Nasher Prize 2018: Theaster Gates

[Music] people have been making things for thousands of years [Music] it's a very shifting time at the moment we are talking about the division what the sculpture is [Music] sculture has this rather old status I think what's incredible about the Nasher price is that it gets together a series of curators intellectuals and art thing kurz they not only know this change but also part of this driving forces of this change [Music] sculpture is in a lively place and a place of experimentation and pushing the boundaries there are artists now who are making very powerful objects but those objects often have a resonance a meaning and a connection with the world way beyond the art world why sculpture now I think the relationship between photography and sculpture board game you know contemporary artists cannot represent reality we will present and create a new reality we can decode for a larger public so that the larger public sort of understands why this is such a powerful object that needs to be addressed if you take our collective imaginations into the future if we start thinking now like yo we can do anything sculpture has this capacity of absorbing everything that surrounds it the attractiveness of sculpture is in this facility to be but open-ended at the same time mysterious you [Music] [Music] Chicago's not only am i from here it had the right preconditions where I might be productive I often attribute my hands to to my dad he was a builder and I had to build I wasn't very good at it but I was actively building you know working on his buildings and and rehabbing apartments and working on the roof what made me good in the clay studio was the fact that I already had my dad's hands and my mom's care you know and I think over time I just tried to cultivate understanding the histories of making and material culture and art but also just keeping my hands busy and keeping them in clay and touching things Theaster makes sculpture through the encounter of materials memories found materials and people Fiesta gates is an artist who's being committed to working in the neighborhood in which he lives in the south side of Chicago and taking buildings that were disused or abandoned and renovating them and giving them new uses [Music] if we were to break down a building into a series of spaces that have raw materials that need fashioning that's going to make a person feel a certain way one space to the next then building making is no different from ceramic object making is no different from metal smithing is no different from shoe making the Astor's work makes us consider objects and places that were not considered to have value as having value a lot of the Astor's artistic practice is thinking about space and very specifically it is in thinking about what is the potential of black space how is it defined what are the qualities that make a space inherently and intrinsically black [Music] so I collect a lot of things and some of those things will never become works of art they're just things and those things are stored and they're numbered [Music] the line between collecting and awarding is a fine line when it comes to the Astor it isn't simply you know books records Negro B Leah but machine parts old timber flotsam and jetsam of all sorts the after is enamored with potential there's both my private archives which is just materials that I look at every day that inspired me to you know material projects that are in play there's a hardware store among these things and there's there's an old Knitting Factory and there's an upholstery shop instead of those things being forgotten about those moments in urban landscape will be able to kind of pull those things out and play with it everything is about like collecting things that have like spirit and history within them his collecting is actually very sculptural - it just feels like it's like a mounting it's like it's about mass I really think he is quite brilliant in in in kind of making kind of making sculpture making the sculptural performative music expressed in the form described in the foregoing words is as natural to the American Negro as his breath the Astor gates for me is one of the most extraordinary voices in the field of Contemporary Art and I suppose I used the word voice as a play on words as well because his voice is away ringing in my mind you him singing in his church him preach loan and give gravely in his sermon you got my number man how you been really good but absolutely I'd like to talk to you though I'd love to I do have your number remember Simeon send me a text man yeah I'll take care good C breath so black library is this project that I conceived of where I've taken all of the duplicate books that I own throughout my collections that are about the black experience and then using their titles I start to stitch together these new poems so I basically took three thousand books it's some had multiples of three or four and alphabetize them and then divided them by size Amazing Grace and half inch increments that formed the basis of raw words that can become my poems so this becomes Amazing Grace with black rage the breaker of wind and that becomes the beginning of a kind of poetry and that maybe in a way these books are at the same time history and maybe their titles functioning as an index toward a new art form and I think that I'm just trying to by by stitching stitching these books together maybe create a new grand narrative maybe the accumulated narrative wouldn't have existed unless these things were stitched [Music] [Music] the Astor likes beautiful things and he wants to make a beautiful place for beautiful things and in so far as I could ever sum up the work that's how I would do it beautiful place for beautiful things so I got a call from a reporter asking you know what I would do with this national prize money and I hadn't really thought about it but I've just moved a printing press from Boswell Indiana and the press stop being active in 2002 but the owner Cecil has kept the equipment in the best condition [Music] so I decided that I would use the resources from the Nasher to build this this press this imprint that we call Black Madonna press I love this idea that we could be oppressed as dedicated to artists books that I could explore some of that there's just a small and simple practice that I'd like to observe it seems as the projects get bigger my desire to just do small things increases and I think the press will be a big thing that allows me to do small quiet things and I feel thankful for the prize but also thankful for this moment where sculpture feels bigger than it has ever and maybe the winners of prizes more expensive than ever I feel really honored to be a part of that number you

Channel: Nasher Sculpture Center

Views: 2,160

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Theaster Gates, Sculpture

Id: tSdHdzg6nE4

Length: 12min 39sec (759 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 11 2018