Issue 04
FRIENDS WITH YOU
By Caleb NeelonPhotos By Friends With You
Friends With You isn’t kidding; they’re really friendly. Get these Floridian friends-individually known as 25-year-old Sam Borkson and 29-year-old Tury Sandoval-on the phone and it’s a sea of goofball giggling. This artist duo bases its work on an evolving cast of characters-Friends-that have thus far taken shape in the form of designer toys, large gallery installations, digital video, graphic design, and other media. The message is invariably positive, as Sam explains: “Our basic agenda is to make friends with you! It’s easy. Throw out all your coolness and your preconceptions, take control of your life, and live a better one. Be nice!”
Sam hails from the Florida Keys and Tury is originally from Havana, but the duo found a home, and the new name Friends With You, in Miami in 2002, just after Sam had graduated from the University of Central Florida in Orlando. Tury, as he recalls, met Sam when “friends and I would go up there to do drugs and go to raves and hang out and be young and stupid.” Of deciding to join forces, Sam says that it was “due to a strange similarity in artistic aesthetics and styles before we had even met. We met one day and realized our sketchbooks were almost identical in form.”
Sam and Tury decided to work together, but some media just weren’t going to happen for them: they both painted, but their styles were different. Sam had just returned from Japan, however, and the sight of everyone walking around there with little talismans and tchotchkes dangling from their backpacks gave them their next idea for collaboration. The duo figured out how to sew, beginning to make prototypes for plush toy characters, each with a name, story, and special powers. Malfi and the Albino Squid, among others, were born.
Rather than bumble through the manufacture of their plush toys, they took out a classified ad in a Miami Spanish-language newspaper. After 20 go-rounds, they found a mother/daughter team that both dug the work and could nail every deceptively simple detail in the stuftie prototypes. Not every city offers such a wealth of low-budget resources, but Miami is a unique place. As Sam explains, “You can either completely relax here or disappear for a month into the depths of the creative cave and really make something great. There are all the resources in the world, and it is really inexpensive to make things or produce something big. There is also a great mix of culture that really inspires me and makes you feel you are in a different country with all the comforts of America.”
Theme Parks
Of course, Florida is also home to the largest theme park in the world, and the state’s patron saint, Walt Disney, has certainly blown a few inspirational kisses the way of Friends With You as well, albeit on a smaller scale. Picking up a cue from the eminence grise of all things fantastic, Sam and Tury figured that making characters was a good thing, but at every opportunity fleshing out these little critters with a fully-rendered world to surround them. Gallery installations were a perfect opportunity for this, as Sam explains: “When we are in the gallery setting we are mostly trying to provide the people with an avenue to show their expression, to participate and believe – kind of like us building a mini theme park in your brain and letting you become the artist and interact with us.”
Friends With You has taken these “mini theme park” installations to the Box Space Gallery in Miami and the Merry Karnowsky Gallery in Los Angeles, among others, always with a goal of audience participation. As Tury puts it, “We feel that the level of entertainment and intellectual stimulation that our audience is exposing itself to on a daily basis is quite extraordinary! To demand that that audience sees your work from a sole spectator point of view is suicidal. People want to have a part of it, so we make the audience be part of the show somehow, always keeping a two-way communication going, instead of a monologue from the artist to the audience.”
And what does this communication mean in practical terms? Sam remembers a favorite reaction to their Miami show: “Old ladies gently waved at the giant furry monster and tied their wishes to the wishing post!”
With their particular appreciation for theme park environments, Friends With You was a natural fit for Volkswagen’s Project Fox, in which they and 20 other artists redesigned rooms in Copenhagen’s Fox Hotel. Sam and Tury themed four rooms, to which they gave the titles King Albino, Heavenly Palace, Two Swans (Fertility Shrine), and Harmony’s Helm. Sam describes their goal “to create story-like environments that people couldn’t just forget while staying in the rooms. This meant converting everything: the furniture, every little detail, carpet, and bathroom towels. We were nervous at first that there was no way they would be able to do what we wanted, but they all did. One of the rooms, Harmony’s Helm, was completely tiled – the walls and the floor. Giant bulls’ heads, the largest king-size bed in existence, and a ton more tricks, including secret compartments. They are some of the best installations we have ever done in and of themselves.”
And those old women that gently waved at their giant furry monsters – are they welcome at the hotel? “Any hotel room is for lovers. That is the main responsibility I think. But all are welcome. It’s your chance to really experience a new sensation and environment without putting yourself out there and you changing. It’s like we offer you a theme park for the evening to use any way you like. I know I did when I stayed in one of our rooms!”
Collaboration
Nearly all of Sam and Tury’s work, Project Fox included, has involved a degree of collaboration, whether with one another or with production managers and craftspeople. Tury explains that the process of their collaboration begins when “one of us shows a special interest for a project and takes the lead and starts making stuff. Then, soon the other half wants to play and have his say in it and jumps in the wagon. It’s always about the work and that it comes out right, so that we don’t hate ourselves like a week later after it’s out of our hands; there is never a guarantee of that.”
While the process of jobbing out work to third parties is sometimes nerve-wracking, Tury says “it doesn’t make me nervous any more. Being a designer means that you can’t always make things yourself, but only specify how you want them done and then hope for the best and hopefully get a round of corrections. So the way that we deal with this is that we try to be as detailed as possible and explain ourselves the best that we can. Some designers really have a hard time doing this because they have never made anything 3-D with their hands, and they really don’t understand what kind of explanation or diagrammatical drawings they should be doing in order to explain their ideas to a craftsman or a factory production manager. But really, that process is one of my favorite parts of my job. I get to imagine how to make things on paper and I try to explain how to do them from my computer across the other side of the world.”
Friend Theory
Friends With You can use their gallery and installation work to render their most elaborate visions, and their commercial work for MTV and other clients tends to pay their bills, but their calling cards are their toys, whether plush or wooden. Even after thousands of toy Friends sold, Sam and Tury still manage to lose money each time, they say. From their first plush toys, when they would commission their Miami seamstresses for runs of 20 (”If we felt really lucky we’d do 60,” Sam remembers), to their new modular wooden “Good Wood Gang” (produced in editions of 500 in China), Friends With You has an agenda with their work that may end up sapping all their profits, and they seem to be fine with that.
Sam is especially happy to expound on the theory of the Friendly creations: “The toys are a mix of things that we would love in a creature and an opportunity to bring an idea to life. We work every detail to the bone until we are both really satisfied, and then it is born sometimes. They go through an extensive testing to see what their effects are on people. Sometimes we don’t get the result we want or maybe it is something useless for humans, and then that strain is maybe not fully realized! But lots of the time we find these creatures play an important part in their new owner’s life and help them to be more confident, get more money, and have more adventures. They all have special stories. They in some way or another keep the world working and even the simple event of brushing your teeth takes an uncountable amount of Friends working together.”
From the outside, the designer toy phenomenon is risible even by art subculture standards. Adults paying large sums of money for little plastic figures without moving parts, and calling them “toys” as they store them in their unopened packaging on a shelf? That sounds a bit too Comic Book Guy to elicit empathy. Of course, here is where Friends With You veers away from the majority of their peers in toy design, even though many of their products end up in the same hands and through the same outlets. Speaking of much of the rest of the designer toy market, Tury states that “people don’t make toys, they make miniature sculptures for collectors’ shelves. I think it’s quite unfair to call a lot of these items toys when the only thing that makes them toys is the vinyl material that they’re manufactured in. I’m not going to say that our wood toys may not fall under that category, but if they do, it is accidentally.” Sam elaborates on their strange niche in the toy market by saying that they “aren’t really competing in this market with anyone, even though they find us as their competition, especially those with bigmoney philosophies. We want to make something that is important and unique to you, not for its collectability necessarily. That’s why we work in plush and now wood. Once you put wood in your hands and start to manipulate it, it becomes yours forever. It has a whole different special quality to you, and the modular ability is the reason to have toys, for you to be able to imagine anything you like.”
The Good Wood Gang is their latest creation, and it seems all but certain to do well. The little wooden beasties can come apart and be put back together in many different ways, and the natural wood used in their construction has an inviting feel in the hands. These are toys to be played with, whether by you or by a young person in your life, though you’ll probably hang onto the toys yourself and let the kids play with them when they come over. For Tury, those kids will be the best judges of the Gang’s success. “We really want to make real, useful things, and with every project that we produce, this becomes more obvious. Hype and speculation only work in such a small, media-savvy circle of people, and those people are like us, so we know how to design for them, and in turn that makes it easier. But the real challenge is designing something that ‘we’ like and the newer generation of cool kids and their mothers like also.”
Let’s hope they keep the old ladies gently waving, too.