Fred Wilson in “Structures” - Season 3 | “Art in the Twenty-First Century"

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?"