Liz Magor in "Vancouver" - Season 8 | Art21

[soft synth music]

Liz Magor: What I like about Vancouver is the fact
that it's on the edge of the continent.

If I look west, I know it's empty.

♪ ♪

I call it breathing space.

♪ ♪

I live on the Eastside, which is very industrial.

Big ships come in and get loaded up
with containers.

I like that feeling of the world coming and going.

Vancouver is an entirely and 
completely different place

than it was when I was a child,

and Coal Harbour especially 
was a wild, filthy, muddy,

cranky, beautiful place.

Then by the time I came back to look at it
for this public art project,

all that was erased,

and all these places that people lived
in squatter shacks

or lived in little crappy float houses,

all of it was gone, so I built
this little wooden building,

put it on 4 pilings that are 
tilted because I wanted it

at that moment of movement.

I wanted it to be alive.

Then we sent it to a foundry,

and they cast every piece separately.

Your first view is that it's a pretty ordinary

piece of woodwork, but if you go up to it
and you see that it's aluminum, you realize

that it's an extraordinary piece
of foundry work.

So that flip is in the manufacture.

You think one thing-- "So simple, so dismissible."
Then you realize another thing.

You think, "How remarkable."

With "LightShed," I worked consciously
about keeping the past alive, taking an old thing

and keeping it vivacious,

keeping a complex tapestry of stuff in the world.

♪ ♪

I live not far from my studio.
I take my bike.

The studio is my priority
over everything else.

[soft synth music]

I try to get here every day so that I can follow
the continuity of what happened the day before.

Often I'm here all day, you know, 8 hours,
trying to stay focused.

I'm seeking that place where my brain stops
spinning around and stops wanting things that

I don't have so that I can 
follow this very faint thread

that I'm laying down as to what
each sculpture is supposed to be.

The objects come first, and objects flow
through systems.

We use them, we waste them, we wear them out,
and then it comes out the other end.

They call it the waste stream.
I'm not an animist, but I do feel the objects

that have been in the world for a while,

they've got all this stuff in them that
comes out.

Gloves are interesting because they're quite
complicated copies of the anatomy.

They're very easy to fetishize,

and I'm not the only person 
who has fetishized a glove.

Casting is like photography in that you
have the real, the actual.

Then you make an impression of it,
which you call a negative.

Then you pour into that negative some system

of making positive, and then you have a copy
of the real.

So if there's a trapped air there and I demold it,

then there'd be a bubble in the thumb,
for example.

It's my favorite part.

I like the color.

I like the creaminess of it.

It feels a bit like playing with your food.

We all love that, and, um, I'm now
so accustomed to trying to kill air that it's

like a--it's like a game on a computer.

This is my computer game, to kill bubbles.

Making a mold, doing all this process to that
thing that I've picked up,

in all the slowness of it is 
how I kind of get to know it.

So, in fact, the slowness of this process
serves the slowness of my intellectual awareness.

Demolding is like opening a present.

[Gasps]
Oh, it's good. It's got a few air bubbles here.

You know the image you're going to get,

but it's always a surprise.

My main talent is my ability to
pay attention.

There are many things in the world that live
in this nether zone, this nonzone,

this not-needed zone, and so I pay attention
to these things, and through that effort,

I'll change their status, I'll bring--
I'll resurrect them from the dead

and bring them up into this quite

a high-status activity that I'm involved in
of turning them into a sculpture.

There's a big

process of me making it.
I want a big process of looking, too.

I'm not sending a message.
I'm creating an experience for looking.

Objects when they're in their heyday, they
arrive in our life with a bit of celebration.

If you're in a really pretentious store,
they make a bit sort of theatrical event

of wrapping up your purchase.

They fold it, then they wrap it,

and they put a sticker with their logo on it,

and then they carefully lift that as though it's

a little premature baby, and 
they put it into the box.

Inside that box is some sweater that's been
mass-produced, but this gift,

this offering is--

they mimic a personal transaction
between two people who care about each other.

[soft synth music]

♪ ♪

Douglas fir trees grow hundreds and hundreds
of feet tall,

and they grow for hundreds of years, and at one point,
that was everywhere here.

They were a big source of the wealth
of British Columbia.

They still are.

There's a big logging industry.

So I made this proposal for this column.
I don't call it a tree. I call it a column.

It's 100 feet tall, 5 feet in diameter,

and it's made of panels that are cast.

Vancouver today is developing very quickly,

and it's sort of like a gold rush
for condominium building.

Each development is supposed to have
a public art component.

You want to find a way to make something that
is for that site but is also a good work of art.

That's the hard part.

[soft synth music]

- I'm gonna try it there.

- Do you want me to hold onto the other side?

- No.

- Ok.

[Liz Magor] In 1968, I was 20 years old.

I went for two years to New York to study design,
and I started going to galleries.

- That looks about right.

[ Hobbs] I would just say we put them
all up, and then--

- All right.

- and then we consider--

- Yeah.

[Liz Magor] So there were lots of times
in galleries where I got this feeling of focus.

It's like feeling a muscle of attention
and observation that-- so I thought art

is--is interesting.

Art is interesting, but I didn't quite think
I was gonna do it.

[Hammering]

But when I dropped out of the design school
and came back to Vancouver,

I was hanging around with a lot of artists.

They were all guys.

They were all painters, guy painters,

and so I worked alongside 
my friends, watching them.

They were making real art.

I was making little things.

Then I started to focus on them more till they
became more interesting and more complex.

- Maybe, uh, 4 inches this way towards me.

I think that's a good place...

[Liz Magor] They started to rival
the kind of paintings that my friends were doing.

- I don't even remember my first exhibition here

except that you had just opened
the gallery, right?

- You were my--you were the first solo show.

- Was I?

- Yeah.

- I mean, coming up as an artist, like, you--

you were just wildly important to me
and my friends.

My friends at least are abuzz that you're here.

[sounds of traffic]

[indistinct chatter]

All these below-the-radar impulses that

I'm looking for all the time, these are things
that exist in our daily life,

and they are with us.

We wake up with these small worries and these
small concerns.

One of those worries or anxieties is the stuff
that you have around you.

"Can I pay for it" is a problem,

but once you get it, then 
there's the storage problems,

maintenance problems, dusting.

Maintaining the conditions that are good
for this kind of not very logical,

not rational, uncalled for--nobody's asking me
to do this.

I'm barely asking me to do this,

so to maintain that over years, 
I've really tried to overlook

the relationship between my making of something

and its journey out to exhibition.

I don't want images of people liking
or not liking.

I don't want to know about it.

[crowd clapping and cheering]

[birds chirping]

I would be surprised if 99% of the artists you
talk to don't say, "Death really interests me."

[laughs]

[Scraping]

Part of the work of being an artist is that
you are always contemplating

the beginning of something 
and the end of something.

There's a whole bunch of births and deaths
every day in the studio.

[acoustic strumming]

Some people sort of die before they do die.

They die while they're still alive, so you know
a question is is there life before death?

That's really the question.

So if I look at the different choices
you have of how to spend your life,

it seems interesting to find a 
way where you hire yourself--

not quite hire yourself-- where you give
yourself your own program.

♪ ♪

I'm doing my own assignments.

That's my definition of art actually.

Art isn't a material, it's not a medium,

it's not a certain product.

It is the choices I've been able to make.

[soft electronic music]

♪ ♪