Interview → Michael Young
Interview with Michael Young of Young & Ayata.
Words, page layout and graphic design by Nicola Cortese
Nicola Cortese and Michael Young discuss topics of defamiliarisation, the search for novelty and depictions of reality. An excerpt of the interview is included below, the full article is available via email.
NC: Do you view defamiliarisation as a means of distorting reality or
is it more so reinventing reality? Your Base Flowers project seems to
be an example of either one of the two.
MY: The Base Flower project attempts to operate between the terms listed above. The vases themselves are an attempt at Appropriation. They are trying to foreground the mundane background qualities of the typical flower vase through ornament, character, and materiality. The artificial flowers that are designed to jack into the “real” flowers are an attempt at Allusion. They feel like flowers, but are clearly not flowers. They have qualities that one misses on first glance, but are strangely geological, biological, and digital once one pays closer attention.
We view this not as a distortion of reality or as a reinvention of reality. Reality is out there. We can’t change it. What we can affect are the ways in which qualities and ideas concerning reality are made sensible and understood. This is the shifting of the relationships between the aesthetic and the conceptual. Realism is not reality, it is the aesthetic experience of a problem or a tension between reality and its representation. It ignites doubt about assumptions, and triggers a desire for understanding. In it, reality feels strange, which is actually akin to a heightened attention to the qualities of the world.
NC: I have been looking into Freud’s writing on the uncanny for my own
projects of late. Do you think your projects have uncanny qualities?
The Wall Reveal project Young and Ayata did for the SCI-Arc gallery
has a certain uncanniness to it.
MY: There is a definite connection between the uncanny and the “estranged” or “defamiliarised”. We have shied away from the use of the word because of its associations with Freud and psychological conversations. But, I’m becoming more interested in Freud as well recently, and I think that I’m going to have to fold this into my argument in a way that I’ve been avoiding.
Our favourite corner in the Wall Reveal project is the simplest one. It is the corner where the wall planes appear to be slightly out of plane with each other. The detail is no longer the focus of attention, but instead the whole wall becomes weird. This sensation can be described as “uncanny”.