IÑIGO MANGLANO-OVALLE: If art for me is a platform from which to speak,
but not tell you something?
That’s good.
And if that’s a way in which I give you a platform from which to think and debate it,
that’s even better, because ultimately art for me does not reside in the object,
it resides in what’s said about the object.
All my work, even the most formal work, has...
an underlying politics to it.
But I don’t want to reveal my position.
In LE BAISER or “the Kiss”
I’m washing windows in Mies van der Rohe’s Fansworth House out in Plano, Illinois.
The camera outside is always mic-ed to the sound of the squeegee on the glass.
And it’s very sort of ambient in one way and then very physical.
The squeegee squeaks and sarcastically kisses the building.
(MUSIC)
Whenever the camera is inside the pane of glass or inside the building,
there’s an ethereal sort of electronic music
which is a single moment of a guitar solo by the band KISS,
and then that little guitar, nanosecond,
is stretched to make the sound piece or the score for all the interior shots.
I have a strong connection to architecture in my work.
At a very young age I was taken by my parents to see Mies’ architecture.
For me, on one level, the piece was just about visiting a shrine of modernity.
It was about trying to figure out a way to actually touch the building.
You’re three things as the actor.
You’re artist, you’re laborer, and you’re architect.
You’re artist because you’re making the film
and because sometimes when you’re washing the windows
the camera is watching your hand make a gesture.
Almost a painting gesture across the pane.
You’re also just simply washing a window.
So it’s mundane.
And, then you’re outside the building tending to its form.
So you’re the architect.
And inside is a young woman spinning some discs on a platform
with headphones being separated by the…
a thin skin of transparency.
But ultimately total separation.
The female actor at one moment in the piece
actually raises her eyes and looks straight into the camera,
thereby looks into the viewer of the installation and acknowledges them or says,
I see you and that’s the one moment for me that
she’s able to penetrate through the architecture.
Of course LE BAISER is about love,
but it’s a kind of restrained love.
I thought what we would do is run through the edit.
The School of Architecture in Chicago auctioned off
breaking the windows at the Mies van der Rohe’s Crown Hall.
They were going to renovate, put new glass in.
As it turns out, the winner of the auction is Mies’s grandson who is also an architect.
I was interested in this whole notion of almost like patricide,
you know the son breaking the father’s temple.
The show in New York is a show that I think is
kind of difficult to negotiate
because there is no apparent sort of common theme.
I’ve been wanting to make this umbrella for a long time.
When you actually look at an umbrella, there’s so many complex curves in that fabric.
There are so many parabolic equations.
It’s very much like a flower.
That’s probably one of the best designs out there in the world.
I enlisted the help of a fabricator that does prototypes for stealth bombers.
It’s called BULLETPROOF UMBRELLA.
And it’s exactly that.
It’s made out of graphite and Kevlar and space age materials.
So I think it actually responds in many ways to the climate of our times.
Although it does it very quietly.
My mother would freak out.
She’s from Bogotá and…
and an open umbrella indoors is like bad luck for the rest of your life.
The jack, very much like the umbrella takes an every day object
and sort of scales it up and deforms one axis of it.
What you end up having is this,
it’s almost like missile that points up and almost touches the ceiling itself.
There are many connections between these things and I think it’s just,
for me important not to make it readily apparent.
This sort of troublesome condition is what I’m looking for.
On a very, sort of, formal sense, the exhibition is all about color.
So the red film on the window of the gallery is a work itself.
It’s called FROM RED TO ORANGE AND ORANGE TO RED.
Going from high alert to not so high alert.
I’ve been very interested in weather patterns that occur both inside and outside of architecture.
In the case of RANDOM SKY in Chicago,
the weather station is outside and takes the temperature,
barometric pressure, wind speed, wind direction.
All these streams of data connect directly to a set of computers
that are running a program that generates these blue and white scan lines.
When I decided to do this project I met Mark Hereld,
an astrophysicist at Argon National Labs.
MARK HERELD: I was asked originally to help the Hyde Park Arts Center
figure out how to build this façade.
We have a large effort in what’s called scientific visualization,
we think about ways to sort of tame these herds of computers
that are intended present environments
that are large enough that people can step into them,
become directly involved with what’s being put out on the screen.
The outside world is coupling to this internal universe.
So there is a kind of little bit of a living ecology there.
MANGLANO-OVALLE: We got to a certain point where I needed to consider sound,
and in this case I worked with a young artist
by the name of Rick Gribenas
who is an artist as well as a composer.
RICK GRIBENAS: RANDOM SKY is really just an examination of this building
and its architecture and the space that is contained within it
and the space that kind of surrounds it.
It’s definitely an exploration.
It’s a, you know, the kind of great lengths that
we as humans go through to kind of understand our environment
and kind of adjust our environment.
MANGLANO-OVALLE: RANDOM SKY addresses that idea of the arbitrary
or the randomness or the uncontrollable,
the impossibility of our desire for stability.
CLOUD PROTOTYPE #1 was a thunderstorm
that was captured by the department of atmospheric sciences at University of Illinois.
I watched the three-dimensional data development as a storm
and at a certain moment I said, “Right there.
That’s the moment I want.”
It’s about stopping time.
It was just before the storm erupts.
Capturing ephemera is an impossibility.
And in the end you really haven’t captured ephemera,
you’ve made a sculpture.
The space between things is just as important
or more important than the space that things occupy.
Once you enter the exhibition,
this little infrared video of my son at five months old
is neglected by you because as soon as you walk in,
you see the iceberg in the cloud.
Another sculpture is so miniscule you can step on it.
Red Fist and it’s in a central location,
it’s dismissed by the viewer.
Red Fist actually came about playing with my son a year-old with Play dough,
it’s all about just grabbing things and holding them.
So I would roll little balls
and he would grab them
and we squished them
and his hand would open up
and I would see this glorious, like,
shape that’s made by his fist.
SEARCH was a piece where the architecture of the site,
this bullfight ring down in Tijuana sort of called it forth.
I mean the bullfight ring already looked like a speaker facing up into the sky.
The bullfight ring was converted into a radio telescope
that would search for the real aliens only fifty meters south of the U.S. border.
And for me it was a joke.
I wanted to do a piece about alienation
and about UFOs and about the alien
and about immigration.
When I first came to United States as a baby,
you know I came in as a resident alien.
And SEARCH was titled SEARCH (EN BÚSQUEDA),
the subtitle was Searching for the Real Aliens.
In Tijuana everybody from cab drivers to artists to politicians got the joke.
I grew up with parents that were always
having to shift the family from Madrid to Bogotá to the United States,
so the world was very small at a very young age
and I almost had to learn that there were borders.
The General Service Administration asked me
to propose a work for the Immigration Naturalization Service Building.
Now it’s part of Homeland Security.
I actually like the idea,
because a whole host of people that I know have been
through that building as what they call clients.
So LA TORMENTA, these two clouds, or THE STORM,
there’s a kind of critique that’s going on there
because it’s a storm system that arrives
and historically all waves of immigration to the U.S. have been storms.
And have gone through turbulence, upon their arrival,
and have caused turbulence
and all of those waves come with a great deal of hope,
and a great deal of anxiety.
And that’s what a thunderstorm is.
It’s one of the most destructive and most productive events.
It was about the duality of that,
and duality of hope and anxiety
and the fact that the piece in a sense reflects its public in a way,
you know that they are the storm.
La Tormenta somos nosotros.