Theaster Gates Explores the Politics of the African-American Experience | Brilliant Ideas Ep. 14

brilliant ideas powered by Hyundai Motor the contemporary art world is vibrant and booming as never before it's a 21st century phenomenon a global industry in its own right brilliant ideas looks at the artists at the heart of this artists with a unique power to astonish challenge and surprise in this program American artist Theaster gates you i d--'s chicago artist Theaster gates has emerged onto the contemporary art scene in the last decade with key exhibitions at galleries and festivals around the world his work includes assemblages of objects and materials referencing human rights and the world of labor but he's more than just a visual artist he uses performance and music in his work and he's also become known for his Dorchester projects in Chicago's South Side where he's taken ownership of abandoned buildings transforming them into cultural spaces and now he's taking on his biggest project to date converting a derelict Bank into a shared art space he's a modernist I think he's a post modernist I think he deals with the politics of african-american life and the experience in America some people have felt as though Oh Theaster is doing too many things like the architecture the urban design the urban planning the pottery that you know but I think that it's all one project I actually think that the word artist has been too small for too long that in the past there may have been moments where the term meant a tremendous amount it meant that a person could have any number of skills including a deep knowledge of the sciences of religion of the physical body of philosophy and poetry of music and that it all kind of landed in the word artist but maybe even like the field of architecture before it was called architecture maybe it was a person who knew how to design a thing and build the thing that over time those parts got disconnected and so what an artist meant was something that was very very narrow and I think I'm just trying to fill the word up again so that it means more one of the things that I've seen in thei Astor's art practice and admired is somewhat the fearlessness that I would say he takes to bring whatever discipline is required into the picture to make the work happen or to get the message across identifying evocative objects has become central to Thea stirrers work two important pieces stand out from early in his career the shoeshine stand and fire hoses I was in the Whitney Biennial in 2010 and in that biennial I made an architectural space in the courtyard it was a temple dedicated to very humble labor it was dedicated to shining shoes it struck a chord as something that was either good ritual or like bad American politics or something and that idea that like a shoeshine stand could trigger a lots of different kinds of emotions nostalgia anxiety a guilt that was very exciting to me and then there was a moment when I was trying to account for the my connectedness to the civil rights movement let us know that I'm is to build a better Chicago the civil rights movement was a really important moment in black American history in American history the injustice with regard to kind of racial segregation job opportunities that those things had like come to a point of politically charged speechmaking protests on acts of peaceful resistance by black people all over the country how do you make that past moment potent again and I felt like these fire hoses which have been used to prevent deter arrest people's protesting cube by humiliating people that this charged material could be used to kind of reintroduce the possibility of struggle Theaster laid his hands on a cache of decommissioned fire hoses and set about planning how best to turn such a powerful symbol into a work of art I mean the hoses were already wrapped in with their nozzle and and I thought I'm just going to put that thing back in the world like it was and so I I framed it I kind of built a box around it and entreated it like a portrait like a Cornel vitrine after I framed it I thought wow this is this is great it was somewhere between a ready-made and a painting in a photo and then I thought well this material could do so much more and so I started to slowly just play with it bending it flattening it ironing it it felt like it was the found object the loaded object the color the texture that could stand on its own as a thing so that if there was no narrative there was still this form that was like elegant in quiet and then that form was also connected to this history that was like charged you could look at those civil-rights tapestries the fire hoses and just see them as incredibly inventive powerful formal objects but of course these things resonate with meaning a fire hose has all sorts of connotations but it has a very specific connotation for him as well in the context of the civil rights movement and it's that rich layering I think physical layering material layering cultural and intellectual layering that makes him I think such an important artist I guess is downtown Chicago skyline is world-famous overlooking Lake Michigan the city is home to an abundance of iconic buildings an inspiring place for a would-be artist and designer Theaster gates grew up on the city's west side and from a young age had a relentless thirst to understand the world my parents had a collection of books called Encyclopedia Britannica and they had like the adult versions which had really nice like black and brown spine with the gold and then they had like these young people's Encyclopedia Britannica which were like the white spine with like kind of colored in the middle of the spine and I remember wanting to read the big people's Britannica because you had this sense that like if you were looking at the image of a bird they would give you all the different names of this particular species there was like all this stuff around this like one object because we have a big family I was left alone with these books and I was kind of left alone to figure it out most things in life maybe are not immediately visible and so how do you wake up your capacity to see more that you might understand the world more he has to studied for a degree in urban planning acquiring the knowledge that would feed into his career in the visual arts he's now a professor in visual arts at the University of Chicago on the south side of the city when she asked her first worked there he was drawn to the area of Greater Grand Crossing when he sought somewhere more affordable to live it's a 99 percent african-american neighborhood great and normal people lived in this neighborhood but sometimes violent things happened this was in 2006 when I moved there in 2008 there was the housing kind of an market crash during that crash a lot of buildings became abandoned and I decided that I would acquire the building adjacent to me just to try to keep myself safe and manage what was next to me I thought I could make it a studio space it ended up pretty quickly becoming like a space for others Theaster and his expanding team redesigned and reconstructed these buildings with salvaged local materials creating spaces for archive and community engagement South Dorchester Avenue became the first staging post in an extraordinary artistic and personal endeavor there are times when making art isn't enough and that to be black in America if you were waiting for opportunities to have an exhibition or opportunities for people to write about your work or a venue where you might make music you could be waiting for a very very very long time I found myself preoccupied with space for the last several years because sometimes you have to build the house that you exhibit in you have to build the house that you make music in the Aster has imagined programs for these abandoned spaces he has created a life for a space that we walk by and don't even notice that we're volitans perfect stead I once heard the Astor talk about his projects as Lazarus projects he's not really interested in taking on a building unless he's raising it from the dead so you won't see him going into some particularly cool space that has so much potential it's you know it has to be something that's decrepit to end and really needs his help could that architectural image of Dorchester where people normally get through Dorchester as quickly as possible they drive away from Grand Crossing could I give people too want to slow down that's exciting inviting people to a neighborhood that they would never go to out of psychic fear felt like a way of regenerating reimagining a place reloading it with promise there was a buzz about something interesting happening in South Chicago but I have to say it really crystallized when he did that extrordinary project a documentary Documenta is a contemporary art exhibition which takes place every five years in the town of Castle Germany for 2012 Theaster decided to take over a dilapidated nineteenth-century Hyuga know house and use it to exchange ideas and materials with his own building back in Dorchester having those raw materials go to Castle using them to restore the Huguenots house making music they're bringing my friends bringing my staff of makers these musicians all amazing in their own right but all choosing to like band with me in this effort they creates this really extraordinary renovation which kind of kind of gazaam can spark a kind of total work of art 12 ballads for Hyuga no house could be seen as a love song from one abandoned building to another for the Astor it also represents the gift of the Chicago blues and the black voice transported to Germany the Astor asked some of his musicians to just make music in 6901 south Dorchester and at the time it was an abandoned building and it was cold I remember that it was cold you can see our breath it wasn't until maybe a month or so later that he really shared the bigger vision a grand exchange you know essentially shipping this time capsule in Chicago to castle and just allowing it to inhabit another space there are times when object making doesn't work for me when whatever I'm trying to say I don't have the skill or material things don't have the capacity to articulate what I want and I need sound it was almost a million people who visited castle through the hundred days so it was really the moment that that he really exploded onto the art scene so it was an important staging post in his career since documentay in Germany in 2012 Theaster gates art has become increasingly sought after and his dorchester projects now firmly on the map his enormous studio there encompasses both wood and metal workshops a pottery studio and a large experimental space but his exhibition art now centers around recovered objects and materials from his neighborhood like the remnants of a local hardware store the building was being torn down what do you do when these important commercial moments in a city go away you know space was being made for new condominiums but there was a time when the hardware store was the place where you could go and get bike inner tubes you know wiring for your lamp you know kind of before Home Depot there was like you know the hardware store was kind of where you got everything you know and and so it's really sad that these things are going away and so I've been trying to figure out like well how do I make new forms and maybe even what's what's my relationship to these things being a person who builds and so you'll see remnants of the hardware store all over the studio away you know from the pegboards that had held merchandise to these cabinets that you know for a hundred years held all of the needs of a home I seem to be preoccupied with with certain themes reflecting on labor is really important to me fiestas recent work has included large-scale tar paintings drawing on his own family's experience in the world of labor the answer's father was a roofer there's a materiality to the black painting that is fascinating it's like so black painting what is this and until you know that it's tar it's quite mysterious but it also clearly means to take its place in the history of black paintings and Goya in the beginning of the 19th century has what we call the black paintings and then we have piasters black paintings but now it's a black guy painting the black paintings and it's a black guy who's black dad was putting moves on with black tar right and so there's a way in which blackness just has a kind of richness that it doesn't it could never have within the formalist tradition as we know it and yet it doesn't mean that those paintings aren't formalist you know they are you know they're they're geometrically exquisite I really wanted to take on the idea that being a roofer was good enough for painting that in a way I could bring something of my history to this genre to this field and I could I could use a mop like one might use the brush I could use the copper roofing nail the way one might kind of secure canvas I could think about how the frame holds itself in space not unlike the way a painter thinks about a canvas painting could use new forms so I can thank my dad for introducing me to a way of handling of this custom material that's two-dimensional themes of Labor and trade continue to power fiestas work today his energy is focused on his latest project his biggest and most ambitious yet in Chicago the project that I'm most excited about is my bank the bank was a derelict building that hadn't seen use in at least 25 years for the bank project Fiesta couldn't resist creating a specific piece of collectible artwork to help raise funds he had this ingenious idea about creating bank bonds which were made out marble that was in the building and onto which he sort of carved certificates if you like for these Bank bonds which we then sold for the sum of $5,000 so there's the building we have the house to rock in but then the rocking part is really exciting because it means that now these collections that have that have had homes on on Dorchester they now have a home where big publics can come all of the energy that have been put into Dorchester now transfers to this this bank space where even bigger greater things can happen I think our most important collection is the Johnson publishing collection which comes from the Johnson publishing company and african-american Chicago based company that is most known for publishing ebony and jet magazine they were founded in the 1940s and our collection contains full print runs of everything they are ever published from the 1940s to the present day this small temple is the first of a series of temples that take on lost collections and tries to make sense of them within an architectural form and I really really like it a lot you know these books are amazing and that they they didn't plan to function as an archive when they were made they were about the present but but to look to look back you know did people read it when you were growing up absolutely they were all over my house um and and it was it was a way in which um black people could connect with each other around the world as his stone the island Arts Bank finally opens its doors to the public the Astor's dreamed to salvage knowledge and beauty within his neighborhood is well on track of all the frontline artists working in the world today and I try to conclude him in that I think he's the least bothered about art per se and I don't mean to say he's irreverent towards art but art to him is not unimportant but it's a it's a means to a broader end I think his aim is much more culturally socially and by extension politically transformative it's become really clear to me that when people believe in the place where they live when they invest in the places where they live when they live in the places that they grew up when they love with their hearts and with their lawnmowers the places that are around them when we make the time to know our neighbors and our friends and we say thank you to the world beautiful and amazing things can happen there's no doubt in my mind that art has the capacity to do things that other other things in the world other mechanisms of transformation can't do there's no doubt you artists don't have the burden always of having the ambition to make a difference but can art change things canva the act of creation the a way of dreaming in the world and then forcing yourself to do something with your hands to take that dream and do something yeah art makes a difference brilliant ideas powered by Hyundai Motor you

Channel: Bloomberg Originals

Views: 67,100

Keywords: Bloomberg, theaster gates, art, chicago, south side, brilliant ideas

Id: u1D4ne1jQKs

Length: 24min 12sec (1452 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 10 2015