[David Brooks, Artist]
[New York Close Up]
Well, I grew up in a small town.
Brazil, Indiana.
I came to New York in the mid-Nineties
to go to school at Cooper Union.
["David Brooks Hits the Pavement"]
And being a skater, I could just skate all around town.
So I would go to all the museums,
have my skateboard with me,
and just check it at coat check.
I was a little backwards.
In fact, only the year before had I seen
my first piece of historical artwork in person.
I do recall, very starkly,
going to The Metropolitan Museum of Art
and discovering the ancestral totems from the New Guinea area.
At first, they're very exotic looking.
But each one of those face is an actual person.
And when I realized what was behind them,
it definitely shattered a particular preconceived idea as to what art was.
There was both the life around the artwork during it being made.
There was the life around the artwork
and how it functioned in the society.
And there was a life around the artwork
as to how it got to the United States.
And so it's the life behind it
and the truth content within it
that is actually really quite extraordinary
and goes far beyond what it appears to be.
There was a piece I did at PS1
where I planted about fifty trees.
It's more of this, like,
cross section of an Amazonian forest.
And then we dumped, pumped, and sprayed
about twenty tons of concrete on the entire forest.
[LAUGHS]
It's more of an action
than it is a composition
or an object.
And it's one that is both horrifying
and has some beauty to it at the same time.
The forest then regrew over time,
as it would break through elements of the concrete.
And had a whole life cycle that went on for a year and a half.
We're so desensitized to imagery of violence,
both in terms of a landscape,
but also in terms of a culture.
So what the project really is looking at
is trying to find ways to tether reality right back to it.
Just like skating,
there is no ideology behind hitting the pavement.
That's just you and your body hitting the pavement
in a kind of reality check.
The skating started...
I was quite young and I was really bad at it.
And my brother, I remember,
made fun of me at one point.
He's like, "You've been skating that long and you still suck?"
So, there was a turning point at around the age of thirteen
that I became extremely disciplined.
I had this thing where I had to learn a trick a day.
I used to sneak out of the house,
like, at two in the morning,
and drive up to Chicago or...
[LAUGHS]
or drive down to Louisville.
So skateboarding, for me, was the most fulfilling
when you would find a new situation in an urban context
and you think of a different way to use it.
It propels one to want to actually go out in the world and explore.
[The Explorers Club]
The Explorers Club is a private club
that was founded in 1904
by a number of people that were embarking on these different endeavors
and they kind of needed a center
where they could come together
to have what they call a "smoker"--
where they would meet and discuss what kind of expeditions they've been doing.
So it was a place to disseminate information.
At the time of its founding,
there were people, of course, racing to the poles--
North and South--
trying to get to the top of the tallest mountain on earth,
Mount Everest.
Eventually, to get to the Moon.
But as these people were racing to the great firsts
they were kind of passing up all of the rest of life
along the way.
And so, I think now we've come to
a completely different understanding
as to how to perceive the definition of exploration.
Now it's really about those granular,
infinitesimal minutiae aspects of life
that really are the things that make up the world.
A combine is basically a piece of farming equipment
that cuts corn,
breaks the kernels of the corn off the cob,
and then sifts and rasps the cobs and the stalks,
but also cleans the grain.
The exhibition breaks apart this piece of machinery
into thousands of pieces.
It takes time and movement going around and looking at everything.
Just like an ecosystem is not really
something you can just show up and stand in front of and experience.
It's actually a number of processes that, over time,
you understand, experience, and you put it back together.
Taking the macroscopic hole into the microscopic details
that make up this one thing
that also does many operations all at once.
There's an infinite number of variations
of things one can do with a skateboard.
And it never quite ends,
so it will always keep going,
the more you put into it.
I thought that at one point
I was going to be a professional skateboarder.
But a girl broke my heart,
and I just started making art
quite intensely.
And I realized I was just better at making artwork
than I was at skateboarding.