Tom Burr

Born :

1963

One of the things about working over decades is the cumulative and the durational effect of work. That the updating process of a work happens less in changing the work than the way it's being read for a specific time.

process happens way

The internet is like a surround system, a landscape at its most benign, a closed system of surveillance and self-surveillance at its more sinister. Something we can no longer imagine an outside of.

surveillance landscape self

I had a lot of fantasies about being an architect when I was young, and I think I still do. On a visceral level, I'm very intellectually and emotionally attracted to acknowledging how space functions in our lives, both in terms of pleasure and in terms of control, and in terms of all those factors that form a life. I'm also very anxious and maybe repulsed by how superficial that whole dialogue can become.

levels space thinking

Longing is the fullest sense of desire; it's the most deeply felt kind of desire. I think the most interesting artwork comes out of some sense of longing. It could be called dissatisfaction; it could be called distance. There are many kinds of wanting to get closer to something else, whether that is an idea, a body, a place. Longing is also one of the conditions people approach reading, visual art, or music with - it's to satisfy that sense of longing. It's part of my job, on some level, to grapple with that notion.

distance jobs art

I do think of my work as being quintessentially American in that it could only have emerged in that particular situation that I find myself. I feel that a lot of my work is working on problems that might be specifically American problems, but not exclusively.

problem might thinking

In a way, art has always been my way of problem-solving, of getting through situations, of finding my response to things, so to imagine doing something else makes me panic a little bit.

panic littles art

I find that deadlines form part of the aesthetic. I don't have that "It could only have been this way" kind of thing. I tend to rewrite it and say that after the fact, but on the way there, there are just some routes that you have to give up and make decisions, and that decision-making I find torturous. But I'm used to that torture.

giving-up decision way