Matt Copson
Coming of Age. Age of Coming. Of Coming Age.

MC As a kid, I remember going to Disneyland and I have since wondered what my perception was of meeting Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck. Did I comprehend that it was a human being in that suit? I don’t think I did. That indistinguishability is interesting to me. 
I always think about the first five films Walt Disney made and the invention of Disneyland, the combinations of such strong formal innovations in the service of these classic tales. I think of the shows that I’m making in relation to some of these early dark rides Disney developed, where the dioramas are telling you stories as you’re moving through them. They deal with the concept of the uncanny in profound ways.
I also grew up in a woodland and spent a lot of time building dens, which I think of as an early site of creativity. Constructing a den was about making a space for myself and my brother to play in. I’ve thought about that a lot since—how it relates to my interest in installation art. It’s like creating a den in a gallery that people can step into.

EE There is this famous line by Friedrich Schiller about how there was a more profound meaning in the fairy tales he heard as a child than in the truths taught in real life. Reflecting on your experience at Disneyland or your building of the dens, there’s a clear connection between the two.

MC I like to think about the essential idea of the human condition: Being in the past, the present and the future at the same time. Our past is very quickly narrativized by us as the author and becomes fiction, informed by the media or the styles of storytelling that we’ve been around. That’s also how we view the future, while the present is more complicated because it’s so sensory and visceral. With my work, I’m trying to explore the combination of a visceral existence and the fictions around us.

EE How did you come to think about the character of the Baby as a protagonist?

MC I’d been to Italy, surrounded by depictions of babies everywhere in classical art—it’s such a central motif. Anthropologically, I understood why this imagery was so dominant; it’s a literal and accessible way of depicting humanity. And it just made me think, well, no one is depicting babies today. It struck me that they are almost absent from this world of representation, which felt as though it was tied to a broader millennial nihilism—or perhaps even millennial narcissism. A baby embodies a construction of pure potential and, in many ways, a symbol of the future. This made the Baby a potent archetype to work with.
I had started making the baby works as I was interested in using the form of opera. I had learned that the space of my gallery in Paris, High Art, had been [Georges] Bizet’s studio when he was writing Carmen. I was so interested in the history of the space that I thought, well, an opera needs to be staged within it.

EE Music is a central part of your practice, the Coming of Age trilogy has a libretto, for example, with a score by musician Caroline Polachek. You also made an opera, Last Days, an adaptation of the 2005 Gus Van Sant film. How did you approach this?

MC Around the same time as making the trilogy, I was speaking to my friends Danny L. Harle, a producer and a musician, and Oliver Leith, a composer, about a potential collaboration, and we were trying to figure out why we were interested in one another’s work and what the meeting point was. We realized it had to do with magic and mundane things, and the combination of those.
Oliver and I had two reference points: Beauty and the Beast, when Belle enters the castle and the objects then start to come alive, and the Van Sant film Last Days. We liked the mystery within one of the archetypal symbols of our times: Kurt Cobain. The film was made 20 years ago, but teenagers still wear Nirvana T-shirts everywhere. His symbolism hasn’t faded, it’s actually evolved. So, we decided to adapt it. At it’s core, Opera is about the bringing together of different forms so in many ways it felt similar to the way I approach art-making.

EE Let’s talk about your show at KW and the push to have a live experience, like an opera, in the art space. The main work we are showing is the 30-minute Coming of Age trilogy, a work with a baby as the protagonist. It is a show that blurs the lines between a theatrical space and a visual art space. There isn’t a single physical object in the show!

MC I really do think that any showing of art is theater. Clearly, artworks are characters, and you are the audience, you walk around a space, and are manipulated in how you walk around that space. It’s the first time that these works will be shown in their totality and in a space that I designed them for: the gallery space as a theater. In the hall, the Coming of Age trilogy is like a diorama. I have adapted the work so that the various objects used by the baby—the swing, the pen, etc.—are left behind waiting to be used again, while the other parts of the saga play out. So, it becomes a scenography, a stage set with its props.

EE How did you come to work with lasers?

MC I’d been making a lot of hybridized works, using technology in various ways. Some of them were projection-mapped wall murals or more conventional rectangular video pieces. But I often felt disappointed with the “deadness” of those mediums—they lacked material tangibility in the space.
That’s when I came across videos of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon concert and their laser shows from the 1970s. These were theatrical, immersive experiences where the lasers traveled around geodesic domes, creating a frameless world—something that could appear from anywhere. It went beyond traditional theater, making the world itself the stage.
It all started with that impulse to make something more tangible, more alive.

EE There is also a new work you are making for the show, an introduction of sorts.

MC I wanted to make a type of Disneyland experience, where you are welcomed before you enter. The baby greets you with different ways of saying Thank you for coming. It gives its gratitude. On an adjacent wall, there is a teleprompter that it’s just reading off of and you’re caught between that sentiment of what you’re being told and the reality that the Baby is reading a teleprompter. But, really, it takes effort to do anything. And it’s an effort to come to KW and see a show. So, I am saying thank you for your time. Because it’s truly precious.