Redefining Space: Artist Sarah Sze

[Music] you good evening good evening and welcome to the 17th annual Patsy our and Raymond II national lecture series in contemporary sculpture and criticism I'm Jeremy strick director of the national sculpture center I'm thrilled does he such a tremendous crowd gathered here tonight for this lecture by artist Sara Z this series presented in partnership with the University of North Texas was endowed to honor the nashor's by their daughter Nancy a Nasher their son-in-law David J Hema Sager and their grandchildren Sara Isabel and David Hema Segar as ever we want to express our gratitude to Nancy David and their children for making this series possible [Applause] the talk is a yearly highlight and we look forward to the insight that can be gained by listening to the excellent artists and critics that join us for it this year is certainly no exception we have eagerly awaited the chance to hear Sara Z a remarkably imaginative and singular talent before our esteemed speaker takes a stage I want to first introduce the Dean of the College of Visual Arts and Design at the University of North Texas our institutional partner in this venture mr. Greg Watts greggwatts joined the University of North Texas last summer after serving as chair of the art department of Metropolitan State University Denver Colorado since 1999 where he also worked as executive director for the Center for visual art metropolitan states off-campus Art Center Watts previously served as an associate professor and coordinator of photography and digital arts areas at Metropolitan State and has served as president for the Council of Arts at the University a native of Cambridge England mr. Watts holds an Executive MBA from the University of Denver and MFA in photography from the University of Florida and a bachelor's degree in printmaking from Kingston University in London he also attended the management development program at Harvard University we're grateful for this long-standing partnership with UNT and for mr. Watts a stewardship of the series helping to bring some of the most influential artists and thinkers here to North Texas and the Nasher Sculpture Center please join me in welcoming Greg watts [Applause] well good evening everybody before I start I feel I owe Jeremy an apology nobody gave me his resume I had no idea that that was going to happen but thank you Jeremy again thank you for the kind introduction and I would like to echo everything that you said Nancy David thank you to you and your family for doing this it really is quite incredible experience thank you so I would like just to take a few moments and share with you some facts about University of North Texas it in particular the College of Visual Art and Design that said given the climate that we're all in at the moment and soft facts I would like to assure you that you can check anything I am about to say and political will show you that I have a hundred percent truth rating on this having said that I now risk a lot so let me continue considered one of the best and most comprehensive visual arts schools in the nation we have the original and longest-running doctoral program in art education in Texas our general fine arts program ranks first in Texas first in the south and seventh in the nation our fashion design program ranks 18th in the nation and 43rd in the world and finally our communication design program is ranked number one in the southwest sixth in the south and 28th in the nation we believe that such excellence deserves the same in its facilities the facilities that support the students faculty and staff that achieve these exceptional rankings so in case you have not heard we are both renovating and creating new space to form a home for the college in total we will have two hundred and thirty two thousand square feet of space that will create identity and community for our outstanding programs our architects of the award-winning Boston firm machito silver tea and they are working in partnership with Corgan and hunt here in Dallas we'll break ground this January and we are convinced that we will be on time open and occupy the space in the fall of 2018 and for any senior administrators from UNC who are here we are under budget and we are on time I sincerely hope that all of you will follow and support and in the champion our growth it's events such as this this evening and collaborations with friends like the nationís culture center that strengthen and provide evidence of the outstanding contribution that UNT can give when we work with others earlier today our guests spoke to the students at UNC in Denton in our current facilities and we are thrilled that they could hear her discussion and her working process I'm pleased that the importance of our history was a part of that conversation I heard that afterwards and that's a personal bias it's crucial for our students to understand the depth and commitment that someone makes to achieve their goals as a professional artist and overhearing comments after the lecture it is clear that everyone in Denton was galvanized so born in Boston Sarah Z presently lives and works in New York she received her BA from Yale University in Connecticut in 1980 1991 and an MFA from New York School of Visual Arts in 1997 she was a 2003 MacArthur Fellow now I have never understood personally why people in my role stand at a lectern like this and try to describe the speaker's artwork and their process when the individual here is so much more able to do that is right next to us so without further ado two things one I would like you all to check your devices and make sure that they are silent good teacher example visual and secondly I would like you all to join me in welcoming Sara's II I just first left see I bring this down I'm not using this I want to thank Nancy and David just because these kind of lectures are really important to me and my growth as an artist and I think the support for for open forums like this where there's a critical dialogue and you really hear about an artist's process from them directly is invaluable so thank you I want to thank all of the students and the faculty of the University of North Texas and Greg in particular was a really wonderful afternoon spent there today and the National art of the Nasher Sculpture Center I have a long relationship actually not directly indirectly with Jeremy the first show I ever did in a museum was actually at the MC Chicago and a collector both loved the peace and love Jeremy and the old Jeremy was in LA he actually gave the piece to LA and so my first word that was I reflected by museum went to the museum because of the love of Jeremy and the respect for him so it's wonderful to be here tonight many years later so I'm going to start with some early work I'd like to start with this piece because I actually was trained as an undergraduate and in painting and in architecture and in graduate school I started to make sculpture and the first thing that I really thought about and questioned was how we place value on objects how do objects accrue value how do we value them in our personal lives how do we value them in society and in culture so I wanted to start with something that in my mind had very little value and what I did was I I took a roll of toilet paper from the bathroom and in the in the graduates program and I sat down and I just made an object with one sheet of paper and put it down on the floor and then as I did them ice for backed out of the space and this piece was actually brought to a gallery space it was see by a curator in New York and they asked to put in the show and I think one of the things that was important that I did for myself as an artist is I I learned this from older artists and in that in that program who are very wise to really protect my work is the the place it was a gallery wanted to put this in as a square in the middle of the room and to me this idea that you didn't know where the work began or where it ended and you didn't understand what was part of the work or not was very important so this was a back abandoned storage space in that gallery and I wanted to feel like it had actually weathered the space that it had this very large presence through a very very small touch very light touch and then I want to expand this idea of a kind of sculpture that did that lack boundaries so I went back this was my studio in graduate school and I should have took everything off of the walls and everything that I was using and I laid out all my books and I mixed everything together so that you really I couldn't couldn't understand what was the work and was not but also things became functional things became non-functional so that was my desk chair for example again I was interested in this sort of idea that you a space had a sculptor had a kind of viral quality that it grew that you didn't know if you came to the space whether it would be more or less than an hour and felt it was in development and had the kind of rawness of a studio space so even my work now I try and make work feel as if you're coming to a studio space that it has that intimacy and one last comment about materials at the time I'd sort of made this rule for myself that value the materials will be chosen in a way where I thought that in some in my own definition the materials had very little value and my definition of that meant they were mass-produced they were easy to replace and that they didn't have and they weren't defined by their aesthetic questions they were defined by total practical needs so a toothpick is a length and a dimension purely for it's it's it's practically it's not forget it's not colored in any way for any particular reason so that when they were put in a space that that we're you know like I'm a Slyke a museum where the value was raised that you would the person would actually be participating in the raising of that value in a strange way that you would know that it was such a common object but somehow you would imbue it with value in that space and that that that stretch would be very wide so I put this piece up because I wanted to talk a little bit about also scale and how I think about moving into spaces and creating a narrative over time and I think that comes a lot from my architectural background so I think a lot about spaces that what's the first thing you see what's the first chapter in the story how does information reveal itself over time how do you create initial viewing experiences of discovery so things aren't presented to you told you that that it's on a pedestal and important but that you have to see them and discover them in time so this is a piece I did at the old entrance to SF MoMA and you know it's a very very rigorously symmetrical space and I wanted to do a piece that felt as if it had sort of fallen haphazardly and broke in that symmetry and that when you first came in you didn't actually know exactly what it was as you went up the stairs that actually revealed itself in this kind of sculpture in the round way that as you went down the stairs it actually spun in a kind of baroque way revealed its itself in time and space I showed and I changed the the slide lecture a little bit for those of you who came to both but I did show a picture of Bernie knees Apollo and Daphne because I love that kind of very baroque quality of sculpture that you really can't for me coming as a painter you really can't play with that in the same way with painting of how something can be entirely different as a sculpture as you move around it and that transformation of information as you move around and objects so this is actually the back part of its a car that was cut I wanted to take an object that was very familiar or to us in terms of scale and it was a car that was cut into five pieces just like a loaf of bread it's actually quite scary if you take a sawzall you can cut a car up and it sort of collapses very quickly if you take the chassis out so the car was cut up to make these these kind of interior spaces so this was on one of the landings at SFMOMA and a student had asked about what kind of you know protection or proximity get to a piece this afternoon and this is a great example of how people actually tend to be extremely careful around my work because they actually understand how it's made and understand how it could fall apart so this was made as a temporary Commission so it was I was there for three months and then they decided to keep the work and so was that for two years and this was an unprotected stairwell and you could go right up and feel as if you're sort of inside the piece and was never damaged I put this work up because I I wanted to talk about you know putting work in places where where they're not expected where you don't where they're not for fronted this is at the Asia site in New York and they had to reopen a museum they said choose anywhere you want and I decided to do this piece that's back at the freight elevator and you don't expect to see where the back when you're going to the bathroom so you don't expect to see it there at all and the Asia Society is also one of these museums where you have it juxtaposed with this incredible you know ancient art from Asia and right across the room there was a Rockefeller show collection but I want it to be a complete surprise in that context and what I did was I actually used the paint from the wall so peeled back the paint so the sculpture is actually made from the white paint of the wall and I wanted to feel like it was a site where a site where something had happened so perhaps you know that the wall had had water damage and now had this kind of natural evolution of becoming the sculpture and almost if there were these different these different layers of time that you that you that are revealed to you if you spend time with it so you sort of have you have the wall deteriorating but then you have this sort of lamp that's actually sort of looks the hand of someone examining that problem and then you have actually a whole sort of setup to protect the site but you don't know what the site is and as you get in and closer and closer all of that information collapses into a kind of world hopefully of the imagination this is a work that I did and for me it was a really different kind of work because it came from a comment that a critic had made it was a nice observation because my work has a plays with the idea of modeling and I usually try and use scale that is not not one-to-one but is slightly smaller but it's not is not actually a model that's tiny so what the critic said was your work deals with models in the way that scientists do not architects so if we're an architect a model as a stand-in for something that's going to be built whereas for a scientist it's actually a modeling of a kind of behavior and this idea that when you come to my work you're actually witnessing behavior that there seems like it's kind of a you know like that idea I said about your looking over the shoulder of the artists that you they've just left and that you're actually witnessing a kind of behavior that both is theirs but also that you recognize as being familiar so I decided to actually do something that I they hadn't been doing and actually play with the idea of a model so I started playing with these ideas of auras of planetariums of pendulums sort of classic ways of using sculpture as a tool to attempt to measure time and space and so this is this is the planetarium I did it was the first planetarium I did oh yeah and so I think one of the things that was really interesting for me as I've always played with scale in my work and want the scale to transform as you move into it but this piece had this kind of really interesting shift where you recognized it very much immediately as even if it wasn't literally so you named it as a planet but I think that actually when you see when we see images of the planet we have this immediate sense that we're we're tiny and time and so the very distancing sort of experience but with this piece when you you recognizes that as that and when you walked up to it it encompassed you and it nested you and so you had this very surprising switch of being the center of the work so you saw it as it came in and did you climb up to it and then when you were there when you reach the piece you were entirely encompassed in inside this worlds it was a very strange moment in the approach of the piece it was also it's also an important piece for the last piece I'm going to show you is something I just finished and I also started playing this idea of the works being at like projectors so in this work as you saw in the film there's actually a there's a overhead projector with small holes pinholes on a black piece of paper and then a piece of toilet paper being blown by the wind so but it creates this whole kind of very low low-budget high high aspiration feeling of a kind of cosmos so this is the front of the American pavilion and again the American villain is incredibly symmetrical and was very much about trying to sort of recreate this sense of a centrality hierarchy of space it's very close to Pilate owes villa rotunda is just about half an hour away and it's a kind of architecture that both the British and the Americans are borrowed from Pilate owe to create sort of the kind of feeling of gravitas and I want to play with this idea of gravity and gravitas because of course and all the buildings in America including this one you can pull off the columns and it's just ornament so this idea of what's ornament and what structure which is a very fundamental sort of thing you often study that in architecture less so than in sculpture actually but you know this idea that we now if you build a brick building it's brick face that bearing structures are not built anymore they're steel structures they're skeletons with skin so all of this is all of this is just decorative or nature but the other thing that was interesting about this is that this whole building was heavily landscaped to be symmetrical but the but the trees have died so there's only trees on one side so I want it again to confuse what was the sculpture and what was there and so this is all me all of this growth up here and we you know came in and added moss up to the building on that side and I wanted you to at first not understand this sculpture but understand it I knew once you had gone through the work I'll show you at the end so this is the this is the plan for the building so and this is sort of how I imagined it that this would sort of spill out and we the whole hierarchy of the building would be thrown off that you enter through an emergency exit and that you're you have this kind of this revealing of rooms one after the other and a chain rather than going to the center where there's literally a compass that says you're the center and we had to change all of lock all of the fire doors to be able to do this but we figured out how to be able to get the building to circulate that way so that was the outside of the building this is the first the first room and two of the works I what I did was actually just traced the real the real compass rose from the main room and I brought it back to New York and I used a one-to-one scale you know it's the only or nature and the building at all everything is what I used a one-to-one scale to build two of the pieces so the in the space instead of having one compass now and three and the title for the show is triple point which refers to the triple point of water which is the state where water is solid liquid and gas so ice melting and vapor coming from it at the same time this idea of a kind of unbalanced state where you're constantly teetering you're constantly in between you can't settle and the way I dealt with the space was very much about that to me the transitions between this space where as important as the room so the rooms were all lit sorry other ones were lit totally differently the way you moved around sculpture in each room was different so in this room you circled the piece and then you kind of came into it in these smaller Eddie's so these are some of the details of that of the of the planetary room and then you can see they're us we wanted you to have to orient and disorient yourself in the space so as always the doors were always framed differently so with this piece you knew to exit you had to go around this this piece to see the door framed and when you get through it's a very different experience because you actually you walk between the work and the work is on either side of you and it's hard this is a very hard work to to photograph but it there's one little sort of measuring tool which is a string with a rock on it that creates this angle in both sides of the sculpture tilt down and sink to the ground at that exact angle so it almost felt as if the entire the gravity of the entire floor was off which is something that link in Venice you always have this feeling when you cut off because you're half on vote and half on water so to sort of play with that idea of where you're trying to find your center of balance in the space and again this this sort of idea that their workspaces that we spend a lot of time sort of at our waist length whether it's watching dishes at a computer that the desk is sort of this reoccurring theme of sort of a laboratory or a site where we actually do a lot of our creative work so this is the this is the compass rose and that the real compass rose and usually came into this round room and all of these buildings were built like the World's Fairs that were built as non-permanent sculpt structures so none of the pavilions had bathrooms air conditioning or anything because they didn't know whether they would actually last so the American Pavilion has this tiny little storage faces one is a bath or four of them one is a bathroom one is a storage space and one is the other two are mechanicals but this one storage room has been there for you know probably since the 1920s and it had Louise Nevelson catalog they said this earlier had bruce nauman x' hat in it it was sort of this incredible little space and it was really important to me in this place that was so much about you come to the Vienna the American villian is a magnet that you go to to find a space in the that was sort of you know to colonize that hidden that was an off site that was a site that wasn't revealed to the public before so this so this would these are the shelves and I've did this the which was obviously as you saw that the earlier work it was a reference to that work of mixing in some of my objects with found objects there so there was incredible catalogs from over the years there let's see if there's any and I can't Hamilton's was there I know she is one of the speakers about go burrs was in here this is a Smithson but old book so it's really like a real archive that was just left it was a mess when I got there I would definitely redid it but they're piled up so this is the this is the fourth room and you see that's the exact compass rose and it's also interesting to see that this is you can use this to measure but you know a room so that's exactly the same room moved into this room so you'll get a sense of scale and how it changes and this piece was really interesting to me because of this idea of sculpture as a tool was almost sort of a one-to-one equation in it so it has a pendulum that is interesting because it really skirts every object just about a centimeter above every object that it goes by but it also is built the piece is built from the pendulum so the tool itself builds the piece you put the pendulum in first and you use it and the angle is created you use it to create the piece itself so it's kind of a tool for the sculpture itself becomes a tool to build itself if you will and so I so the first version of this was in my studio but you know it's interesting to think about how works become site-specific and I think you can do it with a very light touch so this line here is where the pendulum when it's on its fullest arc actually hits the wall and so actually mark sort of makes one mark with the wall so this is the this is the last room and when you sort of go round I also had things subtle things like this like you this is where you want to stand when you come to the piece but when you enter the room you see you come here and then you understand that there's a reveal but that slight angle is really important actually I didn't think I've ever told anyone this but we actually I had it I made peace in New York brought it to to Venice and had it it's actually easy to move these pieces now that we have digital photography because it's just photographs and just lying laying these things out so totally lay it out and then felt like it needed about one more foot to the left so we did it again and it only took like a day to do because once you have the decisions made it's really it's really quite straightforward so this is what happens when you go into the final room and this is a really interesting room because the building is landmarked and you can't do anything to that building now but it got landmarked in the 70s right after this group of 70's artists who are doing a printmaking show in this room Rauschenberg is one of them cut out a side of the wall they just went and cut it out and put this kind of really different kind of architecture I had a kind of much more about the horizon it was sort of a Frank Lloyd Wright or you know glass or glass house Phillip Johnson kind of idea which is completely antithetical to this architecture but I and it had been covered up very funnily and if you look closely at past pavilion pictures with a masonite with a faux brick on it to read to make it look like the building but so I took that down and revealed that's this window beneath and really liked that that it was there and then I did this thing where I felt like the ceiling had to erode and so just a very thin grid line along the ceiling of a blue string which actually also acted like a tool for how these are laid out because actually how this is then moved is actually just on a grid where you can find you know a point from you know b7 this is what's in that square so this was also a tool for how things would be laid out but to me this piece was also all about painting and about painting on plein air this idea of sort of trying to depict the outside this frame for me was very much about creating an outdoor sort of an outdoor scene that was actually almost composed like to me like a painting and then I also took this image out but I have more referencing our historical reference images later but I did is it's hard to put up a Vermeer next to your work and a Bernini so but I had a Vermeer after this because I always loved about what's not to love about Vermeer but two things that I was thinking about were how he used how he plays with planes so they'll be the plane of the table with the plane of the wall the plane of the open window flipping which I think Mondrian took her a lot from him but also this idea of scale where you'll have you know a broken piece of bread and then on the wall you'll have a map of the world and then out the window you'll have at the stained glass window you'll see the sky and all of these sort of objects that represent sort of the Netherlands expanding into the world so everything comes from it you'll see something from India you'll see something from constant noble to sort of symbolize that that the scale like a pebble to a mountain and that really quick shift is something that I'm interested in so another important idea to me here was this idea of a spill of even spilling outside of the Giardini feeling like the work actually came came out of the pavilion and into Venice so actually the in in this space these are this is actually we were making photographed rocks this is actually a printout of one of the photographs of rock so iPhoto for us then built armatures and then wrapped these with with the photographs so all of these objects were really photographs of weight or the surface of weight and when you saw them far away you actually gave them a kind of gravity and then when you got close they had this strange quality of lightness and almost like a photograph but I all of the information about them being made was actually in this space this room actually it came up entirely with on location I actually had originally imagined it much more like a row ng very simple rock garden a classic rock garden but it was the place where because there was no outdoor space and actually rained more than I think it was 70% more than ever and in Venice that that that install period that became the interior studio so a lot of this was just left their tables that we used so it really was like the studio site but so what I did was I made a whole bunch of these rocks and I put them out in throughout Venice so that you would find them either before or after and you'd sort of any we don't have this memory of the location or when you got to the pavilion you'd understand what they were so there's one right up there and we winter I lived there for three months and so I knew you know I knew that I love this neighborhood you know there was a book I went to our butcher we went to our brochure and so I knew all these people and every single person we asked if they wanted a rock was like sure no you know it was no insurance it was no like what's going to happen in the end do we keep or anything so this is was actually this is the grocery store this boat comes in and gives fresh produce every day and so there was a rock on and there and that's actually that was my apartment nearby and that's the thing about Venice I mean look everywhere you look it's just you know magnificent in every detail you can never you can never turn a corner without discovering something really really fantastic so when to play on that idea this is a piece I put in a few slides of pieces that have that precedent of sort of spilling out and and invading a space so this is at the gallery I work with in New York at Tanya van dr. gallery this is actually when you enter they sort of have this unusual situation that's nice which sort of like you walk into a library but there is this thing of where's art where's the you know where's the gallery and that sort of in-between space so during the install every sort of every takeout box and every liquid item that was used during that was then poured plaster into and then and then made an object and then sort of aided the front space in a kind of you know it had it was a timekeeper in some ways because it was actually sort of what was a drunk by me and the crew what was eaten in this form and it's there's some for me I think of Miranda this is another piece cited this is actually from Mao it was done in Sweden in Malmo but I wanted to play with this idea of a rug of making a piece I love this idea that rug is like a nomadic architecture that you can bring anywhere and put down and both interested in pieces that feel entirely tied and specific to a space for its architecture for its use but also sculpture that feels like you can take it anywhere and put it there and it will feel like it's part of the space like a rug like a trash can like a box or anything on a dolly that it has this kind of vagabond transient quality to it that's going to set up shop so this was a sort of did a whole kind of series where I played with these are just a tiny cut yarn that I would put into patterns and then put out on the floor or like a rugs or in it's either falling apart or being put together this is all just paper on the floor it's a it's a very very beautiful Renzo Piano building in Tokyo it's the Hermes building and it's the entire building is made of glass block and so from the outside you have no sense of scale because it's all one window and you see no divider to where floor is so your whole sense of the architecture in relation to your body is is gone but it's also incredible feat of engineering because of earthquakes in Tokyo so it really is this is a curtain wall and this is that this is the is skeleton and this wall hangs it actually never hits the ground so that if there's a cake it will actually move and so I wanted to really play with that idea of that of this the lack of gravity that Renzo does so well so that's that would happen when you come to the space so I was I was really pleasantly surprised I was actually invited back to Venice and I'd love Venice as I said to do to be in the group show after I'd done the pavilion which was quite unusual bio Quian waser and he did this interesting thing where he offered where he said well what about this what about this this is the last part of our Sonali they're allowing us to take over how would you like this garden and I love this garden and I loved it for all of the reasons that for all the things that could do that you couldn't do in the American pavilion it was totally you know derelict you could discovered it you didn't know whether it was part of the via Nala or not and I wanted to do kind of the other side of my work so that you came in and you you didn't know if it was a piece or not yet and what you couldn't do in in the other one but I just want to show you so it was only marked but this is sort of the beginning of the piece these little markers so it was really easy to pass by this work too so when you looked in there's actually there was a little bit of movement here because we actually had a candle moving and there's this hammock it's a hard to reproduce this because it was very subtle and as the vanilla is a few go through our sanella you're exhausted by the time this is the very end and it's hot and so you had you had it was it was a very different touch than a lot of times at v-- and all is you know the only way to get a kind of voice is to do something very spectacular but I wanted to play with this kind of extremely subtle almost ghost light presence in in Venice because I feel like you have that in Venice to time feels very different there and then on the other side there was this hammock that I actually had made for as an indoor piece in reference to this just gives you a sense of I'd made an indoor the truth and this is a good story I made this in my studio because I was asked to do work near Rauschenberg's bed and I wanted to make a piece that was a very important piece to me as a sculptor or slash painter I have an image of it here and I this hammock was a kind of in my mind a kind of conversation with that it would it's this is all paint so I'll show you some more pictures - there's Rauschenberg's bed but this peak I remember seeing this when I was I don't know exactly when I was but I think I was in middle school and I love I love that it's that the grab it's figurative that is gravity actually you know I was a painter when I saw it but has grabbed the gravity of the bed is turned on its side I love the drawing up here and the of the weight and I love there's a great story that about his development as a as a sculptor and that he when he was at Black Mountain College Albers really disliked him but Annie Alvers really liked him and he studied with Annie and that's where he first did his his material works that's where I started using with fab using fabrics and Annie famously wasn't allowed to do painting or architecture the bat house because even though it was so enlightened if you're a woman you weren't allowed to do that so she did she was in the crafts section of the Bauhaus and so I love this this sort of high-low relationship of sort of a craft quilt with you know Albers as a high level sort of abstractionist use of this exact same form so I think it's a great piece so this is this is the piece I did in reaction which was much more it was about trying to make again this idea of a portable you bring it anywhere and you have a place you know that it leads to a hammock but obviously you can't sit on it all these pieces these are little chips of acrylic paint and so I had this in my studio and oak we visited and he said will you come I think my phone alarm was going off yes sorry and he said you know we've come to a site visit and see this garden and I usually when I go to a site I bring an object that I some kind of object that I work with a lot and I put it in the site and I photographed the site with it in it so I have a sense of scale and how you know does a blue string can it hold up with grass around it how does light work on it so this was in my um in my studio so I rolled it up and I put in a ski bag and I checked it on and I brought it to the garden like this and I put it out and I thought this is I couldn't like it was perfect there and so I really built the piece around it but actually wasn't it was not made to me outside we made I made an extra one to make sure that I didn't we didn't know how we're never had to replace them so acrylic paint outdoors so this one so there were two hammocks in the space and I wanted this this location to be constantly discovery as you went through it so this is the back wall of the arson alley and this wall is four feet thick it's a four feet thick and if you look down here there's actually cracks where you can see through so the wall itself is deteriorating but it's like a long tunnel through to the water to the waters on the other side so what I did is I took pictures of the water on the other side and just put them in the crack and up to the top and it led up to the you know these mirrors are all over Venice because you turn corners alternate so it led up to this mirror where where you discovered the hammock and the interior of this water well which was there this kind of bizarre totally different kind of architecture which day when I took the garden they said let's get rid of us let's get a bulldozer but like the prevent I actually really interested in these layers these awkward layers and evidence of histories in the space so this was a well and this island actually whoops this island was actually cut off by a canal and it was where the nunnery was so it's actually an archaeological site because it became a huge graveyard for the convent that last the end of the arson alley now it's connected but they but it used to be the island where the nuns weren't allowed to leave so there's this amazing history and this was another this was a sink that was there an abandoned sink probably for washing clothes the back of the convent so I made the water work again and the water was was on and live so just a few how are we doing for time the same speed should i speed i'll speed through fee this is i just going to show you a few public works this was a piece I did right on the corner of Central Central Park and it's a hugely cacophonous corner you have you know horse carriage is going by its the plaza is right across the way so there's this real question of how do you get people to look in Manhattan how do you get them to stop how do you thin slit down so the solution I came up with is actually if you can't beat them join them so mirror the space itself so I took this corner right here and I placed it on the ground so this was actually that was the that it's funny because the piece looks a lot like this this was the mock-up for it and that's the mock-up and I wanted to build a piece where you look down also to the Manhattan always looking up so how do you get people to look down and be interior this is an incredible valley it's a step well in India this is right in the middle of Delhi if you ever go to Delhi that's not there not in most the guidebooks they're incredible and it's this beautiful architecture which is the idea that here's the water that you can have many people reach water rather than pulling you know out of a well so there's other incredible examples of sort of architectures that go underground in India janta and Ellora amazing places as well but so I wanted this idea of building below ground and so this is the piece when it was done so we dug down in about you know a story down so there's an interior room we hit an arch lager when we were down there they had just buried when instead of taking it out it was the base of an Irish lager from like the 60s but then you look down into the room and it was kind of you know this idea of creating a space that felt intimate in a very public space it was important to me that when you looked and when you looked in everything was off kilter except there is a thing right here there's a there's a plumb bob that shows you what grab it's purposely you get totally disoriented in the space and there was one plumb bob that was a that was reacting to gaiety oh I'm just not this is I'm going to run right through these so you can see I thought it would be interesting for you to see like this piece this piece my Studios doors were not big enough so we had to cut that into like five pieces we had one afternoon to install it so we had for a permit so put it on a truck that was the hole this is a great photograph because that's as being dead to the corner there's that being put in the hole then the top went on the bottom then it was so you can see it's nighttime and down in repaved it so there it is and my favorite view of it was at night because we lit it from the inside and this sort of idea in Manhattan weird these little intimate views into people's lives was really my it was surprisingly made out of the most beautiful part for me the high like I'm going to just go fly through these because I want to give you the last one but this is that piece I did the High Line for me the key to this piece was that the promenade divided the piece that was something that one Venice that actually that idea came from this piece the Highline is such I think a brilliant work in and of itself the question of how do you make it better was really a question and I really wanted it to be a piece that you didn't just walk by like a hydrant and look at but that you you it engaged the promenade and when you came to it you were in the middle of it so one you had this one slope going east and this one slope going lap west and I wanted to really I'm sorry north-south and I wanted it to really play with the speed and that of that walk you don't have that in Manhattan anywhere you don't you're always stopping to see if you're going to turn and here the not making decisions like you're on a highway and like a Midwestern Highway it has this incredible column of a promenade so I wanted the piece to mimic that I wanted to talk about speed this is a Bala drawing slash paints of painting but I thought a lot I think a lot about the Futurists the constructivists that age where time seemed to be speeding up so quickly with the invention of the Train of the airplane where we really the way we navigated space changed as human beings that we understood our location to time and space differently and I think we're in that age again in a different way so I think this idea of sort of representing sculpture that maybe isn't even moving but but it talks about movement it talks about speed it talks about perspective I actually talked about the wall text on this it was focus on zip I talked about this work in relation to Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper not to you know reach too high but in that I loved that if you ever get to go see that go see it first of all it's crazy because there's a door cut out of the bottom of it because they decided that the door was too small and they would make it and so right in the middle there's a door cut at bottom because it's painted right into into the building and but it's so beautiful the geometry of it everything all of the folds on the front of the tablecloth make a a perfect grid but then along there are these sort of horizontal lines of their toes that are all a mesh and then the bread is all a mesh and in their heads you have these sort of incredible movements of between a structure and a sort of debris that I that I sort of started started playing with this idea for creating perspective lines in space really from that this is actually print I did which again this idea of sculpture as a tool of how we see it's just a chart but then flipped up it creates perspectival space which is really about distance and seeing this is I'm going to fly through it this is probably the most permanent pace I will ever make this is a 96th Street subway this these are some of my influences I was thinking this is a great hoax I and this idea of the wind blowing it away this idea also I teach printmaking with Kiki and keysmith and Polly Hammonds at Columbia and love printmaking but this idea that you see in particularly Japanese woodblock prints particularly snow scenes where that white of the page can take up you know if you cut out you know if you put your hand up to the middle of this everything falls apart but the white of the page creates this kind of space so you see if you take out that blue all of the space falls apart so this idea of how you create landscape through a kind of negative space something I've always loved and again this idea of depicting speen or movements so there's those pieces for the subway are based on the idea of blueprints that they're sort of blueprints for dramatic light for landscapes in motion that's the idea and each entryway has a different motion to it they did this amazing thing where each artist gets the entire subway because they're new so three entry ways and the the caves are all that one artist so if believe it's Vik Muniz check closer than me and so you walk off and it's an entire world which I think is going to be really nice for the city so this is the last piece I'm gonna talk about I became really interested in this idea of images and movement the idea that we are we experiences images in motion all the time whether we're moving or were flipping through them we rarely see static images anymore and I've been making film actually videos and film all along while I was making actually the piece that was collected by la MOCA that that Jeremy was because because of the love for Jeremy was actually a video sculpture piece in 1998 but one of the things that was interesting is I sort of veered away from slightly because it's actually the most ephemeral part of my work it's the heart technology is the hardest thing to preserve and people look at my work and I want fragility I want the idea of precarity and precariousness and ephemerality and entropy to be right on the surface when you look at it but actually you know a metal box like this that is built very in it with a very very thin metal is so much has so much much more durability than a video right so to actually maintain them is actually that's we don't understand that but that is the hardest thing that analog is actually much much has a much more it has much more of sturdy lifetime then then digital so this is what the top of the piece looks like so it was actually I was working all these videos and then I decided you know what actually the desk is the piece and when you if any of you who have ever edited you know that you edit with several yes I had two screens you always are working between two screens and this idea that I'd always loved this idea from studying film of meaning being being created between the edits I talked about this earlier today but any of you who've edited anything whether it's a paper you know you collect eight hours of footage you make a two minute film it's all of the meaning is how you juxtaposed frames and so this idea I think of that in my sculpture as well this idea of dismantling the object and talking about meaning coming between objects and between experiences so I went back and thought about this thought about the idea of the moving image and really when when did the moving image start and the moving image you know that that that cheetah is actually was actually kind of an homage to Muybridge because some people say that Muybridge or the some people say the Lumiere's but Muybridge was sort of the first film maker and so the cheetah running is actually a projection of a cheetah on these just strips of ripped paper but in space they they fragment out into space and they they slow down speed there was also in my mind sort of homages in this screen here to Edgerton who was the created these are they're both sort of scientists photographer artists you know who was the creator of the strobe and you know in the 50s it was very important in really the first time we ever saw the drop of water and we never had seen that before you know Muybridge famously that that experiment was done by Leland Stanford because there was a bet about whether horses when they ran all four legs were many of you probably know this story it's a famous story but all four legs were off the ground so he commissioned Muybridge to create a structure to photograph to prove to people that the horse's legs rolla so Muybridge took his favorite horse I can't remember is a great name anyone remember the name of horse something Sally Sally Gardner thank you and he set up a contraption where there were trip wires that went around like this and a Sally Gardner ran it Tripp wired off each of the cameras and it actually worked and Leyland proved his point that actually horses do have all feet off the ground so this is the piece installed I did a to two of these works the first one I called measuring stick to play with this idea of how we use sculptures or film or images to measure time and this one is called timekeeper and this is installed at Brandeis at the Rose aren't museum and this one I played with this did I give I'm going to show you that last one I played with this I can't go back I played with this idea that the sculpture was a was a projector itself so when you come in the projections everything is in plain sight so all the projections are just there's all the plugs all the projectors are there so this is like the editing desk or the control room and then on the wall circling the walls are images that have are on for one minute and they're off for one minute so they collide with each other and they're out of sync so these in these intersections of images happen in real time it takes about a week for them to even loop in anyway so even when I'm looking at this it's the collisions of images are actually entirely fresh to me pretty much and this is a close-up so they're all they're actually projected on pieces of paper some of them are projected on images so this is a picture of this is a film of out the window when I'm landing but it's actually projected on a photograph of a sunset so you have this sort of dislocation of what is solid and what is not and when I made the sculpture the editing desk itself I decided that everything that was a skull that was an object or a sculptural should be to feel in material and that the films themselves should feel more material so every so that I made the top of my desk a mirror and shattered it and I made these pieces of paper rather than screens and when they die out actually the edits die so they pixelate you know if you'll see it here so you actually reminds you that you're looking at a kind of you're looking at a kind of medium not just at the total fantasy of being lulled into an image so this was a new interest of mine particular to the idea that we have this new way of reading images they come in EPS and in a kind of debris they're high they're low we change them we send them out again there's a lot of talk about it but I think we actually are learning how to read visually in a new way that's thank you [Applause] I think I ramble do we have time for questions or should we yeah like maybe three questions it is AIT's okay just a few maybe sorry one over little does anyone want to ask a question yes I think you know I think two things I think it goes to the beginning where I was trying to figure out what we have we create value and that ultimately that even the value that comes around an intimate moment is how we measure time actually so if you think about what you remember from ninth grade you remember one thing and that whole year gets compacted into that at that moment so that was very much about this the idea of time keeper that that you know the way we actually experience time is entirely different it's psychological it's emotional and we value things through that more than standardized time itself and I think the second thing I would say is I think that with so much experience being dislocated from time and space that experiences of touch of smell of taste of surprise in the moment become even more valuable and intimacy because we can have an entire conversation on the web but it's very hard to be intimate in a way that we understand spontaneity in real time is phase yes so I mean the most practical way depend you know don't depend on a site how much time there is there you know how so you know for like SFMOMA we could only close that space for a week so I went there figured out where the pieces were going to built an EIU Zhi do sort of anywhere from 30 to 70 sometimes even not you know some of the venice pieces 90% of the work outside and then when i go to the location i put things in that make it seem live you know this goes back to the idea of value and intimacy how it's one of the oldest ideas in sculpture how do you breathe life into an inanimate object so how do you feel make it feel like it's a it is a live performance and that that that kind of feeling of improvisational jazz or why we love to watch athletics live those moments of time to try and put that even though you know that it's inanimate how do you how do you capture that and in that but that's the way you know that's what about that's why in that you know things that are living and breathing are actually more valuable than inanimate things because so to try and make these feel like ecosystem ecosystems that grow that breathe that decay that have a death is part as thing as part of that great I think that is that they actually call it a night thank you very much for coming you

Channel: Nasher Sculpture Center

Views: 16,150

Rating: 4.9210525 out of 5

Keywords: art, artist, sculpture, installation, contemporary art, modern art, museum, nasher, nasher sculpture center, unt, university of north texas, raymond, patsy, lecture, discussion, conversation, chaos, space, structure, fracture, autobiography, culture, sculptor, woman, female

Id: c1Yd8ymJ8Dc

Length: 59min 56sec (3596 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 16 2016