Sculpture as Action in Damián Ortega's Art | Brilliant Ideas Ep. 59

brilliant ideas powered by hyundai motor [Music] [Music] Domino Tiger has famously said that a sculpture is action not objected that I think underpins everything that he does when you meet him that quiet thoughtfulness but that underlying twinkle in the eye sense of humor belies the fact that you know he has this major profile Damien is an adventurer and his interest and curiosity in the world and in the world's materials is ever accelerating the notion between solid and void spirit and matter image and object nothingness and content it was always I always think on the moon like the the person in a lab like a scientific spending hours and hours from the morning to the night just watching deeply the eye of a little fly maybe to find nothing Mexican artist Damien Ortega is known for the intriguing sculptures drawings and films that he makes using everyday materials this life is our universe this daily life of mundane life is a cosmos full of relations and everything is transforming moving spinning around us [Music] [Music] one of his best-known works domestic cosmic on was made when he was commissioned to make a sculpture for the opening of the brand's new who makes Museum in Mexico City rather than the massive and imposing Damien chose to glorify the universal and familiar I did a piece with a different approach to the monumentality or the scale of the monuments like always a huge or powerful demonstrations of the artist and institution like try to go for the other side like let's do something in the ground then it was a cosmic planetarium made with daily life objects the way I understand that work it's like the way the Mian makes almost everything like producing models for understanding reality and this was based in the solar system so things move around things and that's the way we all do in society so this is a model of society but not in a reactive way is not a pamphlet it's not propaganda and it is beautiful it was very interesting how he made a monument for a major museum that centers on the domestic and the witty but also for me it is an extension of the kind of magic realism that Mexico is maybe famous for [Music] Mexico City is unique 2,000 meters above sea level it's a mega city of over 20 million people we're rich and poor collide this city Mexico City I think it's very fair recent and very exciting with lots of energy mostly because of the long term history of corruption violence degradation and authoritarianism from the government in 1967 it was here just south of the city that Damiano Haga was born I grow in a very specific and particular context because my father was a actor and my mother was a professor in the primary school Tamia grew up in a very politicized environment and his father he is a kind of a very important communist protagonist in those years he's completely from the south in Mexico you would say that the left intelligence he lived in the south which is a Collier can and even further land pan the little he went to school was around that area he quickly tired of normal school life I decide to to quit the school because I don't want to be part of the regular structure for education my father was very strict and he said you need to start to work to survive by your own aged 16 Damien took a job as a cartoonist for a local paper he was hoping to further his artistic education but struggled with the Mexican university's traditional approach I think you have to imagine a Mexico that was quite conservative in the 80s and when Daniel Ortega decided he wanted to explore the art schools he found a very conservative backward-looking almost archaic a way of teaching in that time was very intense the nationalism the the Mexican II mechanism oh I didn't know why exactly but I know I want something different in 1985 an earthquake devastated Mexico City it shone a new light on government corruption and sparked a grassroots movements young people now wanted to challenge the status quo the new generation of artists felt their voices were not being heard by the Mexican art establishment we all had to survive and go beyond to produce and create writers poets composers dancers and so on we have to recreate and reinvent new possibilities for using art in a challenging way to do something with dignity in this environment [Music] Daniel and fellow artists began to meet every Friday at artist and lecturer Gabriella Roscoe's studio to discuss and make art the Friday workshops became legendary the group was now the vanguard of a new generation that wanted to change arts and change the world Freddie's workshop worth something like an eternity way of learning that they are being proposed and this becomes kind of self-made University we start to come every Friday 10:00 in the morning to sometimes 8 o clock in the night painting discussing reading and or just having beers and chatting it was a way of finding solutions with a great sense of humor a sense of adventure of really breaking new ground that tried to turn a new leaf on the very traditional and often quite nationalistic way of making art in Mexico we never planned exactly what will happen but we know in some way legged it was important I think this group of artists in Mexico centered around Gabriela Roscoe they realized there was a different way of doing things [Music] you know art must be this academic work these serious materials in marble or stone or oil paintings on canvas and then we jump for something more like an ordinary daily life simple objects around us he did some kind of sculptural suits that were pieces of art he disguised the way dark bother from the film was but like a low-budget dark Vador then it was kind of a caricature of himself but a caricature of industry culture and production and so on capitalism that energy I think that they that group of artists has brought to the international art world a sense of art as something that helps you think about the world through making things think about yourself in the world through the things that you make and the things that you present Mexican artist Damiano tiger has shown his artworks in some of the most prestigious museums and galleries in the world it all started very differently in 1999 his friends Jose curry and Monika man zuto had just opened Korea man zuto a new gallery with big original ideas the first show Marcos economy took place in a local market and we just do two starts right next to the flower and the pinata and that man just went around to buy fruit pick up some trash and I start to buy and collect very cheap robots like transformers and also I start to collect all the fruits vegetable some something very tempura and they start to mix and do some strange robots mix of organic mix of techno and it was important to create a new material with recycling or something with life was a beautiful idea the show was open to all artworks were on sale for fruit and vegetable prices someone came and bought them I mean really for the same price that you could buy a kilo fruit okay how much is one for one and it was a very cheap price and he said okay I will take all of them I'm sorry now as you can tell the person that got them he had to keep them in the fridge what's interesting about Daniel is that he is always starting with the local and it might be playful it might be humorous but it always has a much deeper and serious undercurrent that connects to the universal that connects to the political that is often critical but without ever hitting you on the head [Music] today Damien lives and works not far from where he grew up south of Mexico City plantain is a very old town that at the end of 20th century it became part of Mexico City but it's still kind of a little village with all the traditional shops and so on and there's a market a beautiful market and Diane loves a working there he walks to the hardware store works to the market we'll call it land pan to buy food were also thankful his sculptures and he works a lot with the people around this area not there's a lot about who he is Damien and his team are working on a sculpture that's made from materials he's gathered from his neighborhood in this case we use a stone which is very common in Mexico it's a pork and rock name it definitely many of the colonial buildings are made with these materials it's a part of the color of the fire the color of the soil is a very cultural element and the other one is a lot of rocking bottles with different colors and I like the idea to create this a kind of geometrical form or also volcano having his student clapping is a little bit of these self-imposed isolation from technology and I think that isolation it's a metaphor for everything he is not being so wired to the web I mean he's really very bad with email for example and Internet he has this stone-age mobile phones even I mean his English is fluent but even at some point in his Jos not learning English was a political position is a crazy place kind of Museum forgotten objects and for example here is my own car my beetle car and I use for many many pieces can we see it's a very deities like I didn't take out for ages the Volkswagen Beetle has special significance in Mexico introduced in 1967 at his peak there were a million models on the road 2004 I think everyone identified with with the car because it was a hippie symbol of freedom the chance to go to the beach to go to the some independence for me was a symbol of my child Ness with my family had a car we went to the school every day and becomes part of the family after many years the car was really damaged and I decided to do these works who was a trilogy one of the stories which I like it the most is the return of the prodigal son or or alesis who give a big trip after years and come back to the original town and the idea was driving to Puebla to the factory and to let the car die we dig a hole and we buried the car just so only the four points of the of the wheels and looks like the car was buried on the hunter ground then it wasn't a also fun like people in the streets just so what happened here and it was a very symbolic thing in some way was like a foreigner but also like a redemption or cultivating a new seat for for the future it was a brilliant tense I was really depressed because I feel really like it was sad my my my car it was you know becomes very emotional we let the car there a few days and then we we take it out and it was a chance to do another piece the next work in the trilogy showed the beetle as it had never been seen before first displayed at the 2003 Venice Biennale it caught the attention of the international art world I remember seeing the Beatles got the cosmic thing at the Venice Biennale and certain things just stand out you know I don't know anything about this artists damage anything like this amazing I think he just went following some kind of curiosity that all children have dismantling things putting things apart and not necessarily who understand but it's more about this curiosity that it becomes playful I think one of the beautiful things of that piece is the importance of the thing which you didn't see when you thought it was just one single car is not it's many many thousand of relations between one piece to another everyone is designed everyone is a different material everyone have a special function and you understand how marvelous and amazing is all these mechanism would you use everyday it was playful it was humorous but it also alluded to a very complex political social situation in Mexico how the VW what role it plays in Mexican economies how the different parts that make up the car are being traded on the black market so all of this is part of this work that looks so effortless driving around Mexico City Damian got the inspiration for the final part of the trilogy based on the story of Jonah and the Whale I was driving my car for hours in the in the in Mexico City and I thought it I feel like a Jonas in the Whelan and his phone like this unique are just driving and I thought maybe sinteres need to do this kind of fight again the human against the whale or the power but in a very ridiculous way [Music] it was a fight with where I hold the car and I put grease in the wheels and it was kind of swimming and then it was nice because the grease started moby-dick like the big list of the nature the power of the nature that the rivality against the man the obsession to hold the power salt unremarkable everyday this was the centerpiece of Danny on Ortega's surprising exhibition at the super prestigious White Cube Gallery in London once again he made use of the ordinary and familiar to highlight bigger issues and concerns I saw a beautiful really surprising image in the newspaper about the submarines they use for transport a cocaine image was amazing because was in the jungle it was a crazy like a mythological but political image really rich lippies was a submarine made with sacks of salt suspended from the ceiling at an angle so it was dripping a material onto the floor that turns out to be salt in the colonial period the salt trade was incredibly lucrative but actually exploitative to the contemporary world the cocaine trafficking drug trade is incredibly lucrative but phenomenally exploitative and damaging and I think he was making certain historical parallels not moral judgments but there was something also just compelling about the work this erratic structure that seemed to be starting and then realized was a fine flow of salt and of course in the end the piece existed to destroy itself the salt of course stands in for cocaine but he is even cleverer than that because he's really interested in the world the word salary in Latin is connected to the word salt because salt of course was a commodity in historic times so he's also alluding to the fact that there is now this parallelism in a commodity and that connection between salt and cocaine [Music] in the spring of 2016 he became very unwell while recovering in hospital he found he was drawn to the most simple of materials play can be rigid all these states of the nature could be liquid or could be solid or could be stone but also water and every piece is a phenomenal dummy and flew his explorations in clay across the world for his first ever show in Scotland at the fruit market Gallery in Edinburgh he has displayed on the table a hundred and forty three objects all made of unfired clay from the earliest kind of access that a hunter-gatherer would use to a tablet of the 21st century the feeling which I have the first time when I call come inside of the of this Center is like wow I use all these elements every day you to destroy the nature or to transform the nature there is that undercut of climate change of soil erosion of the way in which mankind humankind has shaped the world not necessarily for good I think his icebergs are really interesting the whole notion of the Arctic as the canary in the coalmine I think he's dealing very much with that the way in which humans influence on the world is not necessarily all to the good you could see it again as a humorous comment on the evolution of mankind but it is also maybe a very potent question about progress and what progress really means I think artists are very very well placed to comment on the world to help us understand ourselves in the world to do just enough to get us thinking and I think Damien is one of a number of contemporary artists working at the moment who absolutely understand that responsibility as an artist we can transform the perspective of the other people and this create a new religion with the world he's a transformative artist as a fluid material poetry and as an underlying wry humor sense of the absurd and there's often a social or political undertone that you can find if you look hard enough he takes his inspirations always from chance encounters so you literally never know what could be next you will always surprise us [Music] [Music] brilliant ideas powered by hyundai motor

Channel: Bloomberg Markets and Finance

Views: 55,585

Rating: 4.8762217 out of 5

Keywords: Bloomberg, Mexico, art, Jumex Museum, Damián Ortega, sculpture, films, installations, Domestic Cosmogon

Id: RJ2VVbijG2M

Length: 24min 11sec (1451 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 07 2017