Robby Herbst
Inter-Disciplinary Artist—April through May ’21
Website robbyherbst.com | Based In Los Angeles, CAlifornia
Q: If you had to identify just one thing that made the Peleh Residency work for you, what would it be?
A: When I was there, I could simply focus on art, and not have to think about anything else. That allowed me to start a new body of work, and I’m very grateful for that.
Q: What are the new ideas and work that you have been concocting since you finished at Peleh?
A: I’ve been thinking a lot visually about multiple intelligences, and how we trigger many different parts of the brain when we have creative encounters. This is connected for me to how we think about innovation in the arts vs. business, and the distinctions between creativity and experimentation. I’m interested in this in general, as well as how I can work with those pieces in my own art practice.
Q: You’ve been writing and teaching about these ideas since you left the residency, right?
A: I have. After the residency I started teaching a course at Harvey Mudd College, called “Composing the Cybernetic,” which was an extension of these ideas, and how we understand the world of “inter-media,” and its connections with cybernetics and the avant-garde more generally.
Q: Being in the Bay Area, with its history of cultural, academic, and technical innovation, must have been very useful for this kind of research and discovery.
A: My work has long drawn inspiration from the Bay Area. Since 2015, one focus has been on New Games [a movement from the 1970 exploring games’ potential for participation vs. competition], as well as the overlap between archives and the counterculture on the west coast. This research overlapped with my work with the Lucas Artists Residency Program in Saratoga, as part of Montalvo Arts Residency, for whom I wrote a long essay about the history of art and tech collaboration through hybrid platforms that facilitate science, engineering, and art.
Q: Your daughter had her bat mitzvah the year after the residency. Through the small but growing Peleh artist alumni network, you were able to find just the right tutor for her: artist and educator Alicia Jo Rabins.
A: Yes. Alicia was a great resource that the Peleh alum network provided. She helped my daughter to learn her Torah portion for her Bat Mitzvah, which was completely DIY. Other individuals in the Peleh network helped our family conceptualize our do-it-yourself Bat Mitzvah. So all around it is a very supportive group of people!
Robby Herbst is an interdisciplinary artist who uses and investigates avantgarde paradigms to expand cultural imagination. He is a cofounder of the Journal of Aesthetics & Protest and Instigator of the Llano Del Rio Collective. He’s the recipient of a Warhol Foundation Arts Writers grant, A Mike Kelley Artist Project Grant, the Graue Award, and grants for the Danish Arts Council, The Durfee Foundation, and Rema Hort Mann.
Compassion & Self Deception was a project he co-developed with the Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD), which premiered at Los Angele’s Museum of Contemporary Art in 2021 — as a theater piece and mail art exhibition. in 2016 he completed the public project New New Games a series of tournaments and events held in California’s Bay Area with the support of Southern Exposure and the Headlands Center For The Arts. A concurrent exhibition of his drawings related to his New New Games project was held at Commonwealth & Council gallery in Los Angeles. With artist Elana Mann he co-organized Chats About Change; a series of encounters addressing social change and social practice in Los Angeles. Other past exhibitions include; I + We: Collective Movement Workshop (Human Resources, 2014), Utopias of SoCal (Santa Monica Museum of Art, 2014), New Pyramids For the Capitalist System (Dumbo Arts Center, 2012), and Blockades with Collaborators (David Patton, 2009).
He has lectured internationally on radical aesthetics, action, and creative practices. He’s taught New Genres Art at Harvey Mudd College and USC, Interdisciplinary Art at Goddard College, and curation at Otis College of Art and California State University at Los Angeles.
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