Pedro Reyes & Terence Gower
New Monuments for New Neighbourhoods (Part II)
E-Mail Dialogue Transcript
Dear Pedro,
A curator at the Museo Tamayo, Andrea Torreblanca, is interested in restaging the installation of New Monuments for New Neighbourhoods we showed at Artists Space in 2007. I think this might be an opportunity to present a second phase of our collaboration. This might be an opportunity to juxtapose our work from the past six years as a continuation of the dialogue we started in Phase 1 in 2005. We have both now executed some public works—”new monuments” of sorts—and I know we both have models for other as-yet-unexecuted projects. Let’s consider placing our models in conversation, and make this conversation the bridge between the first part of our collaboration—let’s call it the research phase—and the next part, in which we fabricate full-scale prototypes.
All of the models we’ve done recently can be seen as proposals for monumental sculptures (some even having been executed), and fit comfortably into the New Monuments program we started discussing in 2005. In this way, these recent proposals reconnect to some of the ideas we discussed all those years ago.
What do you think?
Abrazo,
Terence
Pedro,
Let’s start the discussion with some of the models you’ve done for slotted sculptures in recent years. These proposals for figurative works are a clear manifestation of monumentality in their enlargement of the human form. The slotted technique is a great way to generate a 3D form quickly and easily and that seems to be how you’re using it in your Estructura ginecomorfa. Later, I want to discuss Noguchi’s use of this slotted technique in his sculptures from the late 1940s, but for now let’s talk about the “giant woman”, with its interesting cultural precedents—I’m thinking of Niki de Saint Phalle’s installation Hon, from 1968. There was a therapeutic (regression-therapy?), return-to-the-womb aspect to Saint Phalle’s piece, the all-engulfing woman/mother figure. Was she tapping into the possibility that all monumental representations of women somehow infantilize the viewer? Remember, when we encounter a monumental female form (Athena, Liberty, Henry Moore’s reclining women), we as viewers are reduced to the scale of babies.
At the same time your figure reads like a curvy Niemeyeresque homage to the female form (I love that Niemeyer documentary, where when asked at the end to identify the driving force behind his entire career, he responds, “Isn’t it obvious? Women.”) And this fits with the architectural scale of the sculpture proposed. The female form you are using in this piece is a slightly camp, idealized woman, reminiscent of an aspirational late-modern design object like the Corvette Stingray. For a recent short essay on the role of scale in puppetry, I wrote about the giant inflatable version of the ultimate seductress in the last scene of Fellini’s City of Women. The balloon of the seductress looks like a giant marionette, yet it is the protagonist, Snaporaz, who is caught in the strings, and he is both protected and threatened—saved yet made vulnerable—by this predicament. This paradox extends the virgin/whore fantasy Fellini is satirizing in his film…….. where am I going with this? Might there be a similar paradox—let’s call it the “maternal colossus”—at play in the Estructura ginecomorfa?
Hugs,
Terence
Dear Terence,
You bring up memorable images on gynocomorphism. The subject has often been connected to water. In Greek, the “nymphaeum” was a grotto where Nereids and Nymphs lived. The most obvious reference in architectural syntax is the Ionic capital, which resembles the curls of women’s hair as well as water. The symmetry of the Ionic column may be seen as a fountainhead or a spring. The grotto of Venus was also a feature in baroque gardens, often decorated with allegories of rapture featuring satires and faunettes. Yet, in the context of Latin America, the curve played a central role in the age of abstraction, notoriously in Brazil in the case of Neimayer but also in Uruguay with Eladio Dieste. My project “Estructura ginecomorfa” features curves similar to those used by Calder or Noguchi, but also shapes similar to those women drawn by Wilfredo Lam (especially the breasts, where the springboard is), which clearly drew inspiration from African statuary.
As a folie, it makes me think of all the hot springs from the 50s which were built around Mexico City in places like Cuernavaca and Cuautla, so it could perfectly be at home with the luscious vegetation, a Candela concrete shell (like in Casino de la Selva), a palapa or even a geodesic dome like the one at Oaxtepec.
Your move…
Hugs,
Pedro
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Pedro,
I love your references to water, the grotto, and the idea of this colossal functional female form rising out of this unconscious material.
With respect to your reference to the curve in architecture and design—Niemeyer, Dieste, Candella—I have to add Isamu Noguchi. I’ve been doing some work on Noguchi recently in a series of mobiles as public commissions, as well as in this maquette for a series of standing sculptures, Noguchi Galaxy (Freestanding Version). As you know, Noguchi came to Mexico, drawn by the lure of the muralists and the thought of political engagement through art, and left behind that amazing mural relief in Mercado Abelardo Rodríguez in the Centro. Returning to New York after the war in the late 1940s he channeled that interest in viewer engagement into a series of functional sculptures, tables, lamps, etc. At the same time, due to his reduced means, he started to source sculpture materials locally, rather than ordering large blocks of stone from European stone yards. Some of the most ubiquitous construction materials in New York at the time were the flat sheets of stone that arrived pre-sliced from overseas quarries, used for facades, for countertops, and other architectural details. Noguchi started cutting out shapes from this material and slotting them together, generating 3D forms in this quite architectural planar way. The forms made up the now well-known repertory of Noguchi’s curved shapes, that I like to think of as the source-code for post-war biomorphic modernism in the US (remember this is in the late 1940s!) In my Noguchi work, I disentangle Noguchi’s sculptures and isolate the forms one by one, studying them and analyzing them like a kind of modernist code.
This idea of biomorphic design definitely doubles back to your female forms, to sexy industrial design (the Corvette Stingray, etc.) There’s a real overlap there, but it REALLY hit me when I saw one of your amazing Coloquiums (Coloquia?) in Sao Paolo last autumn. I was so excited to see you were playing with the Noguchi slotting technique, but using it to slot together these quite non-Noguchi forms (speech bubbles) devised by the lousy designers at Microsoft. Where I was exploding and un-slotting the Noguchi sculpture, atomizing it into a sort of swirling galaxy of loose forms, you were drawn to its aggregating character. We’re each reading Noguchi from different sides. Let’s have a colloquium on your Coloquia —– can you tell me more about this series?
Hugs,
T
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Dear Terence,
We have both worked with interlocking pieces; obviously Noguchi is a huge influence. I learned from you that Noguchi is interested in using flat silhouettes because flat slabs of marble were the only material available during war time. Since there were no quarries at hand, and he would not have access to blocks, he had to use flat slabs. This also had to do with the house of cards by the Eames, which is producing a three-dimensional sculpture out of bi-dimensional elements. You have done an eloquent example of this in Noguchi Galaxy and this is certainly an inspiration for Colloquium. I took a pop element, which is the “speech bubble”, so perhaps my piece has one foot in abstraction and the other foot in pop. I think of it as architecture of speech, perhaps as a flow chart, thinking that cybernetics in the second half of the twentieth century was so much obsessed with diagrams showing feedback loops, etc.
P.
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Pedro,
But your speech bubble shapes seem to be derived from some very banal software like Microsoft Word. I love that this source is the absolute opposite of high design. It’s the status quo: a huge contrast to the luxurious materials you use to execute the piece!
We both seem to have been channeling modern figurative sculpture recently, especially of the Henry-Moore-reclining-figure variety. I like how your slotted technique has taken on architectural connotations in your second Estructura ginecomorfa (5). Here is a maquette for an enlarged human form—monumental, again—but the slotting and slicing suggest enlarging the form still further to the scale of architecture. The horizontal slices become floor plates and the pseudo-Henry Moore form, always instantly recognizable as a reference to modern sculpture, becomes an office building, an apartment complex, or a multi-storey car park… The meaning is in that familiar Moore silhouette.
This is what’s happening in my Maquetas del inconciente escultural, but you can replace “meaning” with “punch-line”. These forms, each clearly evoking Moore-esque reclining figures, are lifted from comics (of the New Yorker variety) from the 1950s. For the cartoonist to tell a successful joke (generally built around philistinism or sexual innuendo) at the expense of modernism, the artwork depicted in the cartoon had to instantly read as MODERN ART. Judging from the number of reclining figures in these cartoons, Henry Moore’s sculptures seemed to best fit the bill and were clearly the dominant form in the public imagination.
I have simply translated the cartoonist’s vision into stone. The pieces I’m showing here are of course maquettes and I hope the full-scale versions will one day grace public plazas as monuments to cultural irreverence. I think this idea of “what do we expect to see when we think of modern art or sculpture” is at the root of a number of our proposals.
But returning to the idea of the unconscious, your Troglodita sculpture models are like objects from some very primal place, much earlier that the post-war collective unconscious of the Moore pieces. They’re like modern figurative sculptures in a nebulous, not quite fully-formed, intuitive state. Maybe they’re melted and decayed! What’s up with the Trogloditas?
Hugs,
T
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Terence,
The Troglodita structure is a negative space by definition, characterized by their cave-like shapes. These spaces are unpredictable and therefore have primitive associations. I am interested in the idea of spaces where there are no clear limits between walls, steps, and floors; almost as it if were a morphogenesis of the body itself. In this sense, it is a clear example of organic architecture. However, it makes me think of a passage in À rebours by Huysmans in which he explains with a great sense of humor, that living in spaces with circular-shaped rooms unavoidably led to marital conflicts since couples end up arguing over how to arrange their furniture within the round walls. In fact, human nature is squared and there is nothing more anti-natural than what we call organic architecture.
Yours,
Pedro
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P,
This idea of the primal space you talk about with the Trogloditas is fascinating. It evokes the earliest human dwellings, the womb even. I’ve also been doing a lot of thinking about spatial memories and cultural forms from the collective unconscious—this is really the basis for my “Maquetas” we discussed earlier. But the collective unconscious is the foundation—more like the bedrock—for our own personal collection of imagery and forms that we store in our individual unconscious. I think we access these forms through intuitive processes.
This is the argument behind my series Idea of a Sculpture (10), which operates as a kind of process-piece. It is a simple exercise, where I close my eyes and think the word “sculpture” and quickly create whatever form comes to mind. This is why I use cardboard, newspaper, and tape, covered with strips of paper and glue. It’s the fastest way for me to generate a 3D “organic” form. These little models are in fact 1:10 models for what could be monumental pieces. They are like Calder, Noguchi, Hepworth, all melted together.
But another huge influence is your series of Tripodes, a few of which we showed in our first New Monuments installation. I did a number of sketches of these Tripodes of yours—also in ceramic and closely related to your Trogloditas, I believe—as part of our earlier collaboration. The composition you worked with in those little pieces—of the body or mass mounted on legs—obviously really penetrated my unconscious and has come out in this series of 10 tripod and quadruped models.
This “papier mâché” technique I use is one of several quick form-generators. The other being the slotted slices we both use frequently, sometimes channeling Noguchi, but often enough just using these slices to evoke the outline of an object. This appears to be the form-making device you use for your Klein’s Bottle piece shown here, but can you talk about your obsession with this form? It’s appeared many times in your work, from these small models to the huge Capulas.
Abrazo,
Terence
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Terence,
I see the Klein’s bottle as a volume that unifies the inside and outside into a continuous surface. This topological principle enables a decisive shift from an “either / or” critique to an array of “and / both” scenarios. Also, the Klein’s bottle has a distinctively erotic nature, which in the case of the Capulas, it is emphasized by the translucent nature of its woven structure. The bottle’s opposed perspectives can be illustrated as aspects of the whole.
Abrazo,
Pedro
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My dear Pedro,
My Migrating Monument: Blob I & II look like Klein’s Bottles that have become “unstuck” with the trunk searching for new places to insert itself. At the same time, they are simple visual plays on the idea of the sculpture/monument and the base. The biomorphism we are both referencing in a lot of the models assembled here is pushed to its gelatinous extreme in this 1:10 scale study. In the first model, the blob-like monument arches its proboscis off the base, as if it’s feeling around and searching for a new (baseless) habitat. Model 2 is another arched form, but this time appears to be the end-point in the transfer of mass from base to ground. I guess this pair could be regarded as a kind of visual pun, a comic-style illustration of that moment in early “minimalism” when sculpture stepped off the base and found a new support from the floor.
Interesting to hear about the erotic aspect of the Klein’s Bottle piece. Sex is at least partly the subject of my Adult Play Sculptures, which have been in the works for some time. I like to imagine the ideal viewer for this work as a kind of Jacques Tati character, who is drawn to interact with these pieces for their air of mystery and slight ridiculousness. These studies for sculptures clearly owe a debt to Calder, but each has been designed with a somewhat subversive “adult function” in mind. Function was of course an obsession of Noguchi’s when he started creating furniture with his slotting technique (most famously in his now-ubiquitous coffee table), and paper lamps from the same period as the slotted sculptures. What are the functions I imagine for the Adult Play Sculptures?
A few artists I know—including you, of course, in that brilliant playground piece you did for Basel a few years ago—have done a bunch of research on playgrounds-by-artists: these playgrounds are basically made up of sculptures for children to play on. In contrast to these children’s playgrounds, I started to think of forms of “playing” that are exclusively sanctioned for adults and came up with the most obvious: drinking, drugs, and sex. These sculptures are designed for these activities. The large black piece, for example, forms a sort of “harness” at waste-height—with the high black verticals forming foot rests or “stirrups”—to make fucking more enjoyable. The other sculptures have built-in benches, counters, and overhead ledges for hanging out and drinking, cutting a few lines of cocaine… or perhaps that simplest of adult activities, just sitting quietly and reading the newspaper with a glass of wine or a beer at hand.
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Dear Terence,
I thought of designing a park filled with mushroom-shaped cast concrete forms that, depending on their height, could serve different functions. For example, an eighteen-inch-tall mushroom could act as a chair, a thirty-inch-tall form would be a table, and ten-feet-tall one would serve as a sheltering umbrella. This structure serves as an experiment in creating a variety of pieces of furniture (tables, chairs, shelters, etc.), all based on the same form, trying to avoid a recognizable anthropomorphic referent.
Hugs,
Pedro
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Pedro,
I am thinking of these other low concrete works that would be quotations from concrete facades—an homage to Brutalism. The work, Beton Brut consists of façade sections reproduced in molded concrete, with the impressions of the formwork very visible, then lying flat, as if awaiting an examination or analysis. They can also be used as “pasarelles”—like a stage for some kind of performance or fashion show. They are awaiting some kind of mysterious event or ritual, like your Hongos!
Take care,
Terence
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My dear Terence,
As you know, I am fascinated with the idea of wide undulating infinities, which is something that the sea and the desert both have in common. Perhaps it is the impossibility of fixing your gaze on a single detail that makes them so abstract. On the shores, you often find signs of civilization but beyond lies planet earth. Facing untouched earthscapes often makes you feel extraterrestrial. Sunsets on the sea suggest to me the following associations: mythological wars, stoned teenagers, transmigration of souls, sexual fantasies and lost civilizations. Facing the sun, I have had amusing epiphanies. For instance, realizing that the sound of the sea might be the single sound that has existed without interruption forever, even before any living creature had ears to listen. Actually such sound describes, according to my experience, a panneau moving from left to right.
Once I managed to hypnotize myself focusing on that sound, I felt each shhhooooaaaaaahhh was like wind turning the pages of a book, which was my own face. Being in this state for a whole week was like reading a long novel.
To make a piece for this enticing moment one needs a form that is universal, ideal, simple, mysterious and concrete: a Pyramid. Unlike concepts, symbols are beyond textual interpretation. This is a Floating Pyramid and, according to its own character, it will make us travel to unknown dimensions.
Forever yours,
Pedro
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My dear Pedro,
Here once again, we’re seeing an uncanny formal synergy between our “public” schemes: my palapa structure is triangulated like your pyramids, and the other colourful and cubic pavilion on pilotis I’m showing here brings to mind your Reciclón study. These two pavilion models, for Palapa Moderna and SuperPuesto are both schemes for the same site in the Bronx. The one that is actually being built (under construction right now) is the SuperPuesto. These ideas for pavilions are like mini-essays: they are experiments in applying humble building materials and claddings to recognizably “modern” forms. In the case of the SuperPuesto, I’m thinking of the lona (tarp) as a kind of popular building technology (as used in the market puestos and tianguis all over Mexico). Here the material is applied as a cladding to Marcel Breuer’s temporary Exhibition House, commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art in 1949 and installed in their sculpture court.
All of my pavilion projects, such as the Bicycle Pavilion at Jumex, are designed to question the idea of function and display at the intersection of art and architecture. In the Jumex commission, I introduced a very utilitarian role (bicycle storage) into what was a simple pleasure pavilion, whereas this new pavilion, the SuperPuesto, is sort of finding its own function. The locals in the neighbourhood where it is being built are assigning uses to the structure: It will be used as a party platform; for concert and film project space; as a green market; as a classroom for education workshops; and for artist interventions and residencies.
Hugs,
Terence
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Dear Terence,
I love that you bring this up. For the Reciclón study, I kept thinking of how our technological waste serves as a toxic element rather than a nutritious one. In nature, on the contrary, “all waste equals food.” All waste becomes a biological nutrient. We should be able to extract the technological nutrients before we excrete our waste. There is a missing organ in our social metabolism that would work as stomach or intestines. The Reciclón is a device made of plastic containers that fit into each other. (The plastic boxes are the equivalent to the “vellum”, which are the tiny hairs that stick out from the intestinal wall to absorb nutrients). The permutation of these plastic bins could be customized to satisfy anyone’s recycling needs.
With the Capulas, I wanted to challenge all the dogmas that I encountered while I was studying architecture. These pieces provide an alternative to the conventional room. If a room has rigid walls the Capula shall be elastic, if the room is grounded, the Capula shall hover, if a room needs furniture the Capula will turn itself into furniture, if a room has square spaces, the Capula shall be round, If a room is an ensemble of parts, the Capula shall be a continuum…
Hug,
Pedro
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