Last week, Mr. Clarke, who is now 71 and splits his time between the Dordogne region of France and Frankfurt, spoke via video chat from his Frankfurt art studio, about the never-ending allure of the red couch and how he felt about the latest homage to his project. He was wearing a red V-neck sweater.
This conversation has been lightly edited.
What’s the origin story of “The Red Couch”?
I’d been living in Europe, and in 1979 I came back to the States, and I was staying with my friend Russell Maltz, a painter living in a loft in SoHo. He had this red couch. It had been owned by a couple in New Jersey who redid their living room every two years because he was in the furniture business, Russell’s parents bought it, and it went to the SoHo loft. I was sleeping on that couch.
Russell asked me to participate in a project out in Queens, photographing objects in an empty swimming pool that had been painted black. I decided to photograph the red couch. I rented a van and we carried the couch downstairs, which was a big deal, getting it into an elevator — actually, on top of an elevator — and then onto Crosby Street. I had a little camera, and I photographed that whole process, including a picture of Jack Miller, the elevator operator, sitting on it in the middle of the street with his feet out. And I realized that the process of transporting the couch was more interesting than the pool project.
How so?
We’re all used to doing all kinds of things on our couches at home. It’s generally an indoor thing. And as soon as it came out of the home into landscapes and started interacting with people, it became Buster Keaton-esque. It had an absurdity to it.
But you wanted to take it beyond Crosby Street and Queens.
I did. I thought of Man Ray and his idea of when objects dream, and the dream of the red couch was to travel and see America. In the ’30s, Walker Evans did a book called “American Photographs.” Then, Robert Frank did “The Americans.”
When Frank went across the country photographing Americans.
Exactly. And my idea was, “Let’s play with the idea of documentary photography.” If you plunk this parenthetic device — this giant red couch — in the middle of what would normally be a black-and-white scene of urban poverty in Atlanta, or the majesty of the desert, it tells you, “Wait a minute, this is theater.” I bought a van. I went to Life magazine and pitched the idea. They loved it. The title was “Americans on a Red Velvet Couch.”
