Shopping bag.

Semaine: There’s a lot of talk of the highly conceptual, intellectual, architectural, components of your work, but what is your relationship to the emotional – specifically noir and melodrama?

Daniel: “Film has certainly been something that has been an influence on me. Nothing specific – but more like techno-noir or I’ve been reading this book called Damon which feels like a kind of noir thing. There’s detectives involved, but it all has to do with the internet and the dark net.

So I think if it’s a noir that is present in my work, it’s like a future noir or something like that, like Blade Runner. The melancholy thing people have written about a lot. People ask about when I’m making works that depict objects from our present as if they’re in some sort of apocalyptic future – whether I was thinking about it in a negative way, in an apocalyptic way, and I wasn’t. It never occurred to me. For me it was more like archaeology, so I was looking at those things keeping in mind that they will become that one day. There’s no sadness in that. It’s more matter of fact. It’s ordered like an archaeologist would display things.”

Semaine: I think that there is this sort of George Segal, Kiki Smith foreboding element, but it seems that there’s also a joyful excess in your work at the same time, which I think is a really interesting tension.

Daniel: “I think part of that is in the selection of the objects. They’re things that most people like – basketball and music. They reference things that are more playful.”

Semaine: That might be a good segue into thinking about the issue of broad appeal, of celebrity, of cross-genre collaborations. You’ve navigated multiple spheres of collaboration from Merce Cunningham – a pretty esoteric artist – to Pharrell Williams, who is intensely smart but also has a wide, mass audience.

Daniel: “Even now I don’t feel quite a part of the art world in a way. Or at least the New York art world. It can be difficult to place what I’m doing, because I’m working in scenic design, and I’m working in architecture. My work doesn’t fit into these concise boxes, and it’s a little bit harder to place. But I didn’t do these things because I was trying to be a renegade. I just like them, and they kept things interesting in the studio.”

Semaine: Nobody really talks about Matisse’s set design for instance.

Daniel: “Robert Rauschenberg was a scenic designer before he was an artist, and all of the early Combines which are now considered the formative works that defined his career were not made in the studio; they were made as stage designs for Merce Cunningham. which is never discussed. Those pieces never came out of a studio practice; that was because he was on the road with Merce and he was forced to make things out of stuff that he found. So for me, that bringing in these other types of making and types of necessities have kind of come back into my art practice in a way.

I think that it’s been hard for the public, but also for me, to define what I do. If I’m working in architecture is it still art? The work in stage design has been the pieces that I made for Merce and are in the collection of the Walker, so what are they? And when they’re shown in that context, do they mean something else? They were never intended for that really.”

Semaine: Do we need to invent a new term for your work, then?

Daniel: “No. I’m just out here making stuff. Just chilling.”