Lara Schnitger – My Other Car is a Broom

Exhibition catalogue no 32
No of pages: 40, color, illustrated
Binding: soft cover
Graphic design: Kristina Brusa

Language: Swedish and English
Year: 2005
Publisher: Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall
ISBN: 91-974236-6-1

Richard Julin: Lara, you’re from Holland, travel a lot, have spent a longer time in Japan and currently live and work in Los Angeles. How important is the place you live in to your art?

Lara Schnitger: I have a pretty restless mind but you have to stop in some place for some time. What is interesting to me about L.A. is partly that a lot of my travels over the years come together in this city. Los Angeles has so many different areas that are authentic to their foreign origin, as far as you can be within another culture. Like Little Tokyo near my studio, where you can go shopping in entirely Japanese stores, for example. After living in Japan for a year I learned what culture is to me. Before going there I had never thought more deeply about my own culture, but the shock of being in Japan showed me that culture is like a comforter. Like actually wanting to go to McDonald’s in Tokyo just to feel a bit more normal, because that’s a place you recognize. It’s that feeling of being uncomfortable that I like to use within my work. I want to continue to challenge myself and let things from outside influence me. And as I said, L.A. lets this happen in one place. Things come together here for me. For example there is a huge Buddhist temple life going on here. I love temples as places where art gets made, often in the most eclectic way. Churches I think are for painters and temples are great for sculptors, like me! Buddhist temples have great installations in them.

In some of these temples people give water to the gods, but some times they end up giving Coca Cola or sake bottles. In a temple in Japan I saw Barbie dolls and Hello Kitty next to the old stone sculptures. I feel that our times are like that. L.A. certainly is. This mixture of things that makes perfect sense to me ties in with my hopes that art can somehow be universal.

RJ: During the construction of your exhibition we have to shut off your space since two other exhibitions are open to the public at Magasin 3. We started talking about this fact, which then led to a major new work, Gridlock. The actual work will shut off the space. Once the show opens you’ll transform the piece into something new, incorporated into the exhibition.

LS: Yes. During my first visit to Stockholm we spoke about shutting off the space for practical purposes. It very soon brought up my fascination for Japanese construction sites. While I was in Japan I took tons of photos of these sites. So I thought if we need to put a sign up and some kind of rope telling people that the show is under construction I wanted to play with that. I’ve worked with patch works before and in relation to those started thinking about signs, texts, walls and the fact that you’ll bump into this new work, especially before the show actually opens. (…)