On December 3, 2024 and April 14, 2025, University of Florida School of Art and Art History (SAAH) sculpture faculty and graduate students worked with artist Oliver Herring to stage two all-day events called TASKATTABLE to experiment with Herring’s participatory artmaking project, TASK. TASKATTABLE at UF was made possible by SAAH associate professor Sean Miller and graduate students Rachel Horn, Changil Kim, Benedicta Opoku-Mensah, Kyle Selley and Rosie Springer.
To learn more about this project, read ‘An exploration of creativity’: TASK art project visits Gainesville by WUFT reporter Maria Avlonitis, covering the December 3 TASKATTABLE event at 4Most Gallery.
During the April 14 event, MFA candidates Changil Kim and Benedicta Opoku-Mensah took time out from their TASKing to interview Herring. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.
Benedicta Opoku-Mensah: My first question is about your TASK parties. The structure feels deliberately loose and open-ended. How do you navigate or value unpredictability in your work?
Oliver Herring: To clarify, the structure of TASK is pretty concise. It requires a space, some materials and a group of people who write tasks for each other and interpret them however they want. Beyond that— beyond the structure—the process itself is open-ended and loose. There are infinite possibilities to interpret any written task.
I realized that when I have no set plan for a project, l am more likely to improvise and take risks. And I try not to filter even cringeworthy and ridiculous seeming impulses. That’s because I believe almost everything has the potential to be or become something. In the process, I often discover creative muscles I didn’t know I have. Most recently, for example, I ended up teaching myself a ballet from 1912 without having ever taken a dance class in my life. Granted, it took me two years to get there. To go from drawing my body in the studio, which is where this journey started, to dancing a ballet in public, required being outside my comfort zone and learning from it.
TASK grew out of that type of anything-is-possible work-practice. The first TASK iteration was, in fact, an eight-hour experiment with 10 participants, unfolding in a semi-public space. It took a few more years for TASK to take on a life of its own. Participants started organizing their own TASK Parties without my involvement or knowledge—at home, in a cornfield, anywhere … This explains how it landed in classrooms. I’ve learned from talking with hundreds of educators and students that TASK can play a range of useful roles in the school context. It can be used as a social icebreaker, to build community, to stimulate out-of-the box creative thinking and problem-solving, and as a tangible connector to contemporary art practices.
Changil Kim: Your Areas for Action (AFA) project documented gestures and traces of movement and action with various types of everyday materials. Do you see these works as a meditation on memory, temporary problem-solving or physical inscription?
Herring: AFA, in short, grew out of a career survey I had in 2009. When the show came down, I thought, ‘I’d love to do a sort of follow-up exhibition that focuses on some of the processes and materials that produced the works in the exhibition.’ Process has always played a somewhat outsized role in my work. When I knit in the 90s, it wasn’t just about making pieces of art. I was also thinking a lot about what it means for me to knit, day in and day out, which turned out to be a valuable learning experience. Process is conventionally approached as a means to an end. I learned from TASK that process can also function as destination. With AFA, I was curious to see what would happen if I allowed process to unfold … I compiled a list of some of the processes and materials I had used in the past and structured them into loosely defined actions and performances.
I took a cue from TASK and decided to perform them together with groups of volunteer participants … About two thirds of the [more than] 60 volunteers who participated were strangers to me. Approximately 30 travelled from all over the country. The gallery was open to the general public, which added opportunity for more interaction and endless curveballs … It was risky—and credit goes to Meulensteen, the gallery that encouraged and supported this adventure.
Day one was Color-Spit Solo. We started with an almost empty gallery. To ease into it, I worked with only one person, directing him to spit food dye. The objective was to make spitting plumes of colorful water a worthwhile experience for everyone: the performer, the audiences and me … Regarding your question about memory, I think the closest AFA comes to relating to memory is in its connection to the works that the processes produced in the past … But the objective with AFA was to reanimate these processes as destinations, not means.
Kim: Yeah, I think it was most interesting in how you anticipated and highlighted the unexpected elements. The unexpected is such an important part of this project.
Herring: I agree! It’s kind of a paradox to anticipate the unexpected, but that’s very human, I think, and part of what we did each day before we opened the doors.
Kim: While not community driven in the same way as TASK, it seems AFA also documents the physical aftermath of an act. How would you compare or differentiate the conceptual roles these two bodies of work play?
Herring: You’re right, AFA is not as community driven as TASK. But community building is an important part of it. It may be less central, but it’s there.
Most of the participants didn’t know each other beforehand. We embodied a range of temperaments and personalities, comfort zones, and physical ability ... It required mutual trust and leaps of faith ... My role during AFA is usually far more hands-on than my role with TASK, where I’ve become mostly a facilitator. During AFA, I actively engage with materials, the participants and the audience, in an attempt to draw someone in, or draw someone out, and tie it all together into a worthwhile experience. The two project structures have, over time, in certain contexts, grown closer.
Opoku-Mensah: You've said that you don't care much about the medium or the final object. Your focus is on the process. What is it about the process that holds such importance to you?
Herring: Yeah, I’ve said something like that. But I should clarify. Sometimes I don’t care about the medium I use; other times I care deeply. I care about process a lot. But I also care about a finished object, when there is one. My husband jokes that I fall in love with whatever I make or do, whether it’s material or ephemeral. I think that’s true. My interests and needs are plenty. I see potential in just about everything, so I’m not monogamous with materials and processes … I try and stay fluid and open to whatever happens around me or inside of me.
So, yeah, I love the finished knit pieces! I learned from making these pieces, from knitting the same sort of stitch over and over for ten years, that even a process as monotonous and linear and potentially brain-deadening as the sort of marathon knitting I was doing can in fact be endlessly surprising … Over the course of a decade, I approached the knitting as a personal homage to another person, as an AIDS memorial, as sculpture, as performance, as craft, as gendered process, which it was back then, as activism and, in the broadest sense, as a meditation on the passage of time … Ten years was what it took to pivot and explore all that. Because all that was part of me … and part of the finished pieces as well.
Opoku-Mensah: Yeah, I’m interested in this. I’m teaching a class, and I want to incorporate the value of process into my teaching … so that students will enjoy the practice as they make art. So, I'm navigating between valuing the process versus outcome.
Herring: It’s exactly that forwards and backwards that I’m constantly juggling, as well. In a school setting, depending on the school, so much of education is goal-driven. I advocate for a mixture of goal-oriented, and open-ended, process-driven learning, for balance … Why not reap benefits from both? Goal-oriented learning tends to be more linear. You follow a certain path, do this, do that, to end up with a certain grade … But out-of-the-box, non-linear thinking is more likely to set you on a path of encountering something unexpected and new.
As a student, or rather as a young person, you’re still at the beginning of figuring out what you want and who you are. Simply following a straight path is less likely to give you enough room to do that.
The more opportunities to explore, the more likely you find what you need. That's potentially where TASK can come in. In a relatively short amount of time, you can explore whatever you want without pressure, without grades or expectations, without right or wrong, good or bad, success or failure. Everyone around you does that too ... You’re likely to see someone next to you do something that surprises you, or respond to a task like you never imagined … Within only a few minutes, you can ricochet from being introspective to wildly social. You interact with everything that surrounds you—fellow students, teachers, materials, the environment—in unexpected ways. All sorts of barriers can come down.
Opoku-Mensah: Yeah.
Herring: Even the written tasks are not to be taken too literally. “Become a hero,” “change the space,” or “draw a line”—any one of them can mean a million things. You’ll interpret a task to fit your comfort zone, shaped by your ideas of how something should be or could be done … What’s important is that it all comes from you … I always encourage teachers to collect the written tasks after a TASK Party … They provide an unfiltered window into the collective psyche of a group of people at a certain moment in time.
Opoku-Mensah: Yes. In my practice, I really appreciate process, so I document all my working process. Because I feel like if I am spending that much time to bring the outcome to the audience, then the audience should have a glance at what goes on behind the scenes.
Herring: Great!
Kim: TASK and AFA often embrace unpredictability and open-endedness, prioritizing process over predefined results. How do you define ‘failure’ in your work process and your own artistic trajectory?
Herring: That’s difficult to determine. With TASK, failure isn’t really an issue. Whatever happens, happens. TASK always is what it is. For most other work I do, success and failure are not as easy to determine.
To think about success and failure in the context of art—especially contemporary art, which is not settled by history—is, to me, very elusive. Art is vague territory for terminology and for determining value, be it financial, cultural, personal or otherwise. The terms of what is successful shift like quicksand. Who determines what is what, why, how and where? I once did a performance that I deemed a total failure. In retrospect, I realized that the “failure”… made me rethink, which led to very positive changes. So, was it a failure? … One way or another, it’s important—healthy, I think—to take chances and be vulnerable without expectations of failure and success.
Kim: Yeah, it’s not the strict rules or order that bring out who we really are.
TASK seems to evoke the concept of ‘Event Scores’ from the Fluxus art collective. How do you see your work positioned within the lineage of Fluxus? And in what ways do you feel distanced from Fluxus?
Herring: One of my most formative experiences with art was an exhibition of work by the German artist Joseph Beuys, who was an important Fluxus artist. I was 16, and at first couldn’t stand his work— the bits of fat and felt, chocolate and butter. To me, it looked like something any kid could throw together. But then he took a microphone and started talking. He spoke about complex issues, like politics, social dynamics, education, the environment—none of which I had ever connected with art until that moment. What struck me was how clear and accessible his words were. He reached me, even as a very skeptical teenager. That was a huge shift for me. The idea of art beyond aesthetics—with the potential to have utility; to be able to shape society. It was profound … I learned more about Beuys, and in the process, about Fluxus.
Kim: It sounds as though Fluxus offered great impact on an artistic basis.
Herring: It wasn’t Fluxus, specifically, that impacted me. It was Joseph Beuys. It’s important to understand that the Fluxus movement was still forming; it hadn’t settled. Whatever Beuys did or didn’t do helped shape the movement. Fluxus back then was not what it is now. Now, we can look back and see it in its trajectory.
I think I’m less interested in a movement, like Fluxus, and its ideas and concepts. Much more interesting to me is experiencing an idea or a concept embodied through a person’s action … Part of it is: I’m less comfortable relating to an abstraction, like a movement, than I am to relating to a person. As complicated and indecipherable as humans can be, being one myself, I can empathize and relate.
Meeting Joseph Beuys was formative. So was Ethyl Eichelberger. As were many of the participants in my work. When I’m asked about my work, I often end up talking about the people in it and the anecdotes of what happened that helped shape the piece, rather than talking about the piece itself.
Opoku-Mensah: We really appreciate your time.
Kim: Thank you so much for today's interview. It was very awesome for us to speak with you and share ideas.
Herring: Thank you, Changil and Benedicta, you were both awesome. Your questions were great, and it was a really lovely experience to spend time with you. Bye guys! I actually envy you! I would love to TASK with you now!
To learn more about the artist, visit Oliver Herring’s website: https://oliverherringstudio.com/home.html
