and I would just randomly yell stuff at people, but it’s like not me who yells stuff at people, why? Cause it’s somebody else, I’m not the ass hole, Chaley’s the asshole. And like I’m not the weird techno sex-freak that Fartpantz is.
TL: Is that part of your art too?
SB: Yeah, I would say everything I do, except for when I sit on the couch and watch TV, is art.
TL: That’s such a weird statement, “Everything I do is art” (laughs)
SB: Yeah, well I’m pretty sure everything you do is art too, you just don’t know it.
At this point, Shaun coerced me into making a blind contour drawing of him making a face.
SB: I really feel like life is art, so it doesn’t matter what you’re doing as long as you’re doing something and you’re trying to do it and you’re trying to be creative. As long as you create things they somehow represent you. Like nobody else could have done that drawing. I know that sounds romantic, but its true. I liked it a lot, it’s a pretty good drawing (laughs).
My interview with Shaun lasted about 2 hours. I learned a lot about him in these two hours which was exactly what I was looking to do. For Shaun, it’s more about the act of creating than the final product. He enjoys making things and is really good at it. Shaun is very aware of the fact that no matter what you create, it is a reflection of yourself in some way. Even though he admittedly doesn’t go to as many openings as he should, or make things like video projects anymore, he still has a solid belief in art and what stands for.
You can see Shaun's furniture here.
-Tim
Chaley Snakes...hahaha!
ReplyDeleteMy friend Mitchell has a belligerent alter ego that I made up for him called "Patches".
Your drawing looks like Roger Ebert or some weird "ghost of Shaun Baer past" or something...
Good interview.