Artist Abraham Cruzvillegas Takes on the Tate Modern | Brilliant Ideas Ep. 13

[Music] brilliant ideas powered by Hyundai Motor the Contemporary Art world is vibrant and booming as never before it's a 21st century phenomenon a global industry in its own right brilliant ideas looks at the artists at the heart of this artists with a unique power to provoke astonish and Inspire in this program Mexican sculptor Abraham Cruz Viagas undertakes the prestigious T turbine Hall [Music] Commission celebrated conceptual artist Abraham Cruz Vias made his name in the 1990s working with found objects and creating sculptures by improvising with unusual materials now he's taken on his biggest challenge yet to fill one of the largest and most popular Contemporary Art spaces in the world originally a power station Tate modern has been described as a secular Cathedral attracting more than 70 million visitors since it opened in the year 2000 at its core is the turbine Hall a cavernous space that once housed the generators responsible for powering London now however it plays host to a series of annual sight specific commissions by International artists the space has become renowned worldwide as one of the most important commissioning spaces for really bold Innovative projects and Contemporary Art it's an interesting space to see when it's empty um you get families on a wet day and putting blankets down and you get kids on their scooters going down the ramp I mean in some ways it's an indoor park you got this giant space you got to come up with an idea that's got an integrity and a coherence and a Simplicity to dominate conceptually there was Ola for lion weather project with this enormous representation of the sun Doris salo's enormous crack in the turbine hall floor shipthe there was iway Way's very very popular sunflower seeds these millions of tiny porcelain seeds that viewers could look down on and look across this enormous sea of incredible handmade pieces so there' been a whole range of projects over the years it's one of the top bildings it's it's it's one of the dream gigs created from soil and Scaffolding Water and Light Abraham Cruz vas's enormous sculpture titled empty lot will occupy the turbine hall for the next 6 months I received this invitation a bit more than a year ago and of course I felt very honored and very proud but also very challenged I thought that I should make something that could summarize everything I did before kind of a synthesis of every work every single work I made [Music] before Abraham cruus doesn't work in a very predetermined way that's one of the things that's very interesting about him he doesn't have a conception for a piece or for a show and then make it happen he works very organically he finds objects and materials he finds people in a way are a material of his as well and collaboration is absolutely essential so the Journey of the making of the work becomes part of the story of the work itself we kind of construct in a very silly way there is no real technical knowledge or skill so it's more like joining Parts together as I can and as I have no real art education or technical education I always do thing as I can an artist who had residencies at Institution all over the world Abraham describes himself as arriving at each new location with empty hands improvising as much as possible with his setting in 2008 he embarked on a sixth month stay at glasgow's Center for Contemporary Arts it was just in the middle of nowhere in the mountains of Scotland with a beautiful landscape and the locks and so I started collecting so many different types of materials that I of course H I knew but I never used in my in my work one key work created during this residency was part of his series of blind self-portraits it's a series of work that I make with all the papers the all Printed Matter from my everyday life from my residency in Scotland I kept all the train tickets along with the letters from Friends postcards invitations everything that describes my everyday life and then I painted the on the back it describes me it's my identity but nobody can see it so it's more about uh kind of a creating a field for complicity with a possible visitor or audience of of the exhibition so they have to believe me that it contains my life but they cannot see it and so that's why I call them blind self portraits [Music] relationships and a playfulness and a sense of negotiation with other people is critical to the work but so too is the geographical location and everything that it says about that local economy and society and its people and ways of living and working what is important about his work is that he works in an international level but at the same time he retains this identity this history his his own History Abraham grew up in the southern part of Mexico City at a time of social and political upheaval when large numbers of people including his parents moved from rural areas of the country to find work with no infrastructure to support them when they arrived people just put up homes themselves appropriating land and building with whatever materials they could find I was born and grew up in a district called ausco and this neighborhood was originally an area of volcanic rock that was not meant to be inhabited by people people used to build their own places you know their own homes according to any materials they happen to find around them and this was very very typical of the Mexican way of being autonomous being independent being very much in control of your own destiny not waiting for government to help you or support you so it became a very politicized Community we had to fight against the corruption of the government the corruption of the function it took us some time to construct the houses something you can call a community this way of building is known in Mexico as autoc constru which translates as self- constructing autoc construction is a word we use in Mexico particularly for describing the houses constructed by by the people who inhabit them so that's the case of my parents house was not really planfield [Music] the construction of a circumstance that comes along uh in a very difficult economic circumstance but not in a sad way not in a heroic way but more I would say in a very optimistic and very positive way in the 1990s Cruz vus realized that his own way of making art was very similar to the way these buildings in his home City had been constructed and he appropriated the term AOC constru for the series of sculptures that he's been making since around 2005 and since then I've been calling every work I make autoc construction but it's it's been evolving as well into autod destruction self-destructing and also reconstruction reconstruction and then I've been more recently dealing with auto confusion like self-c confusing so this is what I'm mean now and so the stage is set with his 2015 hyundi turbine Hall installation will Abraham deliver autoc construction or Auto confusion in London's Cathedral of Contemporary [Music] Art Mexican sculptor Abraham Cruz Vias is the latest artist to take on the turbine Hall Commission at London's Tate modern five story high with 3,400 M of floor space it's one of the largest installation spaces in Contemporary Art but how has Abraham chosen to fill it it's a giant sculpture that occupies both ends of Tate's turbine Hall and it comprises two huge triangular platforms that are stepped up like stepped pyramid uh you can walk underneath it and see this scaffold structure that holds it up and walking through the scaffold is definitely part of the work the scaffolders they've done a massive job those Lads I think there's something like 2,000 scaffold Planks on each east side and then another 2,000 the west side I mean it's a huge install this structure has to hold the weights of 240 planters that contain 23 tons of soil collected from Parks and Gardens across London each soil sample has been gathered from a discrete part of the city bringing with it its own ecosystem of weeds seeds and animal life the artist's aim being to let nature take its course from chesington all the way to Lee Valley North southeast west the whole the whole city's been covered when I went personally to dig some of the soil for Hamstead Heath or peam Rai when we were taking the soil from there in back there were already many many things alive like moving that I saw myself I touched them like these large worms earth worms and I think they will reproduce there I mean there will be lots of H fun and sex in there to see the soil this stuff that we've just concreted over to see this stuff brought back in the great turbine all onto the surface and for us to see that this is where we came from from this is the thing we depend on this is the thing with which we are totally independent and from which we've shut ourselves off how will we respond it's quite mad really I think about it this all come from London and yet each and every single park has got something completely different some of them are harder to identify so like you can pick out um Chessington that's like really fine sand like a beach um q q is a really fine mulch the soil from at is really clay and sticky so yeah you've got big rocks of it that need breaking up nicely if enough that you've got a nice flat surface and hopefully something will grow Abraham has added growth lamps and an irrigation system to the structure introducing all the elements necessary for life itself but whether any shoots will Sprout will be down to chance and mother nature today we watered half of them and today we go and rewater everything and uh yeah I think the plan is to do it once a week fingers cross we'll get some nice growth have been constructing all these things that will work as a lamp poost they are made with materials we collected from different places many of the elements are discarded objects [Music] as with all his projects Abraham has used found objects in the work scavenged from across London inspiring the people working around him to get involved with even Mark the curator hunting for materials he found this antenna while walking by the street and so he thought it might be useful for me so so he took it and walk to take with it Abraham then embellished that and that's now one of the the lamp posts one of the tallest lamp posts in the uh in the sculpture and for Abraham even an abandoned toilet door has its place it's a kind of a the door of a stinky place and so many things that probably people thought that are dead or useless they think it's but definitely it's not for me you there's clearly a message which is about you know stuff's useful and the stuff that we throw away is vital for many other people's lives then I think there's another deeper message that lat that's latent in his work which is about you know what we value what he's trying to communicate is that we've got our model of waste wrong the big part of the project is going to be about this idea of Hope but also the idea of instability the instability of the artist in this case he doesn't know genuinely whether anything will grow over the five months of the project the instability of the visual look of the structure which does reflect I think a lot of the construction sites that Abraham has seen in his visits to London all big cities are in constant transformation but this one in particular I think it's always like constru ruction site like if you look at the landscape it's a horizon of cranes it's still something I like thinking of as a metaphor on the transformation of the identity taking soil from every part of London using found objects from across a city perpetually under construction Abraham's turbine Hall installation asks questions about the nature and meaning of this Metropolis cities are smelly they're polluted they're expensive the only thing that valorizes a city the only reason we come to a city is to be with each other to connect with each other to get that friction that heat of the other and that is I think a metaphor for how we can Thrive and for London this city that's becoming this gated Enclave for oligarchs it's a very interesting and counterintuitive take about a future Cruz vas's work always incorporates elements of uncertainty and change but with this installation he's relying entirely on Nature's capacity to endure if there were certainty and he knew on day one that that was it the big reveal had happened and the work was finished I suspect it would in some way be dead to him and there is an alive quality which is incredibly important about the work the day of the opening will be just the beginning of a process and the final work will be there only when it's h closing the last day of the exhibition that will be the the final work so it it will be in a constant H change permanent transformation but on one of the most prominent stages in the cultural world how will a work of art that begins its life unfinished be greeted by both critics and the public I I [Music] Tate modern's Hyundai turbine Hall Commission is one of the most challenging and high-profile Commissions in Contemporary Art it's been undertaken in 2015 by Mexican sculptor Abraham Cruz Vias who's created a work which investigates themes of Life waste hope and renewal in a city defined by constant change but it is unpredictability that is at the center of the installation I love being a beginner and what for me being means being a beginner is that you have to run all the risks possible as many risks as possible that way you learn and this is for me my main goal to be on the way to keep learning and that's the riskiest thing you can you can say about your own process because if not it's like you assume or you accept that you already know something and I think I know nothing [Music] what cannot be known is how this installation will evolve a work that begins unfinished makes it difficult for critics and The Wider public to judge on day one we I think at the end we designed something nice that could be seen by the millions of people who visit every year the turbine Hall as it's free and in which I I'm the one who's been learning more than anybody I think it's very consistent with the idea that I proposed and very uh simple which is of course more it becomes more like a a container a recipient for everybody's interpretations and ideas I think it's kind of like everyone was kind of asking the same question what what's growing inside there so it's a bit of a mystery um I don't know if that's the point of the art or or if it was accidental but yeah I'm intrigued to see what's going to grow out of [Music] it fantastic setup and it really makes you think you know anything can grow out nothing to watch that soil what will they do to us or maybe a little aw awaken in US these memories of the sheer richness of our own territory and what we can produce as with all turbine Hall installations the way visitors respond and interact plays a huge part in the success of the work my idea is that they can use their own bodies in a different way like looking at the work from the bridge of the turbine hole to both sides of the bridge and have a perception of this veh construction and constructing their own idea you have a relationship with it and to something to sit and stare at is is quite interesting um the geometry of it how it's laid out um they obviously follow a certain order and Mathematics which is quite interesting um and I think it's I think it's brilliant the way he's done [Music] it when they walk under the bridge it's a perception that they will use their bodies in a very particular way that could help them to create their own meaning for the work with a work as high-profile as empty lot critics from every quarter will want to make up their own minds it seems to be floating kind of all of this all the structure seems to be floating but when we came here it's all like very solid and massive and you don't really feel that your upstairs we have all different context and background so there is for me there is no wrong interpretation so if they don't like it it's also good we don't have to like everything and in my in my opinion what what's the real seed of this work is this what people think about it and this might be anything it does feel like some sort of weird allotment that's come inside from an estate somewhere on the outskirts of London because of course lots of people in the city do have allotments and do grow their own fruit and vegetables and things and this feels like some strange modernist utopian vision of those kind of urban [Music] environments this is one glimpse of a future where there's all sorts of things that people used to be used to that people used to take for granted right here we're seeing um just soil just something that is not digital something that's real something that gets your fingers dirty this becomes a religious object now after an epic process of installation it's down to the audience to interpret and interact with Abraham's work and for nature to run its course over the coming months only the passage of time can reveal what life and hope may have in store the lot of physics says that energy and matter cannot be created or destroyed it can be only transformed and I believe in that it's not it's not like a again it's not like a religion it's it's physics you know it's science and it's supposed to be objective I think nothing is objective everything is subjective even even science I don't like the idea of an artist as a Creator we create nothing we just rearrange things different ways in different manners but we create nothing in fact myself I believe that I cannot really transform even anything I just arrange make different types of organizing the matter and the energy my own energy this is what I like and I think playfulness is very important for me and optimism and hope and this is the way I work and this is the way I think things should I mean the way I should deal with energy so it's it's all about the joy of energy [Music] [Music] brilliant ideas powered by Hyundai motor [Music]

Channel: Bloomberg Originals

Views: 93,774

Keywords: Bloomberg, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Tate Modern, Turbine Hall, Mexico, art

Id: BoaRZHBa6hg

Length: 24min 12sec (1452 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 23 2015