Body doubles in silicon

New Zealander Chris Braddock is - among other things - collecting nipple erectors in his New York studio. He tells TIM WILSON why

"I was about to use the word 'overwhelming' again," says Auckland artist Chris Braddock. "I've got to think of a different word to describe New York."

The artist is sitting seven floors above West 37th St, in the midst of Manhattan's garment district. Snow falls outside. Though spring is supposedly near at hand, winter still has the city by the throat. This means the heating is on full-blast in rooms such as this all over the five boroughs - a typically American response to American weather - and it also explains why Braddock is dressed for warmth rather than cold, in a clay-flecked T-shirt.

About halfway through a four-month residency with the International Studio and Curatorial Programme (ISCP), Braddock is elated and serene, though he looks tired.

New York can be overwhelming in good and bad ways. He's positive about being here. He can't speak highly enough of ISCP. "They have curators coming in all the time - it's not like a retreat on a hillside. You feel really plugged into the art world."

He loves (and is horrified by the rent on) his apartment in the East Village. There are compensations. How many streets in New Zealand also have an underground film festival taking place on them?

But urbanism's surlier aspects must be contended with. The secrets of the train system, the crushing, baying crowds, inexplicable weeping in the next room, that murmured obscenity on the subway.

Ezra Pound, the American poet, once wrote that London made one see the futility in all art but the highest. New York does that, but it performs unexpected tricks also. On a percentage basis there is more art here, and so more bad art.

Moreover, the American predilection for stardom produces the results of aristocracies anywhere: patronage, nepotism, laziness and immobility.

That's my view, not Braddock's. What he has been seeing, and relishing, is the way that art is set before you like a buffet prepared by a fat lady. In one weekend, Braddock visited the Armory show that is held every year on the Chelsea Piers, met numerous artists, dealers and curators, went to Scope, a competing art fair, and to PS 1, a leading New York art gallery.

Wisely, he avoided the Whitney Biennial, telling himself he'd get to that later. There is so much to do: meet people, make contacts, view work. Oh, and make work - that's important, hence the ochre-coloured clay on the artist's T-shirt.

Braddock has been creating in silicon lately. He makes imprints of his wrists, his elbows and heels, body parts really, then pours silicon into the clay. The works are immediately vague, beautiful and ugly, but intricate qualities emerge - satisfyingly - on examination.

"Look," says Braddock, and there, you see the little hairs from his elbow. And the pieces carry bits of Manhattan in them. "See," he says, brandishing a bottle of silicon colouring, unobtainable in New Zealand, bought from a store called the Compleat Sculptor.

Foam rubber nipple erectors (an authentic aid for women who don't feel pronounced enough) stand about on the studio walls. "I'm not interested in their shape," he explains, "I'm interested in manipulating them, and playing around with the form."

Braddock is a rare artist in that one has to watch what one says around him, and what one thinks, too. Unformed prejudices are gently probed and, after some shuffling and coughing, dispatched ever so politely. I'm uncomfortable with a lot of contemporary art - it seems deliberately evasive, emotionally barren, and overly reliant on the shell games of sensuality and intellectualisation.

"Perhaps you have to think of art without the capital A," he offers, sounding like the teacher he is. Braddock's day job in Auckland is as senior lecturer at AUT's School of Art and Design.

Much of his previous work has been about the body, so it seems appropriate, if a little brazen, to ask the artist, what does he think of his own body?

"I've never been asked that question before," he says.

I scribble something down.

"Are you writing that I'm taking time to reply to this?" he asks.

"No, just that you'd never been asked this before," I answer, adding, "but the clock is ticking."

"I'm a means to an end," he replies. "I'm a vehicle."

He looks unhappy with this answer. "I think it's an interesting question, but not a relevant one."