Above: 'You drive me crazy,' and 'Two more.'
There's the Berenstein bears, too, and your titles remind me of the Berenstein bears. Have you ever heard of that?
No, what is that?
It's a children's book series and I don't remember but it's about bears. And we all grew up with that.
No, I don't think we have exactly the same stories. We only have Snow White and in my life, they were not a big deal the children's stories.
I mean are there bears in Italy? Maybe there just aren't bears that are native to Italy.
That's right. There's like one.
You know what else I think of? There's the Coca Cola bears. Do you know the Coca Cola polar bears? Do you ever think about how we’re so drawn to bears but in real life they're extremely dangerous. Do you ever think about that?
I mean, I obsess over that. We live in Alaska! When we had a house on the edge of town I lived with the bears spray on every floor of the house.
The mace?
The mace.
My dad got me that for people.
Ah, for people in New York.
Yeah, my dad's crazy, he thinks danger is everywhere.
Me too, with bears. I'm totally obsessed with bears, and in Alaska we are in their home. But at the same time, the bear is the teddy bear. And also at the same time, the bear is the man-eater, like a real man-eater on land.
That's so interesting. Now, have you ever encountered a bear?
Yeah, many, many, many times.
Really? Like a real bear?
Yes!
Like a polar bear?
No. polar bears are in the very, very far north of Alaska and Alaska is very huge. But I heard that polar bears, if they see you, they eat you. It's not like brown bears or grizzly bears. Brown or grizzly bears are not supposed to be interested in hurting you or eating you unless something goes wrong. The polar bears, they see, you they eat you.
That makes sense because they're polar bears, they're up in the cold, they need to survive. That is so interesting. Where in Alaska do you live?
Anchorage. The big city.
I'm interested in the feathers. Why feathers?
Well, it just came. I was obsessing over making a sculpture of a polar bear dancing with a grizzly bear and I was obsessing over the fact that I could not make it because it would not come out, how do I put this, if you have a dancing sculpture you cannot have two dead bodies in it. I did not want to have a dark sculpture.
Did you want it at first to be real taxidermy bears?
Yeah. I had this vision of a taxidermy white bear and brown bear dancing, and I did not intend it to be a sort of Edward Kienholz, or darker, which I love but...
But you wanted it to be light.
Right. What’s the name of the artist showing at the Margulies Collection, the historical American artist, you know, who do this realistic reproduction of life and then there's this little bit of darker side to it [George Segal]. I love those. But I wanted it to be about dancing — like real dancing. And so I was really struggling about how to do it. I was calling parks to tell me when a bear would die of a natural death and send me the body. But there would still be this body, this death there. So I finally had the vision of the feathers. It came out of that struggle.
Did you ever get an actual bear body?
Uhm, no. I have only seen them alive. But I've seen in Alaska many bear rugs. You know the real ones.
Have you worked in taxidermy?
These are all made by a great taxidermist who knows the real bodies and works with me to make the sculptures. So working with him, he brings the knowledge of the real animal and I bring the art and that's how they are made.
Bears have a very strong connection with us. Like just think of the teddy bear and how that's a symbol of love and comfort. And one of our friends in Alaska had to kill a bear because the bear was assaulting his tent. He told me that, when he butchered this bear, because of course in Alaska whenever an animal is killed it's also butchered and used, he told me that it was striking how human the body was. Out of all the animals that he had hunted and butchered, this was the one where the arms and legs and belly and dimensions are exactly like a human. And he was very impressed emotionally by that.
Maybe that's why we’re so drawn to them, because they can stand on the two feet and they're the only animal that can really do that.
Yeah, you're right.
Now I'm thinking about with the Russian bear trainers and things like that. Like how they would balance on the ball. It's so interesting. Bears! Did you have a teddy bear growing up?
I had a cat teddy bear. It was the shape of a cat.
'We are the baby gang" is on view at Perrotin New York through June 8th. All images courtesy the gallery. Lead image: 'Oh oh'.