Artist Conversation: Martin Puryear and Theaster Gates

good evening and welcome my name is Judith Lucy Kirchner and I'm deputy director for education and women's board endowed chair I can't tell you how delighted I am to welcome you all tonight to what's going to be a memorable dialogue between two sculptors martin pereyra whose first exhibition in chicago was in 1980 and whose exhibition we celebrate tonight and our friend Theaster gates whose work brings such lustre to our city I want to first thank our exhibition sponsors the Mortons international exhibition fund and the kemper educational and charitable fund an annual support for the Art Institute exhibitions is provided by the exhibition's trust kenneth griffin robert m and diane levy Thomas and Margo Pritzker Betsy Bergman Rosenfield and Andrew Rosenfield the earl and brenda shapiro foundation and the woman's board and on behalf of all of those individuals douglas drew ik and james Rondo it is indeed a pleasure to welcome you to the Art Institute I want to also acknowledge the hard work of our colleagues who made this evening possible phone ring and Karolina Kowalczyk Erica Hubbard and Tracy button finally our wonderful colleague mark Fusco whose remarkable curatorial partnership with the artist shaped this beautiful exhibition which the New York Times praised when it was in New York as intriguing for revealing process enigmatic forms the astounding craftsmanship and humanistic spirit of Martin courier we are all delighted to co-sponsor this event with the leadership Advisory Committee and it's my particular pleasure to introduce Dave Walker who's co-chair of the OIC Thank You Judith on behalf of the leadership advisory committee I'd like to welcome everybody what will certainly be an enlightening and inspiring evening the leadership advisory committee or la sea is the art institute's volunteer and auxiliary board that helps to promote and sustain diversity and inclusion at the museum part of what we do on the la sea is host or co-host public programs and extraordinary events like this like bring Martin courier and Theaster gates together tonight we are grateful to Martin and Theaster and of course to you for attending the conversation will last about 45 minutes and from the artists at this point we've decided that because of time constraints we won't be able to have any questions at the end and so please everyone if you can at this time silence your cellphone's and now let's also please welcome Janet and Craig douchey suave curative prints and drawings mark Pesce so great to see such a big crowd here thank you very much for coming martin pereyra whose work is the subject of the newly opened Art Institute exhibition martin pereyra multiple dimensions has invited chicago based artist Theaster gates to have a conversation tonight the artists share several things in common including residents in Chicago and very importantly serious engagement with Africa at at crucial moments in their development the Aster Gates is a professor in the department of visual arts and director of arts and public life at the University of Chicago he is also the founder of the nonprofit rebuild foundation his studio practice includes space development performance and object making and his expansive list of media and processes was the inspiration for Martin's invitation to have a conversation together the spirit as I understand it is to discuss their personal employment of craft and so much more as two great artists who are aware of each other's gravitas and who would like to know more about each other please join me now in welcoming Martin career and Theaster gates in conversation I didn't discuss this with you at first Fiesta but I'm gonna use my seniority full rank yes sir and I'm gonna talk first and explain explain how this got started which is I was approached with the hope that I would do have some kind of be involved in some kind of program in connection with my exhibition which I hope you'll be able to see if you haven't already seen it in the exhibition special exhibitions gallery and my first thought was I would love to engage Chicago as it has evolved since I left that 25 years ago and I couldn't imagine a more meaningful way to engage Chicago as it now exists without answering something that I've been interested in curious about for a long time which is to Theaster gates i knew about first having seen your work in a magazine article years ago of something that I was very attracted to which was a pot a ceramic jug which I loved vernacular ceramic crafts from the Appalachian tradition and I thought I was enjoying an antique and I read the article and it was a pot that you had done which was part of a conceptual art piece that's when I first learned about you title and then I've read extensively more about you gaining more and more curiosity then we got in touch with it you phoned me and we spoke over the phone a little bit and so when I was asked about a program that I might be willing to do I said I'm going to something that I want to do I'm not gonna do this as a job it's a public service thing this is for me this is a this is I'm gonna be selfish I'm gonna try to get the ass through gates and talk to him and and have a have a discussion and it could be public and I have to say I have to say very personally that I'm really cheat I feel cheated that this is only one hour because I think we could talk for a long long time together and I think a little bit of a little bit of context from my own engagement in this moment is as a person who's a generation two older than you theater and I can I can remember I can remember coming to New York in the 70s and before and feeling so invisible as a black artist in New York and being aware of the incredible discontent that was experienced and expressed by artists of color and women to the extent that there was one artist than I'm friendly with who made for years who made her work consists of tabulating the absence of artists of color in the New York galleries she for years was making charts and that was her work charts showing minuscule percentages of black minuscule percentages of female minuscule percentages of Latino in the New York galleries and I just want to in passing say that when I come to Chicago and have friends here Theaster who I've become I think we're friends now nothing so we've always on me will be your friend we've we've only met we've only met for a matter of minutes before this face to face and then I had a visit to the Astor's project which I'm talking now because what I saw today is leaving me a little bit speechless visiting see Astor's rebuild project and so he he may have a lot more to say than I do but I'm trying to get my word to sit now but but I just think there's a moment - it's it's it's worth recognizing that and also mentioning that I was in the Vienna's went to Venice at the end of the summer to see the be an hour the exhibition curated by Oakley and Weiser who is now working at the house - question in the eunich Germany it's a bit now like you'll never see again and the presence of so many artists of color in that Vietnam and we are not invisible anymore that's right I mean we're not invisible Chicago we're not invisible and just the friends I mean Kerry James Marshall I've known since I lived here in fact before I came here I met Nick Cave a little while ago I mean these are these are pillars of the Chicago art scene and they're working in terms that I think not marginalized at all central and I'm gonna stop talking and thank you but just check so I just I just think there's a lot there's a lot that we can we can exchange yeah and I'm gonna I'm going to finish by saying that I know that yours that your project is I've heard the word social sculpture used to describe what you do and I know that's a word that I think was the first first associating with Joseph boys the German conceptual Fluxus Fluxus sort of a germanic exponent of something which is like octuple vera it was a unique amazing amazing person I saw him speak once in in New York at the new at the school for Social Research very very magnetic person when I when I see what you've done I think that what you're doing in your social practice is social sculptor in a practical sense not a utopian sense it's completely practical and it engages people where they are and it's not it's not a Pied Piper call for people to follow him and develop a utopian idea of what art can become you're engaged in people if you keep talking man they don't think I've paid you to say all this thing like I got enough problems in this city thank you that's that's that's I mean this is crazy it's like my best dream ever so I got to Martin stories then since we since we own the first-name basis that we friends now Barton the the recent story of our meeting was that I was invited by the Chicago Transit Authority to do a work of art at 95th Street right before the CTA had asked me to do this piece Martin had a piece up north the Rosemont station that was a maybe it was called the ring it was a it was a it was a beautiful round piece that was made out of mahogany laminated mahogany laminated mahogany and over the years maybe had been up there 20 years or more about 25 years of tenure can you tell the difference between like my looseness to his tightness over the years the piece had gone into disrepair it was it had rotted and it was becoming a liability and so the Transit Authority had to dismantle the piece and and get rid of it and it was one of the first kind of public artworks I remember seeing when I would like go to the north side bump around so I called Martin timidly and asked you know hey this piece just came down this piece was really significant to me I got to do this work on the south side of 95th Street can I do a piece that like allows me to remember or or pay homage to these two Martin's then it would be my my patron saint martin per year along with a generation Pryor's patron saint that continues into perpetuity so we talked for a little while and then martin says let me think about this and let's talk again like oh right okay so I think you called me back or I called you back we got back in touch a few weeks later and brother Martin said yet the Astor I've considered this and no you know I was trying to give me like a good Martin per your retina made you know like if Baldassare can do it with the Giacometti maybe i could have me like a Giacometti Martin Puryear he asked the gate he's like no the the the first moment that I had a public encounter with you was when you came to Chicago to consider the DuSable Park and I remember being in the audience I was a young artist I was I was knee-deep in clay I mean I was like I was a throwing machine in those days and and I remember there being a real it was a it was a tough conversation and I wanted you to actually talk a little bit about it and then maybe I tell you what I remember of it I didn't mean to come out the gate with the DuSable playing but it's not like that this is a conversation about abstraction well it does it does involve the Art Institute I was approached before I left Chicago I lived in I lived in Chicago he's a little background here I lived in Chicago for 13 years I came about 1978 and I taught at the University of Illinois for a number of those years and then I began to just work in the studio and not teach any longer toward the end of my time here I was approached by Neil Ben Ezra this is around the time I was getting ready for a major survey which the Art Institute was organizing of my sculpture at this museum and I was approached with the idea of a sculpture a commemorative sculpture for to honor and or at least to acknowledge the life and presence and what is present-day Chicago of the first non-native American non-indian person to make a permanent home in Chicago with jean-baptiste plan DuSable who was a man of African ancestry historically recorded as African ancestry no known images of him were extent and he is celebrated on the south side disabled high school to Sabo Museum he is nearly invisible in Chicago itself it's the first non-native resident of what is now Chicago visible only on the south side celebrated on the south side I just in by walking around on this visit a few days here I ran across a pedestal a busts on the Bronx with the Chicago River with the bronze bust a likeness of a person and a plaque that's what recognizes jean-baptiste plant DuSable outside of the south side of Chicago there was talk when I was approached of a park which and I don't know what's happened to it since because it just it's kind of after several planning meetings that I've attended here Park planning meetings Landscape Architect planning meetings presentations of a sculptural memorial to disabled things got quiet at a certain point you have to move forward you just have to realize that you have to just do your own work and not keep coming back for things which are going to be going on in perpetuity without any kind of resolution so it's died but I think what the ash was referring to is I think of a moment when I gave it gave a talk to an audience I'm not sure if it was this audience it was at the Art Institute of Chicago I had my model and I talked about what I was trying to do with the model and it was this I felt and there was there was pressure from numerous sides on me because there were there were people who felt that as an artist who was known for abstract work why is an abstract artist being made being asked to design a memorial to a person who needs to be represented so it was a it was a tight bind I found myself in because I felt personally that that one of the most important things for this monument to disabled had to contain embody and make clear is for the sake of Chicago black Chicago white circle all of Chicago is it the first settler in Chicago was a black man and you don't do that by having a plaque for the text you do it with something that if you're literate person can look at and see so I felt very strongly that as a person who had come out of Rio out of representation I could for this point go back to representation and make an image that people could look at it understand the truth of this history but I was having to explain it to people who know me as an artist who made abstract art so there was a lot of suspicion about me having been chosen anyway I think by the time I had made my presentation some of the people who were most suspicious had come around to realizing that I could in fact operate under that mandate and and fairly and do and do justice to what I felt and they felt needed to be expressed in this memorial so I think that's what you would just serve oh so I was talking about abstraction and and the abstraction part of this is that I felt and I think I used the example of African art when I was explaining how you can show the certain human truth without making a portrait because we don't know what DuSable look like and I felt it would have been a travesty to present a portrait of a person with a likeness but I felt it was nevertheless possible and necessary to show DuSable as the person who had his origins in Africa and that was so to me so important for this for the truth of this city to acknowledge because I was trying to grapple with that that that that struggle let me tell you why I'll tell you why I mentioned that there's a way in which so you say you know I came out of realism I was trained in a realist tradition you said you could look at a thing you could make it and that was cool and that was of your earliest experiences how you knew you were becoming an artist is that you could you could lacquer like I am right and then something happened and you called that the art of your time he said then I realized that there was the art of my time and like what happened in that moment between I know how to draw I like these drawings whoa there's some other stuff going on like do you remember that moment do you remember those moments when when things were shifting for you it happened when I was in college and I was a biology major for the first two years of college but I was I'd been drawing since I was a kid yeah and I was a biology major because I didn't know what an artist did to make a living yeah yeah and I thought well I can I can get a degree in biology and I can do something in that field and paint on the weekends and that I'd get began to hang out with art majors and realize that these people were preparing professionally to be artists whatever that meant I also saw people who were teaching and I said well this is maybe a way that I can make a living as I can teach and that means that I embrace my identity as an artist and that's when I switched into oriented but at that point I came under the tutelage of one very eccentric woman Nell Solomon from North Carolina and she was she was very patient with me because I was I was wedded to to reality to realism I had taught myself to paint with egg tempera you know with wood engravings all this sort of traditional techniques of making art and I was so proud that I had this skill I had taught myself from the time I was a kid and I'd looked at art books and I just I was in love with Bruegel and Flemish Masters and Andrew Wyeth to heat it to my mind at that time he was he was a living artist in my time who was working with this tradition of absolute mastery of depiction and this person said to me she was very patient but she said you know your work to be a lot better if you understood abstraction if you knew how to compose a picture yeah and think of these things as elements rather than focus on the texture of fur and the way light falls on this or the way shadows I mean she just said you know you you've got you've got the bones of right here but you don't have you don't you don't see and we struggled we fought yeah we fought and I began to see in the work that I was admiring I remember particularly looking at Hans Memling a portrait of a woman and how the shape of her veil was like you and and this is this is what connects to Ellsworth Kelly yeah the way he subtracts these basic forms but I was looking at them and I was getting obsessed with all the detail of but but I realized that if I could figure out how to make these elements work I could compose a painting that had dynamism in it yeah rather than just the kind of accidental surface qualities that you get by pointing a camera at something and clicking it and a good photographer does that with with his the selectivity of his vision by finding these things these structures that make the piece work it's art rather than simply as an accidental collection of of textures and shadows and and so forth but it that's the moment if you want to yeah that's weak but it wasn't it wasn't overnight it was like I said it was this woman and I fought and and and she retired and and and we remained in touch yeah and I would I saw her not long before she died I went down to North Korea tired and I were and we stayed in touch and we were we really had a truce yeah at the end of it yeah yeah I had to agree that but you came around oh yeah yeah now I'm an abstract artist now yeah yeah but there but at that time too you were also committed to two-dimensional work like things were things that's where I started right things right Wow yeah yeah but I think like you we both came up in a family where people were handy yeah and my father and I think your father you said was yeah was a roofer ntp is a tradesman it was he was busy yeah yeah well my father was a postal worker he was trained in high school as far which as far as he got as an electrician he came out of school and he was looking for a job as an electrical contractor yeah no unions would have in those days he was he was shut out so he went in there went to work in the post office in DC and that's what he did but he was a handy father and he had seven kids and he when he needed something done around the house he'd go to the library and get a book go to the equivalent in those days of Home Depot or someplace and buy a few tools and I grew up with a watching a man teach himself how to build things and do things and that was that was invaluable to me right on yeah you know this this walking through the show with you and listening to you talk about some of your early work and the evolution is it was really is really helpful for me to kind of chart to see howhow an artist that I admire charts their their life in those moments you know they feel like clear chunks where I was like you know like a decision was made and then like that decision was made based on a kind of ideological shift or a deepening or or you'd go to a place and allow yourself to be enthralled and absorb the things of that place and then another shift would happen and it's just like bam bam yeah you know and seeing the word go from two-dimensional to three-dimensional like there have been moments where I felt like I used you said it earlier that there was a way in which you know the works on paper got to the point where like they just kind of needed to come off the paper like they think that they they became sculptural inside the paper and then they just kind of write and by the time you got to grad school and I think I think I experienced that to where it was like I was making things in clay or I was making things in three-dimension and I was trying to have these conversations about narratives about the world and I was trying to do it symbolically and it was like what happens I make a thing and it would like still not give me everything I wanted and but like the thing we kind of pointed at the world and like more and more I just kind of wanted to take it from three dimension to like another dimension and so I would like take these symbolic narrative moments and then kind of convert it it says like Oh Mike I could build a house out of clay you know could I transfer that into the construction of a house if I want to deal with vacancy in the work or I want to deal with certain kinds of inequalities that I see in the world I would try it first symbolically and then it's like man and so I think that in the same way I was trying i've been trying to grapple with both sculpture and abstraction in that yeah i think we have some experiences formative experiences in common and i think in a sense that i left the u.s. at a young age and went to africa which i think is like one of the most important experiences i've that I could have had to finish college go into the Peace Corps and live among people who lived in the place the part of the world that stamped me as a black American this is the this is the identity this is the curse in a way because it's an identity that in a sense in a very broad social sense stigmatized as you without trying to blame anybody but the truth is that it stigmatizes you being black it's a stigma has been historically remained so today I'm not saying this in any blaming way but it's just that if you just look at how society is operated in this country that's the truth of it and I didn't mean to really go on to this but this is just this is just the truth of it I feel like race is a euphemism in this in our society it's a euphemism because what it really embodies you could almost answer the question when somebody says what are you who are you it's like where are you it's about a place where in society do you fit rather than where do you have what what do you happen what how will you happen to be born how did you happen to be born what did you happen to be born as yes it's really more about where do you fit but I got a little bit sidetracked what was that talking about no I mean let's let's stay here because for what I was talking about is the the privilege the privilege I felt of going to Africa and living among these people these Mende people I was sent to teach in a small and mission school in the Mende tribal area in Sierra Leone and learn to speak their their vernacular languages Creole which is a which is a language based on English just if I can say a little bit about Sierra Leone Sierra Leone is one of two countries on the west coast of Africa to which slaves were repatriated from the West Indies from Canada and from the United States they were sent back and Sierra Leone and Liberia are two countries that had communities of African slaves who had been rinsed of their tribal identities because the slaves were thrown together with different tribes were living together when they were on the plantations or whatever they were working being being made to work in the new world their tribal identities were eroded and in some cases erased and they were sent back to Africa in various for various reasons and at various times and the main community that was sent back to to Sierra Leone settled in what became known as Freetown and in Liberia Liberia the origin of that word is Liberty and they settled in a city on the coast Monrovia named after James Monroe and they're mostly American heritage slaves the slaves who were sent back to Sierra Leone were British from the West Indies some of them came through Canada black loyalists in various but anyway there was a community of of Africans in Freetown who had no tribal language any longer they had what became known as creo que RI oh it's an African dialect still spoken today based on English and so I lived among people learn to speak Creole was teaching French English biology in this high school and getting to know trades people and so forth you weren't teaching art I wasn't I was I thought they thought I could only teach art I was sent there to teach art in this school that had that me had a basic need for really basic courses I ended up teaching French and English and and biology and I and since I had had a after school job through high school and college and working in the library the DC Public Library I ran the library I built up the library in the school and ran the library it was two of the richest years of my life and so but you went to you went to South Africa studied in University of Cape Town Yeah right I went to University of Cape Town in and you talked about being in Sierra Leone three years after independence yes I was in Cape Town in 96 so it was like two and a half years after Mandela's release and I remember also this there's this fervor and this excitement and this the kind of hope that South Africans had about the new South Africa and when I was at University of Cape Town I had faculty by then I could I could use my hands and there were these brother who were doing a lot of stuff and maybe it was st. George's Square like in the main square they were making tourist art and and some of them were Potter so I was like oh maybe I could work with the Cape Town City Mission and like you know learn a little bit of like the local like there was a bunch of Shonna sculpture there's lungs and bobbly and stone stuff happening but I was really kind of interested in like helping them freak like making their clay placed things better and so we spent a lot of time kind of doing that stuff but it was it was it was a magical time for me because I was there on a rotary scholarship the rotary scholarship when you converted the dollar to the r and i was like rich right and it was like I was like broke is all out when I left and then I had temporary cash and then like you couldn't take the money when you left so I was like I'm just gonna stay here for awhile and it was this kind of interesting moment where black South Africans once they once they realized and believed because at first they thought I was like black South African fronting as an American mmm which like I almost got mobbed by these brothers but I was like no no no no for real and they were like yo you're not like I'm about as black as that kind of black gets really ghetto black I know I don't sound ghetto black but guys I'm really ghetto black and and I just I just remembered falling in love with with the possibility that black could be something so much more complicated and just by like shifting context the way that I am the way I imagine myself and the way that I was imagined had shifted and I yeah I just remember that being really liberating me well I I've had something similar when I was in Sierra Leone and I think that's true of anybody who travels particularly any person of color who travels outside of a very stratified society that they're brought up in and realized that these categories in these divisions in these ways that people define themselves are so fluid and and and they are not fixed and we grow up with them and we think they're fixed and we go to a place like Brazil or South Africa and we realize like in South Africa I wouldn't be a black person I'd be colored yeah you know in South Africa people who were clearly mixed-race and I'm not saying this is better or worse than what we've got yeah it's just different yeah and we've got a binary system between black and white if you have any trace of African ancestry you're over here and you can't go over there you'd be better in South Africa don'tjust I'd be worse and you go to Britain you go to Brazil and there's all these different categories with names and in Brazil you I was down there in I think 89 I represented the US and the South probably now yeah and this is ironic because there was a British there was a Brazilian commissioner for that exhibition who was really offended that they hadn't sent somebody important like Frank Stella or something like that you know and it was it was really it was really interesting and the upshot of it was very strange for him because I I got I was awarded the first prize not the prizes mean anything to me at all I didn't even know that we giving prizes then but I did get a I did get first prize and I realized I talked to a lot of people down there and and I met some black Brazilian artists yeah and I met a lot of Brazilian artists who have quite prominent and in Brazil especially it's very hard to be an artist just about as hard as it is here because it's it's financially hard but the Brazilian artists who I met who were doing very well they came from money they were very wealthy families and they they were the people who put the artists out and they were the successful ones and and I heard this expression speaking of how people are categorized talking to a Brazilian one woman gave me a copy of Time magazine was all in is all in Brazilian Portuguese she said and it was an article about about the black people in Brazil with the blacks in Brazil and how they were finally coming into consciousness as the people because Brazil had this idea that there was no racism there's no reason that we're all brazilians and yet all the poor people in Brazil were black and it just happens that that trick worked yeah and and and this woman gave me an Express she said we have an extra said it she said it so openly as though it were just a fact of life in Brazil money whitens if you're wealthy you move up there's no racism here but if you're wealthy you move up yeah so it's just it's these things are so rigid if you're born into them and if you buy into them yeah but you have to get out to realize that these are structures that are created yeah and they're created to keep certain people in some places and allows other people to to have and it requires a very strange w/e du Bois talks about it this double-consciousness yet in order to not go insane yes you have to understand how you're seen but you can't buy into it yeah it makes me think Martin about like there's a way in which you're learning all these things we learn all these things but we go to a place we absorb it and then in addition to the craziness of those places that complicate complicatedness of race and class it also has the capacity to like transform how we make and I feel like you know lots of lots the richness of those cultures become evident in your work in evident in your ethic about working and in your values about why things should be made and when I was walking through the space today there was just like moments where you could see an exorbitant amount of time and thought in advance of a cut that would then make that would make the cut and you were you were talking about craftsmanship earlier you know you'll be talking about and it's like it's beautiful to hear you know somebody out of a deep rich sculptural tradition talking about tools in their hands and making I just wanted you to kind of reflect I just like hearing you talk about your shop you know talk about the furniture in your house you know I want you to you know you can just talk about making a little well I'm gonna talk about what I saw today in your place because I tried to set them up you know because they can go see the show and they can see what what I do they want to tell you they want it but I'll say this I see what you're doing and and you know we both we both spent time in Japan how long were you in Japan over over the five years maybe about a total of a year and a half two years yeah see I went to Japan once early on partly being attracted to the material culture yeah of the Japanese the incredible depth of culture in their architecture the shrines the the temples the history of pottery the reverence they have for Potter's Weaver's all of the incredibly deep deep material cultural traditions they maintain their right alongside their incredible lightning-fast adaptation of the latest year gasp of mod modernity and cyber this and digital that they're amazing society so we both had that experience and I've gone back nowhere times myself I love that culture but I think I think this is where we diverge and this is where I feel it's so interesting to want to talk to you because I think I have continued as a maker to focus in mm-hmm I've got two people working for me I work with my hands I work slowly God my gallery is my galleries all my galleries are just just so angry why can't you produce work more work faster I mean I just I worked the way I work yeah and I look at I look at what what I saw today it's like I was saying how I think of my work as something like that I look at you your enterprise is something like it's it goes 360° all the way around I mean you just you've got you've got society that you're shape I mean this is what I talk about about social sculpture your your shaping Society and and I'm gonna say this to you as a maker I wish for you the time I can't see how you do it to be an artist how can you be an artist when you when you're shaping such a huge swath of humanity with this incredible tasteful craftsmanship and architectural sophistication social sophistication urban planning sophistication how do you do it I mean boo Marnie how do you do it I think I think you're actually hitting it I think you're hitting the thing that becomes this fork in the road for how we imagine our practices that you just said urban planning sophistication architectural this I I am always being an artist like like the bank is sculpture the bank isn't a bank it's not a it's not an architectural wonder it's not a zoning conundrum it's not a economic challenge it is a series of problems that I work out in my studio the way that a three-dimensional or a two-dimensional artist would would play out a project it just happens that mine has a couple more moving parts a little a little bit more of a few more widgets you know it's it's kinetic in that one part has to connect to the other in order for the thing to move right that I that I don't feel burdened by this it doesn't I don't feel like I've missed something when I have to go to a city meeting there are times when I long to be in the studio but there are times when I long for cheese grits there are times when I'm in a meeting and I gotta pee and I just long for a bathroom right you know the but I but I really feel like the the the thing that you're saying falls outside of the studio is in fact the thing and so so I was telling gene earlier one of the times I went to Japan met this brother he was about 65 he was a beginning Potter one day he comes to the pottery class and he says I said what you doing he's like I went to look at my land I'm building a studio for myself when I retired I was like when you gonna retire he was like 5 to 10 years he was 65 and it was like and it was like he was building an amazing pottery studio right it was like he has so much grace with himself about not being a very good he was like I have 10 years to learn how to be a Potter and then I have another 15 20 years to be a Potter in my new space I was like yeah right and it was it was actually those moments when when I came back to Chicago I was at Mill Street the pottery space where I was making I didn't have enough money to afford my studio kiln time my mortgage my Volkswagen I couldn't afford it so I had to stop making pots and I said I will make pots when I can afford my own studio and so I put clay down and then I started like using whatever was around cuz I was broke and it was at that point that I started using these other materials that was not the thing that I knew very well it was not my discipline it was not my love I was just trying to keep busy and out of trouble that it was at that point that the contemporary art world was like oh he is an artist and it's like well if I thought I was an artist when I was a Potter and I think I'm an artist now and then they say the only time I was really an artist was when I was making these things in between there's really confusing you know it's all right I think that in it and it's not to try to justify Martin that anything one does is an artistic practice that's not what I'm saying I'm just saying that like if we were talking about the pleasure that one has when they kind of conceive of a big problem and solve it or the way in which you sketch out form after form until you resolve the right form for the right context that in a way I had to think about the bank in that way that it was like well once I build the bank well what should go in the bank and I needed something that could like be worthy of the structure it was like once that's in the bank and that ain't gonna make no money and then I do two stuff on the first floor that ain't gonna make no money then like what's the economics of the bank and that those problems for me gave me the same euphoric Artful feeling they gave me the same artful feeling if it wasn't art it gave me the same artful feeling that on being in the studio studio would and so then the question was well what do I have to do today and the way that I know that I'm an artist the way that you're an artist is that I wake up sometimes at 4:30 in the morning wake up at 5:00 in the morning and and I don't feel tired it's not like a chore that I have to go before my team comes this it's a pleasure to go and just have three hours alone in the morning and I probably get that kind of time in more than most art is good to be artist I don't have the luxury and this is this is maybe this is black maybe this is messianic I don't have the luxury of just having a studio practice right now well I see that this is where I said this is where we this way we where we diverged yeah and I don't understand what you're doing I I just cannot understand how I don't understand how a person can do it I'm in awe of it and and the fact that you're also I mean I can see I have no problem saying what you're doing in your larger expanding sense of practice is art I have no problem saying that's art I think it is it's art the most and also have you heard about assemble do you know assembly yeah and in Liverpool right yeah the symbol is they may want to take they they got they got the turn of eternal fires in England it's a art collective in Liverpool and I wonder if they saw you and they started to do what they're doing after slaves a so let's say yeah this is an art collective very much there they're buying up buildings often buildings that they're sweeping up just before they get level by developers to turned into gentrified or condominium subdivided urban renewed they're buying them old housing stock old industrial stock yeah turning them into art forms it's at five minutes mark okay see that's why I said this was too short yeah it's too short but anyway turning them into into art spaces they're also making crafts items making clay things making furniture which they sell so it's very much in the same model and and when they got the Turner price and somebody thinks it's art over there too a mine says we have four in one quarter minute this is a new this is a new friendship and and it feels like more and more there's the possibility of a kind of generational friendship right a kind of one that's absolutely necessary like it's necessary that the things that are in your head are in other people's heads like the experiences that you've because whether you can acknowledge it or not your practice has made room for our practices yeah like when you were at that meeting talking about DuSable you said we all come through Brancusi we we all do come ran through Brancusi but we also all come through you if there's any one of us that have any ambition around black sculpture the possibility of an expanded sculptural practice of re-skilling we come through you as opposed to descaling yes I'd love to hear your thoughts on on legacy and friendship I want to live it yeah yeah I want to live it yeah I'm as an artist I'm sort of in the old school because I'm solitary work in the studio try to have those quiet moments which I hope you managed to get for yourself I don't see how it's possible but I have seen your workspaces I know I know if you got there you could do amazing things but when you're not doing meetings and stuff but I I just wish that for you oh so you could pass that on as it's part of your legacy I mean you're leaving an amazing amazing legacy for that neighborhood for that whole area of Chicago with what you've started the possibilities that you're showing people down there I think that's that's revelatory I'm gonna say something off the cuff since the first lady is here I hope that we will return to this idea of your sculpture and of you have a strong presence in the city of Chicago and if that means that we have to expedite certain bureaucratic processes expedite a bureaucratic process see that sometimes expansive bureaucratic tendencies are necessary in order for great art to happen ladies and gentlemen Martin Puryear Theaster gates

Channel: The Art Institute of Chicago

Views: 14,077

Rating: 4.878788 out of 5

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Id: _LVmdOrC91c

Length: 56min 25sec (3385 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 16 2016