FRED WILSON: Everything I want to say
is said by putting things together.
In my studio, I was always, like, arranging things.
You know, this is right out of school.
I was, like, I couldn't sort of say that this was my art.
It wasn't art with a capital A.
But it was really who I was.
— Um... why don't we switch this back for that...
that figure, the original figure?
MAN: Yeah.
WILSON: And when you start doing
what you really, really believe in,
that's when you do your best work.
I did all these pieces with, uh...
these weird tchotchkes, these so-called "black collectibles."
This one actually was given to me,
so now I'm trying to make one big piece
with as many of them as possible and get them out of my life.
It's just sort of bad juju.
WILSON: I really don't have any desire to make things with my hands,
particularly directly.
I don't know when I left that behind,
but I get everything that satisfies my soul
from bringing objects that are in the world
and manipulating them,
working with spatial rela... arrangements.
And then having things produced the way I want to see them.
I love making this stuff.
I love doing it.
And it's not easy in that it's simple,
but it's easy in that it just flows out of me.
— This is... that's just the worst one.
WILSON: I'm totally inspired
by things around me.
I look at things and wonder what they are and why they are.
Everything interests me.
You know, a gum wrapper could interest me
as much as something, you know, at The Met.
As I get older, I realize that your identity
is really tied largely to your experiences
and that time period that you grew up.
I was born in the '50s.
I grew up in the suburbs.
When I was elementary school age,
I was the only black child in the entire school
and I was shunned because I was different.
My world was not... even though it seemed
like everything was nice, I didn't have any friends.
My connection to the black community
was tangential for those formative years.
So a lot of my project is trying to understand
the visual world around me which really affects me.
— Hold it-- yeah, that's about right.
WILSON: For me, that's the basis for a lot of what I do,
is really where that pain comes from.
My mother married an African-American man.
Her sister married a man from, um... from the West Indies
and then a man from Belgium.
And when her other sister married a man from India
and her cousin married a man from China,
it's difficult for me to not look at people in the world
and see everyone as a relative.
To me, they're familiar--
familiar in the root of the word: family, familiar.
I feel comfortable with people,
but that comfort is, uh, tempered by the fact
that people may not feel that way about me.
When I watch glassblowing,
it's like the creation of a planet or something.
You get seduced by the material, by the process.
[ hammer banging ]
And then you almost don't care what it looks like afterwards.
— You know what? I'm going to stand right here, because this way
I get the same angle as the slide.
WILSON: Glass is always a liquid.
It never completely solidifies.
Even though it looks like it's solid,
it actually is still moving.
[ hammer banging ]
And so making it into these drip forms
makes inherent sense for the material.
And I wanted to use black glass because it represents ink.
It represents oil; it represents tar.
Some of them have eyes on them.
For me, these, uh, cartoon eyes, because of 1930s cartoons,
which were recycled in my childhood in the '60s,
were representing African Americans
in a very derogatory way.
I sort of view them as black tears.
So that to me is ultimately a sad commentary.
Working with printmaking is very similar to working with glass
in that it's outside of what I do.
In printmaking I realized that if I...
I could just drop acid... [ laughs ]
with this stuff called Spitbite,
just pour it onto a plate and it would eat onto the plate
and it would, you know, kind of make a spot or a splash
and filling it with black ink,
it sort of retains this spot quality,
and it also has kind of a three-dimensional quality
which doesn't happen
when you use ink on a piece of paper.
[ acid dripping ]
The directness of that really thrilled me,
and the fact that that's what I'm interested in--
these drips and drops-- uh, really worked for me.
— Yeah, that's doing fine.
WILSON: Even before I did the drips,
uh, in glass,
I'd been thinking about spots
and just this, uh, reduction of blackness
to this kind of ridiculous degree.
You know, I think it's interesting, I think it's funny,
I think it's ultimately really sad.
All these representations that I grew up with
are telling me who I am whether I realize it or not.
And so by pulling them all out and have them talk to each other
is my sort of taking control of who I am
through these voices.
And also trying to understand who I am,
what is me and what is something
that the rest of the world has said I am.
You know, it comes from this deep sadness that I, you know...
that, uh... that's kind of the baseline.
I'm not a sad person, but...
you know, it it bubbles up inside of me.
PRINTER: That's starting to look better.
WILSON: Yeah.
— Ooh, nice.
WILSON: There are these, like,
in cartoons, thought bubbles
where the spots drop, talk to each other
and various conversations emerge
from the relationship between these spots.
To me it made sense
that the representations of Africans in books
would be the voices for these representations
of blackness or of black people in these spots.
And so they all talk to each other
and these different characters, they're kind of...
the voices and personalities come out in...
from these little blurbs.
I was thrilled to be chosen to represent the United States
for the Venice Biennale.
The work in Venice had many different parts.
And the part that is the most abstract
was this room that I created of black and white tile.
There was this huge black urn on its side
and in it was a small bed,
uh, cappuccino cup, some newspapers, magazines,
um, CD player.
I did those pieces right after September 11th,
wanting the world to go back to the way it was before.
It's called "Safe Haven."
Right around that time,
my mother was getting extremely ill
and was not going to get better.
So this kind of womb shape that came out,
I do think it has a relationship with thinking about my mom.
I'm interested in invisible processes within museums.
I really start museum projects
without knowing what I'm going to do.
I try to just go in, uh, tabula rasa
and try and just sort of be a sponge.
— Okay, right there.
WILSON: I work site-specifically.
In Sweden I started the way I'd normally start:
I meet everyone, look at the collection
and talk to people about the collection
and research the collection
and try to understand where I am, the city I'm in
and... and... and make a piece.
— I need to get a sense
of what this floor is going to look like.
The model is good, but this really helps.
WILSON: I'm creating a metanarrative about museums and display.
— I would like to put in
one of the platforms
so I can see how that looks from different angles.
WILSON: I'm just using the museum as my palette, basically--
manipulating objects, light, color, spatial relationships
and, uh, critiquing as well the notion of museum.
— Can you help me to take out? — Yes, yes.
I'll put the gloves here for a minute.
[ straining ]: Oh, boy, oh, boy-- wow.
Wow, there's certainly stone in here. — Yeah.
WILSON: What happens with a lot of museums
is that galleries are arranged by historians
who are really interested in the history of the object,
the object themselves, and not really so focused
on the environment these are placed in,
the juxtaposition of objects
and what meaning are they creating.
Besides the visual of the object,
what is the visual of the space doing to the object,
doing to your experience?
And sort of try to kind of infuse it into those spaces.
It's not only the visual; it's how this aesthetic experience
affects you emotionally and physically,
and, uh, the power of that.
You know, I'm interested in all that stuff.
Stones, which seem to be
the least movable objects on the earth,
are moving everywhere.
The project really became not only the movement of stones
and archaeological material,
but the movement of people.
The stones I'm choosing because I think they're interesting
and I think they're interesting in how they look together.
It's kind of an archaeological site
that would never be and never would be like this.
But it's just to get this idea across
that these things being everywhere
and that they travel around the world,
people take them from one place to another.
And since I found this one stone from my family's island
and so I saw this connection
between how stone can kind of connect to your identity.
I'm very interested in juxtaposition of objects,
how juxtaposition of very different objects can bring up
a new idea, a new thought.
There's no manipulation of the objects
other than their positioning
and that changes the meaning, or the relationship,
or how you think about them.
And this is everything that I'm about.
I would like to think that objects have memories,
and we have memories about certain objects.
A lot of what I do is soliciting memory from an object.
The other piece that expresses another side
of what I've been doing with museums,
the piece called "Picasso/Whose Rules"
using a large photo blowup of "Demoiselles d'Avignon"--
the famous painting by Picasso--
uh, an African mask and a video also covers
a lot of other of my interests about art, uh, modernism,
um... you know, ethnography and African culture.
And when I did that,
I was feeling very strongly about how modernism was a part
of the destruction of traditional African culture.
When Picasso found African things in the shops in France,
he saw something far greater in them,
which, you know, of course we're all thankful to him for.
However, neither the missionaries, the military men
nor Picasso had a clue
as to what these things were really about.
If you look through the eyes of the mask,
there's a video of two African friends and myself
speaking about what makes art great.
And, um, there are a lot of convoluted questions
like "If your modern art is our traditional art,
does that make our contemporary art your cliché?"