Maximalist Gnarliness: An Interview with Artist Daniel Giordano
Join us on a journey to Daniel's zany world of deep-fried motocross bikes, plasticized prosciutto, and mummified cannolis, now on view at MASS MoCA 🏍️ 🍖 🍰💥
Welcome to the latest issue of Weekly Special, a food-art newsletter by Andrea Gyorody.
Happy Monday! Take a break from work emails (they’ll be there when you finish, I promise) and spend a few minutes with some of the best sculptural work being made today, by a fabulously talented artist who really lives out his aesthetic commitments.
When I met Daniel Giordano for the first time last July, I wrote this about our encounter:
Over the course of a few hours together, I learned that Daniel (with whom I’d only ever chatted over IG) has a magnetic intensity and excitability that mirrors the effusiveness of his approach to sculpture. His vibe is a bit zany scientist, which rhymes perfectly with the fact that he works out of his grandfather’s former garment factory, situated along the Hudson River in upstate New York. His work has the feel of wacky, nuclear detritus — it’s somehow both alive and already artifact, made of tons of things you can’t identify, glommed together into an alien form that would be right at home in the wake of apocalypse. Though more is more for Daniel, it’s also just enough: the end result isn’t an unwieldy, messy blob of stuff, it’s a relatively economical, controlled form that pulses with the energies of everything in and on it, much of which relates to Daniel’s own personal history.
I promised then to return to Daniel’s work, which is simply too rich to excavate in one little write-up, and here we are! I’m thrilled to bring you this interview on the occasion of his major solo show, curated by my lovely colleague Susan Cross, now on view at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts. I’m so grateful to Daniel, who very generously responded to all of my questions with care and thoughtfulness (and a lot of humor), and sent me spectacular behind-the-scenes photos of his studio to share with you. He’s an A++ human being and artist, and this won’t be the last you see of him in Weekly Special.
Let’s dig in!
Maximalist Gnarliness: An Interview with Artist Daniel Giordano
This interview was conducted via email in May and June 2023. It has been lightly edited for clarity.
Huge congratulations on your solo show at MASS MoCA, Love from Vicki Island! First things first: Where or what is Vicki Island, and can I go there?
Vicki Island is my atelier located in the Hudson Highlands of Orange County, NY, in the city of Newburgh, situated on one of the main arteries of my small city, Liberty Street.
Vicki Island is open by appointment for a personal tour. It is a three-story factory complex that is named after my Aunt Vicki. The Vicki Clothing Company, which my grandfather Francesco started in the 1940s, manufactured women’s long coats for about five decades. It was my playground growing up and continues to be so. Vicki Island is my sanctuary and is a place unlike any other.
The enterprise operated successfully for years, switching hands to my father Tony in the 1970s. The top floor was the cutting room where the fabric was cut from patterns, on the second floor the coats were assembled and stitched by the seamstresses, and the bottom floor was where the pressing and finishing was done before the coats were shipped out. Many of the employees were Italian immigrants and served as my connection to the old country and its culture; some I considered surrogate relatives. The business carried on until it could not compete with offshore manufacturing and my father had no choice but to lay off all 80 of its workers in the mid 1990s.
I have fond childhood memories of being sandwiched between a large pile of coats and the roof of my father’s Bronco for deliveries to the garment district in New York City. After the handoff, we would celebrate with a huge meal at Carmine’s and then pastries from Veniero’s.
Once the factory closed, my father started a marine canvas and upholstery business, bending balletic metal arcs that were outfitted with custom canvas stretched to form perfect awnings for the motorboats on the Hudson River. Advanced Custom Canvas was regarded highly and ran until the 2008 recession.
Since 2013, I have taken full advantage of the factory’s idleness and the inspiration it holds. The third floor is a time capsule and storage unit for all the industry left behind, including sewing machines, press machines, parts, equipment, tools, bolts of wool, vinyl, marine canvas, and plenty of dust.
I frolic about the factory, reciting my many mantras to myself:
“Vicki is my faith and I must stay loyally devoted to her. I am determined to keep Vicki alive. Vicki's work is never done. Do I have it in me to be Vicki? What would Vicki do? Vicki is a state of mind. Vicki is a way of life. Hands to work, hearts to Vicki.”
Vicki herself was an entrepreneur. She ran Vicki's Video Villa (a video cassette tape rental service), then Vicki's Kool Delights (an ice cream parlor), and managed a little league baseball team one season, the only female in the league and led the team to WIN the championship. Vicki and I bond and catch up over a meal of pasta about once a month. She has a strong personality and sports a beehive hairdo. She speaks her mind and used to wear three-inch nails.
I love how multilayered Vicki Island is, as a space with a deep history that’s personal to you and that resonates with the experiences of many other family-owned businesses over the last few decades. I also love that the detritus of industry is so central to your sculptures — it puts me in mind of other artists who had transformative experiences in defunct factories, from Agnes Martin to Eva Hesse. (This legacy also makes it so perfect for your work to be on view at MASS MoCA, which of course shares that history.) Your materials also usually exceed what one might find in a factory space — especially when you work with ephemeral substances, including food. What are some of the wildest things that found their way into the sculptures in Love from Vicki Island?
According to William Corwin, artist and writer, my material lists in Love from Vicki Island “run on like the witches' brew in Macbeth”: urinal cakes, dog ticks, hexactinellid, terrone, alligator claws, prosciutto, charred tennis ball felt, pomade, spring peeper frogs, paintings by Peter Eide (a dear friend), Tang drink mix, turkey vulture talons, vitamin D capsules, bald eagle excrement, Choo Choo’s fur (a Golden Retriever), goat skin cock rings, sparklers, lucky rabbits’ feet, panettone, Maraschino cherries, electroplated 24-karat gold paper plates, Vicki Island’s garment factory dust, pizzelles, stock fish, Dior lipstick, my aunt Vicki’s cheesecake, and so much more!
One thing you didn’t mention in that incredible list is the deep-fried motocross bikes that feature in the sculpture My Scorpio I. Can you walk us through the process of deep-frying massive non-food objects?
I amuse myself by defuncting and defiling machines and tools, so as to render them useless. Sports vehicles serve as the main component in the My Scorpio typology. These vehicles are commonly seen speeding through the Hudson Valley landscape. To deep-fry an object, I begin by applying a homemade slurry onto its surface. I submerge the parts that will fit into a vat of boiling oil, and for sections that are too large, I baste the oil over the surface with a greasy ladle and thoroughly crisp the concoction with a blowtorch for good measure. I’ve also deep-fried ceramic, boulders, a high-heeled shoe, a baseball bat, cattails, an eel, a kudu horn, and aluminum components among other things. Once the piece is fried to my content, I drench it with layers of shellac and/or epoxy resin, immortalizing it. My father has helped me achieve this on many occasions.
Deep frying random foodstuffs puts me in mind of county fairs, where deep-frying is like a competitive sport. Does fried food have that association for you, too? And dare I ask for your recipe?
I learned from a few important women the process of deep-frying objects with slightly varying recipes. My mom, Roseanne; my late surrogate grandmother, Adelaide Tallerico (who was the head of quality control at the Vicki Clothing Company); and my friend’s mother, Miki Paez, all lent their expertise. In order to deep-fry something, whip eggs into a homogeneous slurry, season it with basil, oregano, rosemary, marjoram and thyme. Ladle it onto the desired surface and sprinkle bread crumbs on top. Heat the frying oil to a boil and submerge the slathered area until cooked to a golden appearance.
Many of my favorite dishes that intrigued me as a child were deep-fried, such as eggplant parmesan, chicken parmesan, and fried calamari. I would play with the squid tentacles and found the idea of eating them repulsive yet delightful, having the option to bathe my dinnertime pets in marinara sauce. These dishes are attached to distinct memories I gathered while dining at the Capri, an Italian restaurant my family would frequent on Broadway in Newburgh. My parents were friends with the owners and the staff, many of whom had relatives that worked at the Vicki Clothing Company.
I recall going to New York City’s San Gennaro celebration in Little Italy and mom getting my brother and me zeppole (balls of fried dough), still glistening from the fryer and freshly dusted with powdered sugar. The unwavering tradition, faith, and joy was evident in those crowded streets. My brother and I also enjoyed eating fried dough during our annual trip to the Dutchess County fair in Rhinebeck, NY.
In Ren and Stimpy — an off-color children’s show that played on Nickelodeon in the early 1990s — one of my favorite episodes featured Billy the Beef Tallow Boy, who deep-fried objects ranging from a landline telephone to a shiny purple Buick. Billy taught me I could deep-fry anything.
Ren and Stimpy! Such a bizarre, foundational part of my own childhood too. We could certainly talk more about Billy the Beef Tallow Boy… but I want to drill deeper into all of the traditional Italian products that make frequent appearances in your work. In Love from Vicki Island, I noted zucchini flowers, Amarelli liquorice, stockfish, mascarpone, and (the obviously inedible) Murano glass. Clearly the Italianness of these materials relates to your own heritage, but do they have more specific associations for you? And do they have a different charge for you now that they also appear in your sculptures?
My works serve as reliquaries, tributes, and humble monuments to the things I know, have internalized, and are part of me, be it experientially or by ingesting it. Relatives on both sides of my family originate from the Veneto region of Italy, so I seek out traditional Italian confections and cultural artifacts to incorporate into my sculptures. I was given a large box of Murano glass shards by my friend Miki Paez, who specializes in selling antique Venetian glass. These colorful shards reference the small island of Murano, world-renowned for glass craftsmanship, and my ancestors lived nearby.
Years ago, Adelaide’s husband worked at a local bakery, so my family was frequently given day-old Italian confections. Cannolis, black and white cookies, and baggies of colorful Easter cookies were often available. Adelaide would also make her own sausages, using the animal intestines to encase the meat.
When visiting my dear grandmother Nonni’s house in the summertime, my father would pluck tomatoes from her garden and process them into sauce in the driveway. Her basement was lined with rows and rows of canned sauce and preserved vegetables. My father also used to make his own wine, like his father. I incorporate old spigots and materials from the wine-making process that I find stored on Vicki Island. Food plays such a large role in Italian culture, and my upbringing was shaped by uniquely Italian-American flavors and traditions. My method of incorporating food in my sculptures is my way of preserving these childhood memories, serving as homage to my loved ones and celebrating my Italian-American heritage.
Nowadays, I no longer consider these items to be food from a nutritional point of view. I adhere to a strict whole food plant-based diet with no added sugar, oil, or salt. This enables me to function optimally and stave off western diseases. I consider the confections and meats that are associated with Italian culture to be raw material components that evoke distinct memories for me.
There’s something about turning foodstuffs into “raw material” that makes me think about the grotesque and the abject, two fairly significant tropes in the art of the last century. Do you consciously think about situating your work in that lineage, or are there other tropes, concepts, aesthetics that are more important to you?
My work embodies my Newburgh: the good, the bad, and the ugly. The economic bleakness. There is so much rich indigenous, colonial, revolutionary, architectural, and industrial history here. While walking the streets, I am often reminded of the brutal carnage and destruction of both people and the environment. I make my work in the wake of what the Hudson River Painters, America’s first authentic art movement, feared most: the growth of industry encroaching on the earth’s bounty. They stylistically erased evidence of the forthcoming industry from their idyllic depictions of the landscape so that it appeared still wild, untouched.
The Hudson River alone has been considered a Superfund site for the last four decades, yet the rolling mountains create such an awe-inspiring scenic backdrop to the toxic horrific realities. I aim to evoke what I refer to as the “fucked-up-itudes,” and to capture the realistic essence of the complex place I call home while also drawing from other influences.
I am fascinated by teratology, in both definitions of the word — abnormalities and oddities, as well as fantastical beasts. I also love the supernatural, demonic, and alien creatures from literature, theater, and films. Aesthetically, I revere Pumpkinhead, the 1988 cult classic folk horror movie. The creature’s moist irregular membrane flesh and the way light rakes across its body to showcase its nimble features has made an indelible mark. Its horrifically elongated torso and extremities made such an impression on me as a child, the monster haunted me for years.
When I opened one of the fiber drums that serve as a pedestal in Love From Vicki Island, I uncovered a treasure trove of my childhood Todd McFarland Spawn toys. Gundam Wing sets, Alien toys from the Alien movie franchise, and Star Wars toys — these detailed and otherworldly action figures have had a major influence on my artistic sensibilities.
My brother Anthony and I played with our GI Joe action figures until their limbs would break off and we had to hot glue them back together. After repeated applications, the joints would bulge with so much thermoplastic ooze that the figures took on a new form. Susan Cross, the senior curator at MASS MoCA who organized Love from Vicki Island, pointed out that these seams and imperfect joints still remain visible in my work today.
I like to incorporate flora and fauna that are indicative of the Hudson Valley region or objects I consider echt American, such as bald eagle excrement, bison tails, and Truck Nutz. I also use invasive species such as water caltrops, which are abundant along the Hudson River shoreline, and spotted lantern flies. I collect natural materials that I find on my travels and use old factory parts from Vicki Island such as spent thread spools, garment factory dust, fabric, and thread scraps. All these things are part of my experience in the Hudson Highlands.
America is a consumerist culture where we live in excess and perpetual waste — I often use refuse as main components in my work such as paper plates, moisturizing face masks, Hudson River industrial detritus, clunkers (groggy/warped/fused bricks from Newburgh’s brick manufacturing days), curious multi-colored epoxy spew, buoys, dock foam, my used contact lenses, and old Christmas ornaments.
I use what is available to me and assemble all of what I know and have internalized. It all culminates into a new singular entity as a portrait of a family member, loved one, my hometown, my region, our nation, and our world. In its maximalist gnarliness, it yields poetic beauty. I have always made work this way, since my earliest childhood drawings and sock puppets. It is intended to be playful, cheeky, a farce, but most importantly, a sincere and genuine celebration. I am making Art. My work embodies my whole life in magical iterations. I excavate meaning and source material from myself and what I know. There is an entire treasure trove of inherent knowledge within all of us, we simply have to excavate it to unleash the fury, full throttle.
I love the phrase “maximalist gnarliness,” which perfectly, succinctly describes the aesthetic impact of your sculptures. Can you share more about how you use epoxies, resins, and/or shellacs to "fix" or stabilize your work? Does that fixative step essentially guarantee that your ephemeral food-based materials won’t rot? Your work seems to suggest ephemerality and preservation at the same time — which is maybe one of the things about it that strikes me as grotesque.
I use archival resins and epoxies to immortalize food and other organic matter in an effort to plasticize, mummify, and preserve. The materials I select hold a deep meaning and emotional potency. I am putting my heart and soul into this work so I want it to last. I see my sculptures as reliquaries, encapsulating memories and experiences. I relate it to combing and braiding my mother’s hair as a child, or to her favorite band, The Beach Boys and their inimitable singing in unison which became known as the Beach Boy cantata. The disparate elements that come together to create the whole of my artworks sing in harmony to form a new entity as one, as the dollar reads: e pluribus unum.
In my preservation, everything is an experiment and I make it work. I add more stable material to fight the decomposition. Perhaps eventually it breaks down to nothing and then finally it will be complete!
Now that we’re talking about time, I noticed that a number of works in Love from Vicki Island have rather long dates of production, sometimes spanning two to three years. How do you think about duration in your process?
I feel it is important to illustrate the time it took to create the work. It indicates a span of my lifetime spent putting my efforts into each sculpture to make it the very best it can be. Another reason there are long swaths of time on many of the works is because I produce components en masse and stockpile them until I find the right application. I have multiple projects in differing stages of completion at any given time. The production line is nonlinear and each sculpture includes fabricated components from the past.
The timeframe of making my work is an anachronistic procedure. Some work comes together like a lighting bolt strike, where other works form like the wind chiseling stone. I like to think I imbue the work with a full spectrum of life and emotion, which often demands more time.
For many works, I am aware it needs something more but perhaps haven’t invented what I feel is the right surface treatment to slather on it yet, or found/fabricated a certain component that will make its presence ten times as lethal, so the work will have to be patient in order to evolve. I am channeling the industrious energy of Vicki Island but subverting the nature of its mass production by making these often slow, however plentiful, one-of-a-kind items. It is important for me to be prolific despite the time it takes to create the good stuff.
That is where the different typologies have formed. At the museum, you’ll see Pleasure Pipes, Self-Portraits, My Scorpio, Heel, My Bare-Nakeds, Study For Brothers, a Hot Toddy, and one My Immaculate Conception. They all have respective forms, themes, material combinations, and sizes. Each work demands the time it takes until I feel that I cannot do anything more. If it has a commanding presence, I deem it done.
Before this conversation, I hadn’t realized how much you think of your work as unfolding in sets of typologies. With this major solo show under your belt, where are you pushing your practice now?
I am developing a new typology of work dubbed My Matmos, named after the evil bubbling goo in the movie Barbarella. These wallbound works function like reliefs, reminiscent of the sand casted works of Constantino Nivola. I am using long forgotten marine interior cushions from my father’s gutted and abandoned fishing boat as the foundation to depict imagery that stems from my drawings, with colorful rays emanating from skulls and buzzing macaronic flies. I am needle felting into the uniquely shaped cushions with wool roving and steel wool, building up the surface while also burning through the cushion cover and upholstery foam to create craters, while embedding objects such as a dried out and plasticized cow pie, a deer skull laminated with tennis ball felt, rusty bottle caps, and a pair of Truck Nutz dangling from the corner as the final adornment.
I pose the question, “how do I make the thing feel more real than it does in reality?” Make it more visceral and slow the viewers’ recognition of the familiar objects before them. My goal is to make sculptures that appear new to the eye, like naturally occurring phenomena that seem to have been dredged from the depths of the Hudson River. How can I bring these mundane and familiar materials out of the ordinary and into an otherworldly realm?
Thank you for reading!
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What a fascinating interview. Thanks for introducing me to Daniel. I have a deeper appreciation for what he is doing and how he’s representing the lineage of Hudson Valley artists with his work. I liked that you asked him about his technique (how would one deep fry a large sculpture?!).