Olav Westphalen was born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1963, and now lives and works in New York. He studied at the University of California, San Diego, and Fachhochschule fur Gestaltung, Hamburg, Germany. His humorous projects, including many drawings, sculptures, installations, and live performances, have served as a series of experiments and inquiries into social and cultural patterns. His work has been exhibited widely, including at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Apex Art, among many other museums and galleries.

What initially drew you to the language of comics? How would you characterize your particular approach to the form?

OW: Comics are the most efficient and cheap form of telling stories with images. It’s any dorky teenager’s Hollywood. That’s how I started drawings comics and cartoons. Most of what I publish outside the art world is done in collaboration with my friend Marcus Weimer (under the shared pseudonym Rattelschneck). We need a simple style which we both can draw without the differences in the line being too distracting. So the results are closer to cartooning than to the more opulent forms, like graphic novels or manga. That just always seemed like a detour to me. If you can tell a story with a wobbly ink line, why bother with more? That said, of course you can tell some kinds of stories better than other’s with such modest means. I wouldn’t want to read the Watchmen, drawn by Rattelschneck—then again...

In your comic for this series, you weave together fragments of documented history with personal narratives and observations. In their juxtaposition, the seams between the two become less and less visible and new themes emerge. It would be great to hear a little about what historical and personal moments you chose to conflate and how they fit together.

OW: The part about my grandfather is quite close to verifiable fact, even though the question of the degree of his complicity remains unclear. His son, my godfather, really lived an almost cartoonishly complementary life to that of his father. A very gay, dandyish life of pleasures and disastrous finances. This seems to be quite a common pattern.

And then there’s me, and here I take greater liberties. I am only half-serious about Yoga. But there is really a big craze about the bed-of-nails here, in Stockholm, and they did hold the world record recently. I guess it made some vague sense, as it was billed as a peace event.

Many of your past projects involve a combining of disparate categories and disciplines—I’m thinking of how your blimp race at the Sculpture Center merged art happening and sporting event, or how Bruhaha (1998-99) fused the spectacle of standup comedy with a performative exploration of how we, as spectators, receive and consume abjection and failure. Often, it becomes hard to see where one ends and the other begins. Is this something you think about when conceiving a project?

OW: I often think of the works, especially when they are performative, as a kind of experimental set-up where you pitch different behavioral scripts against another, like at a demolition derby, or a particle accelerator (kind of the same thing). I recently did a project where I arranged a world politics costume party. Everybody dressed up as Bush or Condi or Angela Merkel or as UN-soldiers or jihadists etc. And then I invited a professional Cuddle trainer who held a “Cuddle Party” with all the participants, still in full costume. So there were two competing techniques of disinhibition and transgression, the masquerade and the psychodrama-type self-realization event, both happening at the same time. It was weird and disorienting. Some people cried or fell in love against their will. Or so they claimed.

You created a public sculpture near the Central Park Zoo (The Weight of Dead Prey, 2004), which reminded visitors to the zoo about the realities of captivity. The comic you made for this online series is, of course, public in a different way. How do you tackle questions of audience and receivership when you’re working on public projects versus gallery-based projects?

OW: I think there’s a difference in attitude when I interact with the audience personally. Because in that case I have to think of my own presence and persona, which I usually try to keep very dry and reserved to avoid some kind of entertainment-spectacle. But with the works you mention, I am not aware of making a big adjustment in the attitude. I mean, half of the people who come to a gallery are tourists and a lot of the people in Central Park are probably quite art-savvy.

In my experience of some of your projects, they have a kind of double-edged sword—a sort of lightheartedness or absurdity on one side, and a historical or social weightiness on the other (I’m thinking here of your project Custom Rim Job, in which you rode a bike with spokes resembling swastikas). Could you talk a little about how you deploy humor in your work?

OW: I think contemporary art is really important and at the same time completely silly. In a way the history of the avant-garde is a sequence of gags, like a big collective comedy routine. One artist’s great innovation is the premise for the next artist’s punch line. So, I think all art that’s the least bit self-aware and self-critical (as opposed to just pompous and macho) has an element of humor in it. A lot of the artists work like hell to stay serious and keep from cracking up. That can be very funny too.

Finally, and this is a question I’ve been posing to all of the artists in this series, I’d like to ask: What are the issues facing us today that you’re most interested in, concerned about, or motivated by as an artist? What should we be paying attention to?

OW: The deterioration of sperm quality in Western countries will probably give rise to some pretty grotesque and desperate developments.