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When we asked Mick Minogue to recommend someone for us to talk to about innovation in art, he shot straight back with one name.  Mac Premo.  “He is a multi tactile artist living and working In NYC. He works reclaimed wood like no other; he’s a master craftsman and video maker.”  With a love of re-appropriation, animation, collage and woodcraft, Premo creates art that is simultaneously beautiful, inspiring, and entertaining. 

“Smashbulb (2013)”

What does innovation mean to you?

“I have always been fascinated by the paradox that there are no new stories to tell, but that all stories are new to those who experience them. Nothing is new because everything has been done, but if I haven’t done it all, then everything is new.  So if innovation is the application of new solutions to meet new requirements, then it either doesn't exist or exists anytime a problem is solved.

“When that problem solving is especially creative, that's when I think it gets the label of being proper innovation. Collage is a medium that relies on all forms of innovative thought, from small ways, like pairing disparate imagery to create a new concept, to the re-appropriation of a machine's function to create a metaphor or alternate function. I dig re-appropriation.

“This answer is a bit jumbled. Let me just say this about innovation: the dudes on Wall Street who created a digital product that would collect interest from the dividends of 1/64th of one cent as it was in the process of being traded; that doesn't feel like innovation to me. I think innovation needs to make something, create something. If the end result is merely parasitic, then the action isn't an innovative one.”

“Dying with Dignity”

Who or what inspires you?

“My wife inspires me. Wood and baseball inspire me. My parents inspire me. My children inspire me, but only to hang out with them and make a mess. I think the main thing that inspires me is death. It is coming, whether I like it or not, and I have a lot of work to do.”

Many artists are struggling to make a living these days.  What advice could you give young aspiring artists in forging a career in this area?

“If financial compensation is a mandatory to your art-making plan, choose another plan. Do not make art to make money. There is no money in art, unless you are dead.

“The way that I make money utilizes the craft I exercise when making art. In that sense, the work I do for money is practice for art making, and vice versa. But when I make art I do so for the advancement of an intellectual agenda initiated by me.

“I am not adverse to making money through art, nor do I advocate giving your art away or undervaluing it. I am just saying the market model is poor for the making and selling of singular hand-made stuffs.

“What I do is buy my own time back. I make enough money to purchase time from myself and that's when I make art. It comes in place of a social life, mind you, but so it goes.”

“Throw”

 

Who or what is really shaking things up at the minute?

“I have no idea. I am having a hard time with the high-art world, conceptually. [I] sometimes feel like it may be a cabal of elitists pulling the strings of myriad dealers, who influence the artists they represent to fit the square peg of creative process into the circle hole of the dollars driven art market. But that is a pretty conspiratorial way to feel, so other times I feel like I should just keep my head down and make shit. Subsequently I am not in touch as I should be with who is out there and making what.

“One guy who is nuts is my friend Duke Riley. He goes big, and he has really dedicated his entire self to making art, in some pretty inventive performance based craziness. Big points for not being allowed to go back to Cuba.”

What's the difference between creativity, and innovation?

“I think creativity is the inclination and innovation is the outcome. Innovation is the occurrence of creativity honed.”

“No one wants to hear how busy you are", "The super Americans" and "The world is so gay"

More Information

Mac Premo’s work has won numerous awards, including seven Emmy Awards. Along with Belfast-born illustrator Oliver Jeffers (with whom he shares a studio in New York) he created the TED Conference 2013 opening video (below).

“Ted Conference opening video, Mac Premo & Oliver Jeffers (2013)"

This article originally appeared in Newstalk Magazine for iPad in July, for more details go here