Coming Up: Greater Horrors, an interview with Anthony Discenza Posted on September 16, 2009 by Joseph del Pesco
For the past year artist Anthony Discenza has been installing, without permission, a series of street signs attached to sidewalk poles on Minna Street, near SFMOMA. Last month I emailed him a few questions about the ongoing project:
Let’s start with some stats on the The Street Signs Project. How many signs have you installed? How many have been confiscated vs. stolen? When did you start the project?
I started the project a little over a year ago, back in May or June of 2008. To date, I think I’ve put up 14 signs; of those, 6 have been removed—I know the city took down at least 2 of them and 2 were stolen. Of course, I’m not counting the 3 signs I put up in San Jose as part of the Rejection show at the SJICA. Those signs had a slightly different agenda, as they were made specifically around the idea of rejection. San Jose made us take those down as well, but they didn’t confiscate them.
With The Street Signs Project you’ve stepped away from the densely layered image-rich video work you’ve become known for into text. It seems your long relationship with Science Fiction narratives, which have ostensibly inspired much of the video work, plays a role here too. Signs like “Transported into a Realm of Remote and Delicate metaphor, Will we see Angels?” suggest an abstract landscape of fiction (if not of drug use). Other signs like “Coming Up: Greater Horrors” are more situational, as if placed there to speak in an uncanny way directly to the reader. Can you talk about how science fiction has influenced the language of these signs?
The Street Signs Project does seem like quite a departure from the video work, but they actually emerge from a tradition of working with text that goes way back in my practice, and in fact predates much of my video work. For years I’ve played with fragmentary pieces of text that I either found or wrote myself. I think of this activity as kind of shadow practice, one that has been deeply tied up with my having worked in office environments my whole adult life. Over the years I’ve accumulated entire drawers full of text-derived pieces, most of them printed or Xeroxed on 8 ½ x 11 paper, or scribbled on lined yellow legal pads. In many ways I think I’m influenced by things I encounter in language and literature more than purely visual things, and I’ve always been a big fan of text-based art, from Ed Ruscha up through David Shrigley. I love the way that language can be an object, and the way that a small, enigmatic fragment can somehow invoke something much larger in the mind.
