Theaster Gates at White Cube on The Art Channel

welcome back to the art channel this week we're going to be visiting Theaster gates a white Cuban beurre monté he's an American artist based in Chicago who is born in 1973 and he's the recent winner the art s Monday prize awarded in Cardiff Gates is interested in the idea of art being a vehicle for regeneration with in Chicago in his own community on the south side he has reclaimed regenerated a number of different buildings employing a collaborative team of artists and craftsmen to bring new activities and new life to spaces that have fallen into redundancy through economic hardship and so it's this gap this meeting between art and life that interests them how can we bring productive useful activities two spaces that have been overrun by economic depression and that runs as a consistent theme through his work that we will see in the exhibition so this piece is called cabinet work and is part of an installation in this room of pieces relating to a hardware store that Theaster Gates has saved following its effective bankruptcy enclosure in face of competition from larger conglomerates and this piece we can see essentially was taken from within the interior of the store and we have here hooks and hinges brackets and this wonderful display of different small parts and pieces that were being used in plumbing and so it carries some of the character of a ready-made by Marcel Duchamp but there's a difference and Theaster gates his work and practice he's interested in maintaining the spirit of its original function and the spirit of its former place so instead of just merely translating a pre-existing functional object into an art context as musclor Duchamp attempted to propose and achieve here Theaster Gates is really celebrating the original function and spirit of this hardware store that was a community resource and really it carries the trace and memory of all of the former employees and customers who interacted with this piece during the course of the life of the hardware store so this piece is called shrug you can see it comprises different elements including these bricks that have been glazed as if there were pieces of ceramic studio we're on top of a pallet that's rather finished as if it's a piece of carpentry rather than pieces would just roughly hammered together and they appear to be sitting on top of the spokes of a forklift truck and then wrapped around the bricks are these very brightly huge orange ties so it presents the semblance really all a functional pallet with these bricks stacked up as if they're being moved but of course glass the gate is interested in these formal connections and references to art history to modernism and to pure formal qualities it's that conflation the bringing together of a purely artistic interest married to a social origin and social purpose commonly attached to industrial materials like this we can see how vertical this piece is it's called freedom of assembly which is also the name of the entire exhibition and it alludes to the First Amendment of the United States Constitution the freedom to assemble for political participation and activity a core underlying principle of the American political system but let's look at this piece in detail it's made from wooden board that is echoed found in the wooden cabinet we first and he's cut it up and literally reassembled these wooden components to form a sculptural column that rises from the floor and actually pierces the ceiling of the gallery space itself I think that's really fundamental to understanding this work so from a functional utilitarian purpose rather obscurely sitting in a cabinet and to which hooks might have been placed and other objects he can fashion something beautiful and aesthetically pleasing and engaging that really fills the architectural dimensions of this space and there's a further reference we need to be aware of which is this clear echo of a famous piece made by Constantin Brancusi called endless column a war memorial that he constructs in Romania in the 1930s so the Esther Gates is drawing our attention to the history of modernism but reframing it within this social concern and political activism that so excites him in his practice this piece is called ground rules what we can see here are these slats of wood of varnished with apparent stripes overlaid on some of these individual pieces of flooring and that indicates where he found these pieces of wood which was in a school gymnasium where athletes would have performed according to the ground rules of an individual sport but he jumbles up these slats so that it is not a direct ready-made simply moved from the site of a school into the art gallery but rather he intervenes he disrupts these ground rules in order to introduce a more formal element of random lines quotations of these rules by slotting the pieces of wood together to form this flowing and rather enigmatic artwork but of course there are references to the history of modernism to geometric abstraction found in the work of Mondrian in - steel and also in the Russian constructivist but of course he's not simply mimicking those art traditions but rather quoting them in order to disrupt them it's that ambivalence between its original functionality and how it operates as an artwork the most interesting and which he asks us to consider here in the gallery so this work is called mountain monument and it's part of a series shown in this room he's making this work as if he were making a roof you can see the tide of tar that's been heated and applied to the surface it's run but at the same time it's cooled and set and solidified we can see there a raishin on the surface as the bubbles come to the top and then burst and he's added color this sweep of silver and you can see how the pigment has been applied to the top here so he's conflating bringing together the practical knowledge of making a roof that he learned from his father who was a professional roofer who he would assist as a teenager and he brings it to the art studio so he's investigating and exploring painting through the action of making a roof it's that meeting point that gap between a practical trade with all its dignity of a purposeful labor a building shelter and that encounter with the histories of abstraction of making a painting with all of those debates around what a painting represents why an artist makes a painting and what it is that they're expressing of themselves so they have this very deliberately ambivalent status but aesthetically of course they are beautiful objects they're self-sufficient they are made with detail and attention and craftsmanship this piece is called hierarchy and it's comprised of two separate elements that the aster gates brings together to set up a dialogue a duality really between the ceramic plate placed on a wooden mount illuminated by the small lamp poised above it and then we have one of the rooms with these folds of tar that are flowing from their original hot state across the rubber and felt stretched over the wooden frame the tar is echoed in the black glaze this work here illustrates it's making the flow of that hot sticky bitumen or tar it's almost as if this in completion allows us to see the work deconstructed it's exposed as process of its making and I'm seeing echoes here of abstract expressionism the work of Franz Kline later the more analytical painting of Frank Stella these large monochromatic fields of black that almost simply become a reflection of the ambient light in the room but it's very sort of pleasing and intriguing I can smell the tar here on the felt support there's a hint of the road of mucky physical labor but of course accompanying that is the esta gates his immense respect for labour for craft and he's narrowing the gap between perhaps more revered traditions of craftsmanship and something that is associated really with working-class practicality in the center of this very large room we have a series of pots made of clay crafted built glazed and then fired and Tiesto gates was originally trained as a ceramicist and he says this exhibition was an opportunity to return to this first love and interest in that kind of very primal handling of clay of earth and this tradition of course of fashioning utilitarian pots and vessels storage vessels out of clay but accompanying that is a long history of ornamentation display and aesthetic pleasure in terms of the form and surface ornamentation now when we look at this pot we can see one of those industrial belts or ties that we first encountered in the first room relating to the hardware store but he's covered it in this tar and that I'm told that was a practical solution to a problem of cracking so by enveloping the vessel in the tar he can maintain the structure and on this side there's a detail I've only just observed on this visit which is a diamante or rhinestone a concession to ornamentation a slight joke really that he adds to the surface of the pot because of course it's so functional with this smeared rather mucky tar so what you'll notice almost as an art of thought is this group of standing figures and they're called knockoff each one as if they were just crudely reproduced and you can see the seam from some molding process that Gates has used to repeat these standing figures I mean each of them have an individuality because of the glazed surface is varied from one figure to the next now how do these relate to the rubes and to the parts they repeat this adherence to a lack of color really in this room we have consistent expression of black and gray and browns functional colors and what do they represent well I'm immediately thinking of the modernist interest in primitive or tribal are primitive and inverted commas the interest by artists such as Matisse and Picasso and Henry Moore in art made beyond Europe beyond this academic set of conventions about what an artwork should be and how it should look so they're quite complex and mysterious here standing almost like witnesses to the rest of the pieces in the exhibition you

Channel: The Art Channel

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Keywords: white cube gallery london, white cube art, theaster gates white cube, the white cube, white cube gallery, white cube london, theaster gates, White Cube Bermondsey, Theaster Gates (Visual Artist), The Art Channel, theaster, whitecube, white cube, Art, White Cube (Location), Sculpture, Painting, London art, art history, Joshua White, artist, Contemporary Art, 白立方（位置）, Theaster Гейтс (Visual Artist), Art Gallery, The Readymade, Chicago, Cities, Exhibition, Conceptual Art

Id: ByuGEJX1dfE

Length: 16min 22sec (982 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 04 2015