Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle in "Ecology" - Season 4 - "Art in the Twenty-First Century" | Art21

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.