Brian DeGraw mashes up culture. His artwork dances through a spate of forms and references, reflecting a city-dweller’s uneasy relationship with pervasive mass media. His finely drafted drawings depict iconic figures such as Osama bin Laden and Bob Dylan, often merged together kaleidoscopically, and his assemblages appropriate music detritus in ways that recall Christian Marclay—installations of record sleeves, framed collections of song requests DeGraw received while DJing. DeGraw is known as a musician, spinning international urban tracks in New York clubs, and playing his eclectic brew of synths, samples, and drum pads with the psych-jam band Gang Gang Dance. I spoke to him about his sculpture The Thinker, which recently showed at the James Fuentes gallery, in Manhattan.

–Ross Simonini

The Thinker

THE BELIEVER: Is that Monopoly money on the pedestal?

BRIAN DEGRAW: Yes, it is. All ones.

BLVR: What were your first steps in making this piece?

BD: The first step was to find a fabricator to do a replica of Rodin’s Thinker. I needed the left arm of the sculpture to be flipped around from the original, though with the palm turned upright, and that proved very expensive on the fabricator’s end. So I just had them make a version of the original and then I chopped the arm off, cast my own arm in the desired position, and attached that.

BLVR: What was the casting process like?

BD: The fabricated part of the sculpture was cast in marble, and I hacked away at that with a jigsaw, which was very scary, as the material was very aggressive and huge chunks would fly off and hit me in the face and all that. Casting the arm was gentle, though—I just stuck my arm in a long, hollow tube of Alja-Safe mold-making material and let the form take shape, then poured it in plaster, then whittled it down a bit to be the right length for The Thinker.

BLVR: Did you create the piece with a specific motive?

BD: The idea came to me out of observing the obscene amount of cell-phone dependency in the streets. I mean, this is something I am always looking at and amazed by— the lack of attention people pay to their surrounding space when they are deep in text. From that, I started thinking about Rodin’s Thinker and how, if it were made in the modern day, he could very well have been texting, rather then simply staring at the ground in contemplation. When most people are stumped or need a think nowadays, the phone is always part of the equation, so I liked this image of the classic Thinker just subtly updated for the times. From there, this sculpture began...