1.If you weren’t an artist, what else would you be?
A professional killer. It’s just a hobby now due to how busy I am
2. Can you tell us more about your work and what are the main ideas you would like to express?
I like to do things most people are scared to do. I enjoy the idea of putting myself in harms way and find the idea of escaping death to be the only way to live most of the time. I take photographs of things I am doing but that’s just more to prove that we really did them.
3. How do you start the process of making work?
I get an idea and figure out how to make it happen. most of the time its not an easy idea to pull off
4. Do you consider the viewer, when making your work?
I consider the police and how legal what I may be doing is. Its only after the work is done and out do I think about the viewer. Making the work is the most fun, then watching people talk about it is the incredible bonus
5. Name 3 artists that have inspired your work?
Francesca eastwood, emma roberts, quincy jones
6. Name 3 of your least favourite artists.
I respect anyone who has made it as an artist as I understand the challenges you face and if I don’t like what someone is doing I stop looking at it. I also don’t look at other peoples works
7. What defines something as a work of art?
To me art is making something no other person can make in that exact way. What makes something interesting is how impossible it is to recreate.
8. In times of austerity, do you think art has a moral obligation to respond topically?
Art has no obligation to anyone or anything and when it does that’s when it no longer exists
9. Anytime, any place which artist¹s body would you most like to inhabit?
My own right now
10. What was the most intelligent thing that someone said or wrote about your work?A man stopped me on the street once he began to chat me up then he stopped
and said “I get it” when I asked him what he “got” he simply told me “your not scared of fear.” May sound weird but he did “get me.” So many people who respond to my work are people who don’t want to be scared
11. And the dumbest?
A women told me she was going to get 10 of her friends together and bash my brains in because I took a photo of a women with a black eye she said she wanted to even the score and see how I liked it. I recived 25000 death threats from her and her “women’s rights” group.
12. Which artists would you most like to rip off, sorry, I mean appropriate as a critique of originality and authorship?
I have no interest in ripping anyone off
13. Do you care what your art costs? State your reasons!
Yeah I do, if I am going to die for it someone should pay for it. Also guns, blood and parachutes cost money. The more money I make the more chaos I can create.
14. If Moma and the Tate and the Pompidou wanted to acquire one of your works each, which would you want them to have?
I think each of them would be 3 photos no one has ever seen
15. What¹s next for you?
I am trying to push everything to a new level this year. Hopefully my coffee table book The Dirty Side of Glamor will come out as well as my second novel, and I am working on directing my first movie, but the very next thing is a gallery show at the Imitate Modern in London from the 24th of Feb which will be a pretty wild night!
www.tylershields.com/
www.tylershields.com/
