Daniel Turner: Metal

My earliest memories were drawing. Eventually, drawings made their way to collages, which eventually made their way to paintings. This led me to the Governor’s School for the Arts in Norfolk, Virginia. I studied there for three years before making my way to the Bay Area, to study at the San Francisco Art Institute.

My family could see that I had a facility for drawing, which was really my way to gain affection. It was the way I was able to navigate the educational system, the manner in which I was able to pay attention in class.

At some point, I came across Robert Rauschenberg. I suppose it was in the library. And then I discovered J.M.W. Turner and his way with light. Thinking back, it was the combination of Rauschenberg and Turner that really turned me on. My earliest works were more or less Combines, working through Rauschenberg. I was working outside directly on large-scale industrial tarps, with materials like liquid aluminum, tar and resin, trying to pictorialize what was happening with the salvage operations. The paintings all lived outside in the landscape, and eventually, in 2006, I decided to burn them all, an action which I felt was necessary to move the work forward.

While I was living in the Bay Area, I had a break with reality that ended up placing me in several psychiatric institutions in San Francisco. And in those institutions I came to realize that every material possesses a hypersensitive link to geographical locations, cultural associations and human contact. Once I made that connection, the field really opened for me, and then it was just a matter of locating myself within that field.

I was trying to work around the idea of the readymade. I would come across an object and gravitate towards that object, but I didn’t want to exhibit that object. Over time, I slowly came to realize that I could push objects beyond their conventional attributes toward a new form—meaning, I could still maintain an object’s history of function without its form and essentially push the object to its essence. Not domestic objects so much, but commercial or functional or industrial objects—materials that have been imbued with a kind of use.

I believe that materials resonate a certain frequency, and if you're really in tune, you can pick up on that frequency. I’m after presence. I think you can feel presence when you encounter it, and I certainly wouldn’t be the first person to believe in the invisible.

I’m interested in cause and effect, in material implications that result in global ramifications. For instance, the materials that I stripped out of a Swiss pharmaceutical lab for work that I showed at the Kunsthalle Basel in 2022 are the kinds of materials that eventually make their way into your body. There’s a real provenance there.

I’m fortunate to have a background in material handling. That sort of labor provided me with a great deal of understanding. I think it’s important to lean into what was laid upon you.

My working process generally involves mining sites located near the institutions where I’m exhibiting. When I mounted the show in Switzerland, I worked with the pharmaceutical labs there. In Japan, I sourced materials from Japanese chemical tankers. In Ukraine, I mined Ukrainian neuro-psych hospitals, and so on. In regards to the genesis of the show in Belgium, it came across my desk that the historic and notorious Prison de Forest in Brussels was closing. I was able to gain access to the prison and spent about a week there, photographing the site and speaking to inmates. I was able to extract materials from the interior, which included several tons of radiators used to heat the complex, as well as the entirety of the brass prison door handles.

The handles in particular have a kind of a resonance or valence. They’re really a touchstone moment for the work—the threshold that exists between isolation and autonomy.

I’ve been working in the Catskills for several years now. The upstate studio allows me to be able to work outside again and gives me the kind of space and privacy that enables me to really push things without the headache of ventilation and neighbors. The privacy is fantastic. There are no distractions. I’m able to really work. When I first arrived in New York, I worked as a security guard at the New Museum. As a guard, you’re not supposed to lean against the walls, as it makes you appear indifferent towards the exhibitions and the visitors. But inevitably, everyone leans against the walls, and this leaning eventually produces very faint horizon lines of exhaust on the walls. Noticing that phenomenon led to a series of burnish works that is still ongoing, made with metal wool that’s composed of salvaged material.

The wool is produced using a digital CNC lathe. For the Belgian project, for example, the brass door handles are taken apart and put on the lathe. Then they’re turned at high revolutions and machined with a calibrated router bit that produces fine brass particles, and the particles are compacted to form brass wool. Imagine a pencil spinning at a very high rate and the introduction of a razor splices out filaments that are bound together and polished or burnished onto a surface. Or in my case, into the surface.

The remains of the brass door handles from the prison are ground down to powder. That powder is spliced into manufactured wool cut from the handles and then burnished into the surface of a canvas that is specially prepared to absorb the brass.

I work very slowly. It’s a meticulous process. The paintings I’m working on look fairly similar to the ones that I made years ago. It’s about finding new entry points that feel faithful to the material at hand.

I’ve been working on the exhibition in Belgium for over three years now. These things take a considerable, considerable amount of time. A vast majority of that time is spent doing bureaucratic work. A major component of that work is simply gaining access to these sites and materials. Entry takes time and the right timing. Certainly you wouldn’t have a new wing of a pharmaceutical lab handing over the keys to me. It’s only when a place is on the cusp of being defunct and the materials it uses are becoming unnecessary, the moment when everything is going out the door—that’s when I’m able to gain access to these sites.

Once I locate a site of interest, I simply pick up the phone and start making calls. It’s painful. There are a significant number of rejections. You just have to stay persistent. As soon as I'm inside, I tend to move through the sites swiftly. I document everything that I’m able to document. The process is instantaneous. I’m constantly scanning. I’m working on my heels. This is where the photographic and film elements of my work take center stage. The site itself becomes more or less my studio.

Over time, you develop an eye for utility. You develop a facility that allows you to foresee the evolution of a material, directly on the spot. You’re able to retain the potentiality of a form in your memory up to the point at which you’re able to gain actual physical access to extract the materials. There are usually several site visits before extraction takes place. Once materials are removed, they either get processed on the spot, back at my studio or at a foundry. Objects are often recontextualized, cut, melted or dissolved.

The heated vats here on the land outside my studio contain a saltwater-and-acid solution that dissolves metals over time. That very liquid is then neutralized and sprayed into an environment, enabling me to distill one environment into the context of another—a process I developed through reverse engineering in the most elemental sense. In the case of the prison, the radiators will be melted and milled at a foundry I work with in France and then made into sculpture.

For me, it’s always been about reduction, stripping material and objects to their most bare essence. There’s a back and forth between what is essentially abstract and what is already made. I suppose the objects that I leave as readymades, untouched, are objects I’ve decided don’t need me. It’s as if nature itself manufactured their existence. It’s a hard thing to put my finger on—which objects are which. You either hear the music or you don’t.

—As told to Randy Kennedy

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Daniel Turner’s exhibition “Compresseur” is on view at the Musée des Arts Contemporains Grand Hornu, Belgium from 15 December 2024 through 19 April 2025.

Daniel Turner is a New York-based artist. His works have been exhibited at Kunsthalle Basel; Chinati Foundation, Marfa; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Pinchuk Art Center, Kyiv; Kunstmuseen Krefeld, Germany; Musée des Arts Contemporains Grand-Hornu, Belgium; and Musée d’art Moderne de Paris, among others.

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Images: Taken on location at Prison de Forest in Belgium; Fonderies de la Scarpe in France; Turner’s studio and Fourth State Metals, both in upstate New York. Photos: Photo: Jérôme André, Thomas Richard Mertens, Oresti Tsonopoulos and Daniel Turner