Dance of Malaga: A Conversation with Theaster Gates

good evening I'm and Rupert Chuck and the who I'm getting double sound I think I'm the deputy director here at the getty research institute and i want to welcome you to what I know will be a special night especially because I don't normally feel or look like Madonna nor do I get to introduce the world premiere not the world the North American premiere of a film which I'm very excited to do tonight so we're gonna show um Theaster gates film dance of malaga and tonight's program is occasion both by the fact that Theaster is this year's getty research institute artist-in-residence and by being the keynote event of the gri Scholars Program yearly symposium so we have just had two spectacular days with fascinating panels addressing the topic of monuments and monumentality from a broad range of historical and cultural perspectives and we think you will agree that tonight's program will add a unique perspective to that following the screening Theaster I will sit down to discuss the film its place in the context of the larger project of which it is a part and its position in the broader context of his practice Theaster gates lives and works in Chicago as an artist and land theorist his practice includes sculpture installation performance and urban interventions that demonstrate the tremendous potential in economically destabilized communities his projects attempt to instigate the creation of cultural capital by acting as catalysts for social engagement that leads to political and spatial change Gates has described his method as quote critique through collaboration often working with architects researchers and performers to create works that expand ideas of what a visual braced art practice can be Fiesta has exhibited and performed at the Springville Museum Hannover the kunstmuseum basel the National Gallery of Art the Art Gallery of Ontario the Fonda foundation Prada Whitechapel Gallery Punta del Adonia Documenta and that's only the last couple of years he was the winner of the artist Mundi six prize and a recipient of the Latian donor in 2017 this year or last year he was awarded the National prize for sculpture as well as the Urban Land Institute JC Nichols prize for visionaries in urban development the Astra's professor at the University of Chicago in the department of visual arts and the college and he serves as senior advisor for cultural innovation an advisor to the Dean and is the director of artists initiatives at the lunder Institute for American art at Colby College Museum of Art in Maine the Astor now has several solo exhibitions running concurrently including his first solo exhibition in France titled amalgam which is at the Palais de Tokyo the project explores social histories of migration and interracial relations using a specific episode in American history as a point of departure the story of the forced depopulation of the Malaga Island in Maine and tonight's film dance of Malaga is featured in the exhibition so please enjoy the film and then we'll be back up in just a few minutes [Applause] [Music] [Applause] it's a powerful and beautiful film and a little hard to go straight into a conversation but maybe we'd start off by how did you become aware of the story of Malaga Island testing testing hi so um I was invited to be in Maine at Colby College and was down there visiting friends who had like a summer house and we're about to get on friend's boat and my friend was saying oh it's a white guy lives in Chicago has families from Maine says you know we've been talking about race in Chicago and he was saying well you know there's this island that was an island of like black fishermen and in the early 1900's they were kicked off the island I was like oh it's jacked up and you know we said nothing else about it and then we went out got on his boat we were bumping around and you know we're about to go get some like lobster rolls or something and he was like there's that Island Malaga and I was like you know and you know I keep thinking Malaga Spain you know says like yeah hmm that's interesting you got Malaga Spain you got the Moors you got these black folk who were kicked off you got these Moors that were eradicated along with Jews and I was just thinking about all these things and I just thought maybe a time part of the thing that I could think about in Maine even though I was supposed to be in Maine relaxer you know but maybe this island had something in it that was worth talking about and so we stopped to get lobster rolls and then we get off the boat the first two people I see these two brothers and ain't a lot of brothers in Maine but one of the brothers was a brother named Daniel I mean black person brothers one of the brothers got named Daniel mentor who was trying to put historical markers on the island and was already doing really good kind of community-based work thinking about the island and so this other thing happened where he was like well you know I've been trying to raise the money to get this thing and I was like oh we should just buy the island and it you know I'm gonna I'll keep talking in terms of monumentality but but pretty quickly I realized that there were there were things that were already happening that was super important and then there were these other things that I felt my practice could do to just kind of amplify Daniels work and the work of the you know Maine coastal trust and so amalgam which is my exhibition at Palais de Tokyo kind of takes the question of racial mixing and hybridity and kind of transfers that to sculpture but it also looks at the history of race kind of racial mixing in the United States from the perspective of people choosing to love each other not just masters that were on some so I think most of the people including me have not seen the palais de tokyo exhibition so can you describe a little bit the film are is in the context of sculptures and objects that you created and talk a little bit about that yes so maybe maybe conceptually first the idea was that this really hard history where where poor people were getting together and they were of native background black/white you know kind of poor Irish cats and then kind of immigrant communities that kind of didn't fit in anywhere else they would kind of end up on this island that at one point was owned by a black dude and then the McKinney family which was a we don't really know their racial ethnic origin but let's say they were white ish you know and and there's a lot of that you know kind of you know we're we're at ninety know where we're at 1905 1895 1910 things are palpably mixed and and understated you know and so I think that for me that that idea that people were called amalgams it's like how can I take this direct this derogatory term and kind of think about that in the context of architectural hybridity or ideological hybridity or material hybridity and and then could I say okay well what would happen if I were to marry Impressionism with James Brown you know or if I were to kind of think about the Fluxus movement in relationship to all bossy or the Black Arts Movement and and and the truth of my training which is like I was reading Bauhaus and Andrew rice and kind of the creator of Black Mountain College I was reading that stuff sometimes before I was reading James Baldwin or you know before I do Audrey Lord and so I was like well what if I put these things up against each other cuz it's also the truth of our lives and and instead of saying oh I had to learn the white man's language is like no no actually let's deal with that this and what happens when I internalized the idea of Black Mountain College and it comes through my body could could something else happen could the amalgam be more interesting than anything and your eyes could have done or Gropius or I don't know so so so there was one part of the conceit which was could I make new sculptural forms that were amalgamated and in the show kind of moves like that and man spatially there was actually a palais de tokyo is a big space you use a lot of room kind of move around so there were commemorative moments like there was an altar that would that was about an architectural form that looks like a house with a pretty steep slope and then and then there was this forest that was representative of the new growth because we think at some point maybe Malaga was deforested so that people could harvest the wood for fuel and then there's this film and oh and all through the space I'm kind of asking questions about what it what what does it mean when we say black and brown communities and sometimes when we say black and brown communities we're actually also saying my dad is white but that's that's rarely articulated my mom is white and so how do you how do you start to kind of indicate the truth of whiteness within this this broad subject of a racial imaginary called Brown well I mean that's one thing the interesting we were just talking before you were saying because obviously your work is deeply engaged with african-american history from the beginning but you were saying that there are very few monuments to interracial communities yeah or so maybe one thing about the symposium on monumentality is that from the from the beginning of being invited to be in residence I was concerned that the monument that was being discussed might only land at material forms right and and and and there are a lot of really important monuments but I actually now know that the intent was much broader than that indefinitely my intent was broader which is how many people know that there of mixed ethnicity in the audience yeah I look at each other right and that that there was this that there's something that was kind of understated because we don't actually have a sophisticated enough language always to talk about the truth of our identity and maybe maybe historically the truth of your biracial atiek or try reality the history of your ethnic makeup would be evidenced in the monument of your hair or your freckles or your skin or or maybe mannerisms that you give from your daddy sack because they Apple ash from the Appalachian white world and your mama side is from the sophisticated old-school Detroiters or the Philadelphians or something and that that you end up being this weird mix of like I can kind of get along with anybody because but-but-but is it possible to think of not to monumental eyes by you know being biracial but to say race is so much more complicated than the language that we have for it and the conversations could get so much more interesting if there was room for because of this weird white world this weird world for a person who identifies as black to talk lovingly about how loving their white mother was or how loving their white father was or or how how loving their black mother or father was given the complexity of choosing to continue to live with that white woman in a black neighborhood all those things that are just whoa harder to talk about it's like I'm just glad I'm brown and so there's kind of monument of brown this and I'm just trying to open that up you know well one of the what's not clear from film they're really interesting and conscious choice you made is that this is not documentary it's a fiction film you didn't go and track down the descendants of Malaga mm-hmm yeah I mean I felt pretty strongly that like let's say if I was doing a certain kind of political work or an activist t'k work that that it could get journalistic or you know and that there are other people who were already committed to that you know they were you know and and the thing that was interesting was that you know this edict was announced in 1911 in 1912 people were were they weren't forcibly removed really they left in advance of the force right they left so that so it was like the the announcement came that the governor was kicking yet you know folk off the island and they had like six months they were they left and it seems like what happened was that there were those who could pass who were white ish white enough and they were able to kind of settle and just kind of be quiet and then those who couldn't and then there were those who were sent to an insane asylum said to be shiftless because they were asked questions like who's the current president of the United States and if they answer that wrong they were thought to be mentally incapable of living when really there's also I mean a way of controlling communities was to in those days put them in absolutely and you know and controlling the image because málaga you know imagine this is the island and there's some trees in the middle and this is a black person standing at the edge of the island Maine was becoming a kind of an emergent center for tourism fly-fishing retreat and so they didn't want boats to have to look at the image of black people or mixed-race people from their boats that that it would disturb the state's image right it's in so and so it was it was it was a so that stuff is kind of you know this is kind of interesting yeah and so what I just decided okay well rather than making my exhibition about the people of Malaga I'll take the question of racial mixing and and then from there start to construct a malagant future right so in the show there's this area called the Malaga Department of Tourism and I imagine myself being like the executive director of the Department of Tourism and I would basically make the island the home for any mixed-race person in the world and that Malaga would have a passport and so it's like a you know like Ghana has this like repatriation situation they want to do as I a if you're a mixed descent anemic welcome home right and that there would be a place finally where one doesn't have to feel like a freak because they're they're mixed you know and so the Department of Tourism has these this manifesto and it just moves between I wouldn't even call it fiction cuz it ain't it's not like I'm it's hey I'm not lying I'm not stretching the truth I'm just interested in how history meets something other than a historian so that history can move in different places we can we could start to a man like these young bodies I really wanted to have bodies now you know to have to survive a winter in Maine on an island in 1905 you kind of had to be a different breed you know what I mean you had to be another kind of person to just be like oh baby I have to use the restroom in the winter in Maine you know and so I want it I thought these dancers and I want to acknowledge Kyle Abraham whose choreographer of the dance work who's uh just one of the coldest people I've ever met cold is a good thing he's not a cold-hearted person he's a cold-blooded dancer let's talk about that a little bit because so much of your work is about collaboration so let's talk about both the the literal collaborations in this project with choreography with the editing mmm but also house almost every major project you've done has been characterized by collaboration yeah you know it's interesting to have kind of an artistic practice that you know sometimes sometimes I do I feel more like a producer and a kind of artistic director you know and film has a language for that you know where you can be a producer or an artistic director but but the truth is in order to get the shots that you need the Edit that you need the volume the commitment that Rumble in the video that's like slightly uncomfortable I wanted that mm-hmm and I didn't know how to do that by myself and so you know so then it means you almost have to be a kind of linguist right because so much of the work is then like how do you translate ideas into something that other technicians can help you with other artists feel comfortable being a part of like you know negotiating with a choreographer to say you know can you can we think how do we think about this these movements together and and so I ended up like writing short poems or writing just writing things and talking so that I could think get out of the way of the artist the dancer I could get out it's so like trying to create a situation where you you set up the right preconditions so that so that the things that happen anything could happen but because the preconditions are tight enough you'll just about get there and then in the in the Edit I worked with a group here in LA they're called parallax and my guy Khalil Joseph is one of the partners there Khalil makes amazing films y'all know the name Khalil Joseph yep it's so just like you know is one of these moments where there are some things that I don't want any help with in my studio I make them myself when you compose the music as well yeah like you know those are my lyrics and I don't need I don't want help with the language that I'm deploying about this move or the emotional intent of the singer me and Yau aji man is cold-blooded singer who lives in Chicago's he's just my heart like I never thought I'd have a male Muse but yeah I mean that is yeah is my man's got all of these alerts and so and so yeah so there are some things that I really like to play an artistic role it's not even control it's just like that's where my gift is and then there are other things where it's like oh let's let's let's try to figure this out but you were saying earlier like even like trying to get a house built in a city of Chicago or buying some land you don't do those things alone you know you need lawyers you need city council members you need the mayor you need the Department of Buildings and Department of Planning and while I don't always think about them as collaborators and in the larger project of space and race they are collaborators and it requires a certain you know you have to use your words and again you you find just I found myself I find myself in moments where translation becomes really important do you I mean your work has been very identified with the idea of social practice or meaning that the the social engagement and change are as important as the object itself how do you feel about that term and how would you describe your own practice yeah I've been debating this term you know since I heard it the first time really and I don't I don't want to talk about it in a derogatory way here because I think that that the term has something to do with what art history needs more than what artists need I don't know if artists languid language does is it gives it if you build out a language set it has the potential to give you permission to live in that language set like you can now say social practice artist and that might mean something to people in this room I just think it's too narrow for what the practice of an artist might be let me say artists are always engaged with publics have always had moments within their career where something might be more public than another moment and I couldn't profess that my primary goal is people so it's more reasonable to say I feel more called by God to care for people then I do called by art to make a social situation and so it's like alright well if I'm an artist a byproduct of the work might be I build a building and the byproduct of that is that people get to come to the building for free I don't have to make people coming to the building the primary concern my primary concern is to kill the building it's to nail it so hard that that people would be compelled by the thing right so I think in a way the social practitioner might put people first which is awesome right but I think that good art gets to be concerned both with the aesthetic potential of a thing let's say what the bank could look like and feel like how it flows moves and that's never divorced why am i arguing this point about social practitioners well part of the reason I'm arguing it is because I think that if a person goes to college and graduates with a degree in social practice what might they do what is it what is it that they're being called to do mm-hm and I would say the same thing like I think a social practitioner without an aesthetic sensibility is like an engineer without an aesthetic system Sensibility there's a lot of ways to build a bridge and to kind of get get at get a get from one place to another but it's like man it could happen in a really ugly way but in your case I think it was much more but I may be wrong you tell me much more organic in the sense that you were living and working in South Chicago yeah and saw an opportunity there to make a difference with your aura yeah I mean just promise me that after I say this we don't go to another question if a kid graduates with an undergraduate degree in journalism and then they do a master's in whatever you're saying relational aesthetics social things and then that journalist decides that they're gonna take their journalistic they're gonna bring their skills to social practice and then they start making magazines about the challenges of the Amazon or people in Mexico or and it's like the journalism is always taking them what I found is there's a lot of missionaries that end up under the banner of social practice and they're always you know like a missionary they're always somewhere other than their boring suburb or their little Enclave or whatever and I'm like man does it ever want do you ever want to stay at home and interrogate whiteness do you ever want to stay at home and talk about the straightening calm do you ever want to stay at home you know but I feel like in some ways art is a big enough word for lots of different kinds of practice and I think we should fill art of instead of creating all these little tensors of ITER's art is big well switching gears a little bit I mean one of the reasons we thought you are such a perfect fit to be an artist residence at the Research Institute is because we're very much known for our archives and your practice is there a archival and so first can you talk a little bit about some of the things you've done like the black image corporation but also talk about in this case not having that archive for dense of Malaga yeah are there any archivists in the room please raise your hand really loud up high don't be afraid I see one too yeah okay if you good I want to acknowledge you because I know that what I'm doing is not archiving right so let's say I have some collections of things right I have some collections I have some black collections that were owned by other people who collected things and I either bought or was given or negotiated or begged for their stuff and in the negotiation like would Linda Johnson rice I would say Linda offered me her books I said I would love your books if you give me your books I'll build a really beautiful building for them and I built this Tony Allen Arts Bank but the reason that I want to kind of separate the archive from my collections is because my collections are still active raw material in some cases I'm still messing with them I still deploy them in ways and I would say that that that in some ways ARCIC archivists have said you're not you're not an archivist and these aren't archives because the set isn't financed finite it's not retrievable always it's a bunch of stuff and it's slowly working toward a rubric of completion but at completion I don't know if I'll have the the anxiety the archive the archivist anxiety of forever that is that that part of the goal is that the thing might live and out live and so so the so I I don't know exactly what to call it but i dont have archived fever i might have like uh i might have a bad cold you know but I've been up but I do like the power of organizing everyday things so that people understand that that the preciousness isn't always in the thing the preciousness is that a society or a nation or a people or a person would care enough to organize it and in that that the way that we understand culture matters is that someone is caring for it and so the number of people that I run into who say oh man I got some old urban ease and some old jets in the basement it's the moment that you decide that they deserve something other than your basement that that you start to preserve culture as soon as you say I'm gonna get these out of the basement I'm gonna put them in a sleeve that my grandchildren might know 1953 jet you know and I and I think that that is what nation-building is actually about it's it's about finding ways that the minor monuments continue to resonate from granddaddy to granddaughter to daughter's awesome and it's I mean for those of you who haven't been to Chicago to the bank building that um Theaster restored the library is really this her magical center of that of that installation yeah it feels like it feels like a work of art the the whole thing and maybe maybe I'm also having my own challenges with a kind of definition of terms because it's a building and it's a monument and it's a kind of living work you know it's the more that I read about the history of land art the more I think maybe I'm engaged in something like land art and and that it just happy it happens among others and so I don't have permission like Spiral Jetty I don't I don't have autonomous permission that that that the work is constantly in dialogue and in tension with the truth that there are other people around it who deserve to be there and who I'm excited by some are excited by me sawing and and that that word then gets to kind of go through the ringer of people and it only works when others are there it only works fully well and what you're saying is really interesting because we think of land art as these white guys going out into the wilderness and with bulldozers and jackhammers and whatever creating but actually most land art has been urban if you look at what women and artists of color another have done but yours is on a scale that really does rival the large-scale rent land art done in the wilderness yeah I mean well that that's back to the amalgam in a way that you know if you read if you read about like the the Carnegie libraries or something or you know Sears Roebuck ambition you know I you know Rosenwald those folk were after or the folk they gave money to you know Dubois or Frederick Douglas to start these early black schools you realize like oh there was there was there was white generosity at the same time that there was white kind of monopolies being built that there was already this kind of humanitarianism born out of gross capitalism was really interesting the way our nation is built but I think that if we look at that those moments of philanthropy and for me next to those seemingly heroic moments where the Menil family invests in donald judd say or dia is born that it's like oh well what would happen if money met the black imagination in space and so as i oh if over time Donald I got like 26 million dollars from dia from from the foundation that's an amazing amount of money for an individual artist to do a kind of interesting project and as a result he was able to get all his boys mainly his boys he was able to get all his boys arms like oh yeah you know you get a barek you get America you get to and and I think that's really interesting you know it's like I well where is 26 million dollars come from so I'm like well maybe maybe I got a hustle and give my all 26 million dollars so that I can invite my homies into these houses and and it is a kind of land art you know it is but maybe also the term land art is no different from the term social practice it's totally reasonable that when Judd was in New York and wanted to get out for whatever artistic and seemingly perverted reasons he wanted to be out of New York that may be part of that wasn't it was it was an extension of the studio but we have the term land art yes I oh yeah maybe this is just a big studio practice and maybe it's okay to just have a big studio practice so it happens that we have a couple buildings some land and I'm saying when I think about like my guy Kevin Beasley I think about sister Stephanie Jemison I think they're spending their time deepening their work in all these ways and it just happens that like a portion of my studio time is spent negotiating with the Cook County Land Bank for properties and you know looking at I don't know what they call is ello or you know looking at buildings all the time yep one of my favorite things you said is that you're interested in making objects that bear witness to their legacies yeah yeah I think you know like in the palette I've been messing with these African sculptures do use masks your Ivory Coast you know parts of Nigeria just kind of thinking about them and these are wooden masks and they're starting to disintegrate I keep thinking man even with great archivists and great museums what's the lifespan of the material form that speaks to the fact that black people had divinity and cosmology before Christ was conceived and and if these masks go away and this is back to the monument will we forget that there was a pantheon of deities like will we ever will we forget Aoife or will we forget you know and so in a way it's like alright well if these wooden things could go away maybe I could like make them in clay because the clay things don't go away so soon maybe I could cast the clay things into bronze and so on it's like I just don't want us to forget and it's like I don't want us only to have the object but if we don't have the object what I found is that material erasure is a is a is a is a project of war hmm you know material erasure is a project of war and so I need the material form to bear witness not to itself actually Theaster talking to myself not to itself I need material form to bear witness to the fact that it did things beyond itself that that the mask wasn't a mask for a mask sake if the mask was just a small iota part of the invisible world that was doing all this other work that the mask is a is a clue that there was something else and I don't want to forget to something else when talking about not forgetting you've been involved for quite a while in trying to and you tell me whether monument or not but to do a major project in connection with Tamir rice hmm yeah so you guys know Tamir rice he was a 12 year old kid playing in a park in Cleveland he had a toy gun and there was a call to the police that there was a kid outside playing with a gun and the police came and shot Tamir rice killed him sister his sister came they were about to kill her but he died near this gazebo and people would go to the gazebo and leave you know stuffed animals candles visual they would mourn at the gazebo the city of Cleveland and the police department had an anxiety about black people mourning because they were afraid that that might turn into a mob right and so in the governmental anxiety they were gonna just bulldoze the gazebo Sousa Mario rice called me and was like the city wants to tear down his gazebo we don't know how to deconstruct a gazebo but I don't want them to tear it down so you know my guys got on the road we drove to Cleveland got a local team and we deconstructed the gazebo numbered it up packed it up brought it back to Chicago the the concrete block you know like it's hard to talk it's like two fresh but the concrete block where he said where his body had had lain we cut it was cut and that was part of you know so we we have this with material truth that this kid had passed now what was also happening at the gazebo was that people were starting to organize around police brutality and thus unnecessary violence and it was starting to create intelligence and intelligent organizing so it wasn't actually that they were afraid of like an emotional mob they were afraid of a strategic mob right they were they were afraid that the the death would cause a level of sophistication for which the city of Cleveland was not ready to deal if a class-action lawsuit came against the Department of the police Cleveland and so in a way so I received you know we we brought it back we have it we're gonna resurrect the gazebo in Chicago but it's also meant that I'd now have this relationship with Samari rice and her team and and we ultimately want to find them a more permanent home for it so you know sometimes these moments they're there you know the gazebo is its own reliquary power figure a power object once resurrected the Chicago chapter of mothers against violence and you know against police brutality and you know the torture justice memorial that there there are all these people who again are much more active istic in their and their belief and in their life's work their vocation much more than I am but I happen to be the guy with the ratchet wrench in the truck you know who could facilitate the management of the material form even though I'm ill equipped to deal with the truth of the complexity of the violence against in this case this young guy so so I'm I'm trying to really stay in my lane mm-hmm well I think we should open it up to your questions so please if you have a question for theist or we we really have to hear from you I'm super grateful that all you people came out so nice it's really good there we go nice I'm like tearing up about that smear right well I'm really triggered so I'm wondering as an artist and I do a lot of work like this as well not what you're doing how do you emotionally handle that like that's such a that's such a even you say this is still too fresh mature you're just talking with so much poise and grace and respect so how do you how do you handle that because as an artist that's our responsibility almost to talk about these hard issues and make people think on it but also that takes pieces away from us as well so how do you yeah well I think it's super important that that maybe this word artist it may also be too narrow and maybe maybe we don't have other words for what we do so let's say that retrieving the Tamir rice situation or or or having to having to defend trying to manage land in a in a neighborhood of black folk who are really anxious about the idea of gentrification that in those moments I feel like do I feel called to be an artist or is the calling actually something else and the word artist is the thing that people most readily understand and if it's something else when I'm by myself if it's something else then what is that and I feel like I'm more invested in the something else that has no name than I am in the art but if we were if we were talking about what the world understands or then it's like art is that thing where you can materialize your you can it's you could materialize something call it art and then it has people's attention and then there's a there's a constellation of spaces and platforms where for you you materialize the thing it lands in that platform if it lands in that platform people will understand it as art but maybe there's all this other stuff for which we don't have a name that is that requires the same skills that an artist have and all that but maybe it has much more to do with the heart or with with with some kind of deep deep emotional intent that has nothing to do with others so to your question what do you do with with what it takes from you that there might be a kind of a set of invisible mechanisms because it cuz it's like my I'm built for it I'm built for it and I don't go around looking for trauma to capture but then they're just these moments that deserve our attention and we're either given our attention that things that matter or we're at the Biennale you know and and so I think I just try to balance my time because they're really ties I just want to get on my pottery wheel and just like make a bunch of sake cups and drink a bunch of sake and that's really good and we should mention the you have a background I mean you've studied ceramics at Iowa State you know what you're doing there yeah I mean I like to make I like to make pots but I think that even clay ain't about clay it's it's you know like you know for anybody that really loves making clay after a couple hundred things you kind of don't need another Bowl you know I got a lot of bulls else man I wish i yeah I could I for the next 30 you know public talks I can just give everybody a ball but but I think that that clay might you know that inside of it it's taught me all these things I really think I should have been like something else I won't say what it is it should have been something else like I love that the young it wasn't Dominique de Menil one other like you just kind of want to check out of all of this stuff sometimes and I have a really active commercial art life and it lives so funnily alongside something else you know like I don't know you know but I think that the power that people find in the things cuz I leave the things half empty the Civil tapestries the tar works they're half empty they're not done I think I think people bring stuff to it and that's really exciting to me it's it's exciting to be an artist plus oh yeah there's another one back there y'all don't be shy we're only we only have a couple more minutes together let's just shake it up thank you so much I'm interested in your if you're interested telling us a little bit more about the medium of film and your interest in film yeah okay right on so for me film and music go together and when I was when I was making clay things alone I would sometimes say man there's so many things that I want to say that the material form doesn't allow me to but because because of the discipline of clay and because it was a kind of discipline in that there were traditions around it you I didn't want to cheat the tradition when I started doing things outside of clay I mean I was always like making palms on the street you know like singing songs but but clay was a discipline and and you know all of my big ideas I would try to make him land through clay once I was able to free up from clay to use other materials as I oh I'm good with a little bit of wood I'm good at managing people I can do this little do this thing right well I think I got to a point where there were other things that I wanted to say that we're not about material things in that way and that that there there may be story that would help bridge some of the missing links that people seem to have in my practice it's like well how did you give from singing a song to like making that thing you know and and so film gives me this chance to need other bodies to need history to need a song or a sound and and film becomes this other site where I could aggregate lots of different ideas and people might imagine them as one idea so within the film you actually you're actually you have the potential for an exhibition within the film right the film becomes the site and in a way that you guys aren't able to go to palais de tokyo all of a sudden a little bit of palais de tokyo could be evidenced and and so the if that feels very new for me so i'm ready i'm ready to dig deeper into the craft but i don't think that i want to become a film craftsman so that again you feel the weight of noir and you you have to have a chase scene and vertigo you know and you know but but that that if I could kind of hawk hack in remain a little bit like and into into into interloper that what may happen is that all of these ideas that are really fragments of my collection my collective memory that then those fragments have a home and and if people watch them frame-to-frame they're like oh got it and that and if anybody wants to help me learn make a pillow Mina hmm I hope you guys like the film was really the longest thing I ever made [Applause] I'll take two more questions have you explored maybe ways of telling a similar story elsewhere in this country or in other parts of the world through the medium of film or a different medium that you're interested in yeah my exhibition Black Madonna which was that close museum basel it used the Johnson publishing collection as the kind of basis for the exhibition but within Black Madonna there's a piece that I made called Black Temple which is Shirley Temple dancing next to Bojangles and the littlest rebel and so there's a scene in the little is that so it's a series of clips from the littlest rebel one is when Shirley Temple is the sergeant leading a team of young slaves as if they're like a small battalion ready to defeat the North right strange you know and then there's a moment where Shirley Temple is dancing trying to raise money to get her father out of jail who's been sacked by the Yankees and then there's Bojangles his beautiful series of dances where Shirley Temple is having dinner fare she's six her friends are between six and ten and Bojangles who was serving food is then doing a little jig in between meals and he's tapping and I slow that down and it and and it's just and then the height of my edit is when Shirley Temple trying to decide disguise herself as a slave paints her face black and hides with the slaves when the Yankees actually come in over tank overtake her her dad's property and so they're in a closet everyone's pulled out and eventually the northern military soldier realizes that Shirley Temple is in fact not a slave she's white and he and it's just why and it wasn't it wasn't the black face it you know but like Bojangles Taher like how to dance like she's like Shirley Temple was like a kind of honorary soul sister and so I just wanted to kind of deal with that idea that Bojangles had to positive blackness in this little girl and that that that posit that depositing stayed with her through her life of advocacy and lover preferences I saw so-and-so and so I think that in essence I'm just interested in slowing film down and you know so I do feel like I really like looking at images and looking at our Chi ville footage in a way to see if there is something that's redeploy a bowl and then it's like alright well what else do I need to say about the story that requires that I shoot or I direct or I sing and when you put that together can you get something brother in the middle yeah right here he's really in the middle hard to get to I know brother hard to get to oh yeah there it is when it when it goes it comes in twos brother right now thank you I just was looking online and I have firstly not seen it in person but I was wondering if you could share a little bit about your work with the the bank there in Chicago to the dystonia island project right all what's your name Greg Lance right oh so uh in like 2012 this building was gonna be torn I'm bad with years and stuff you know part of me this building was gonna be torn down maybe it was around 2012 the the legend says that that I had met the mayor of Chicago he was actually coming to do a ribbon cutting of a bit of a building complex we had finished he was very happy with the building kind of Plex he said is there anything I can help you with I said this building is about to be torn down can you stop them from tearing it down and he said do you have the money to rehab it if I stopped him I said yeah so I was 12 the bank opened probably in around 15 15 yeah that's my and basically we have this collection of glass lantern slides from the University of Chicago's about 60,000 size this guy ed Williams who was a Chinese black his ethnicity is Chinese black from Mississippi which is a very particular thing right the the Chinese presence in Mississippi he became a really important banker in Chicago was collecting all of this we call it Negro B Lea to take it out of the market so whenever he'd go to a thrift store or flea market around the world he would just buy up all the black stuff and he ended up with like between 6,000 and 8,000 things Jolly Banks Aunt Jemima you know the whole gamut what kids eating want you know the whole thing postcards so he wanted to leave this as a legacy to his children his children would like I don't want my kids growing up with that stuff and so he just had this collection that didn't have all so anyway the the bank is basically a repository of other people's stuff and then we try to use it allow other artists to use it you know and and then maybe also the bank is just the demonstration that private black wealth can build a black place and that it's not always dependent upon philanthropy or government and and that sometimes we should just do the work of rebuilding ourselves and stop asking people to help us do well I think that's a wonderful note to thank the ester and thank all of you for coming out tonight [Applause] [Applause]

Channel: Getty Research Institute

Views: 2,277

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: getty, getty research institute, gri, getty center, art history, Theaster Gates, Andrew Perchuk, Malaga island, love and race in America, art research, social justice, African American art, 1970s art, university of Chicago, performance art, art installations, art historian, diversity, aesthetic, community engagement, Rebuild Foundation, African American Art History Initiative, urban development, urban revitalization

Id: Cammz0BMWKU

Length: 65min 40sec (3940 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 15 2019