Wes Hill: I think of you as an artist whose work revolves around the recreational symbols of the underclasses. In this sense, you share some things in common with the Brisbane based artist and Queensland University of Technology (QUT) lecturer Mark Webb. How important was he to the development of your practice?
Joseph Breikers: Pretty damn important. I really looked up to artists like Jenny Holzer and Bruce Nauman, but at the same time I was reading a lot of dime novels and was interested in the Jackass-like bravado or adolescent humour present in the language of interviews with figures from BMX and heavy metal. Mark really encouraged me to embrace this spectrum of influences.
Wes Hill: Your recent work Qaphqa (2011) is like an amalgamation of Holzer’s and Nauman’s bluntness, but it also has a jokiness that their works don’t have. Would you say that the staid aesthetic of minimalism functions for you more as a kind of straight man?
Joseph Breikers: I’m interested in the way humour can be affected by material treatment; does the material need to be inseparably part of the joke, or part of the delivery and slightly removed from the joke? Outhouses have looked like elongated cubes long before minimalism came along. So you could say that many minimalist practices actually allude to the tradition of the outhouse. In Qaphqa, I was more interested in the utilitarian design of composting toilets and the issues around construction and transportation … an artist walks into a bar and the barman says, ‘You made an outhouse that flatpacks?!’
Wes Hill: You frequently combine literary and lowbrow subjects. Why did you... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline