Tauba Auerbach in "Bodies of Knowledge" - Season 11 | Art21

TAUBA AUERBACH: I want to
learn new things constantly.

And I'm always trying to
find the pattern behind things.

I've educated myself about
a number of scientific or

mathematical
principles through crafts

like weaving and paper marbling.

♪ethereal ambient music♪

To marble paper, it's all
about relationships and ratios.

You have to mix your paints so
that they float on the water and

so that they spread out –

not too much, not too little.

♪undulating ethereal music♪

There's a limit to how
controlled it can be.

♪♪♪

I like that idea quite a lot of
cultivating your sensitivity in

this really
practiced, purposeful way.

And I've used paper marbling as
the source material for a lot of

my public works.

♪♪♪

It seems appropriate to me
to work in a lot of different

materials and
media and processes...

because I'm focusing
on connectivity and the

relationship between
lots of different things.

Every time people
come to my studio,

I like to show
them these shelves,

because there are just so many
treasures on them and things

that I like to live
with and think with.

Some ashes of artwork
that burned in a fire.

This is a sea sponge.

The water pressure where this
creature lives is very extreme.

The architecture of this
skeleton has been studied for

its strength.

It's a powerfully
strong lattice shape.

I would say I had a really
profound experience with this

puzzle, actually.

It takes over a thousand moves
to disentangle this bar from

these rings.

I got to where there
was just one ring left.

It turned out that having
one ring left was sort of the

equivalent of having
gone as far as possible

into a maze in the
wrong direction.

[laughs]

And I had to
completely backtrack,

put all the rings back on, and
then take them off a slightly

different way.

And so I felt like this
puzzle taught me a lot about the

assumptions that you make
about progress along the way.

♪ethereal synth music♪

I am quite compelled
by things that just barely work.

The near-impossibility is key.

I stumbled upon this beading
technique

via a chemist from Taiwan.

He's been using this
technique to model molecules,

and in his models, the beads are
the bonds between the atoms.

Now I'm trying to do something
of my own with the technique.

I'm interested in the edges of
where a system coheres and

where it starts to
fray and come apart,

and also where the edges of our
understanding and comprehension

fray and start to come apart...

like my own limitations and
then some more collective limitations,

either because we
haven't gotten there yet

or it's just really out of
bounds for the human mind.

[mouse clicking]

♪choral singing
playing from computer♪

The kind of learning I'm really
interested in is not just to

learn a fact but to change how
I digest and think about all

[chuckling] future facts.

For example, my friend Cameron
sent me this Bulgarian state

television choir record.

♪singing in Bulgarian♪

-[Tauba VO] I felt like there
were sounds in there that had

that effect on me or that I
could never come back from,

in the best possible way.

The first time I was told about
the idea of different sizes of

infinity, that was an
idea I never came back from.

♪Bulgarian
singing continues♪

Encountering the idea of
four-dimensional space and the

shapes that inhabit it has been
a tool for retuning my gaze,

retuning my imagination.

Ideally, it would be nice to
make something that isn't just

an image that a
person might remember,

but an image that has a tiny
effect on all images after that.

I love painting so much,

and there's so many different
ways to approach it as

a technology.

♪energetic
oscillating synths♪

During college, I was just
looking for a summer job,

and I thought, "I'm
gonna try the sign shop!"

I worked at New Bohemia Signs in
San Francisco as an apprentice

and assistant for
about three years,

and they were just
beautiful hand-painted signs.

♪♪♪

In sign painting,
if you go too fast,

you're gonna be sloppy.

But then if you go too
slowly to try to be perfect,

it really doesn't
look very graceful.

I really learned a lot about
finding a kind of sweet spot,

which is something I think about
a lot in lots of different ways.

♪♪♪

I love painting and I
think I'll always do it,

but I think I just select the
medium that's gonna serve the

idea best, so
sometimes that's painting,

but a painting can't do the same
thing that a piece of glass can,

for example.

So when I felt like a certain
set of ideas called for working

in glass, I went and
learned how to flame-work glass.

That's my approach to
materials and media.

[rumbling and churning]

The Wave Organ is one
of my favorite places

in San Francisco.

It's pretty close
to where I grew up.

[rumbling and churning]

Essentially, it's, like, a
whole bunch of pipes that are

half-submerged in the water, and
at different levels of the tide,

you get different
sounds out of them.

I think I'm so attached to it
because it exists across a

boundary of air
and water and sand.

[rumbling and churning]

The whole instrument is played
by the sort of instability of

this boundary, and it's
different every time I go.

When I talk about trying to
cultivate the right state of

mind, that's one of the
things I'm trying to get to --

to be somewhere that
isn't a hard edge.

♪wonky single
notes playing♪

♪wonky organ music playing♪

-[Tauba] I think
that sounds good too.

What do you think of how
long I hold that note there?

-[Cameron]I think that was good.

But I did think that the
timing was a little...

-iffy.
-[Tauba] Wonky?

-[Cameron] On that one.

-[Tauba] Mm-hm.

-[Tauba VO] The Auerglass is a
two-person interdependent pump

organ that I made with my
friend Cameron Mesirow,

who performs under
the name Glasser,

and so it's A-U-E-R, glass.

♪Auerglass playing♪

The Auerglass started when
Cameron and I decided we wanted

to make an instrument that
required cooperation between two

people to play.

♪♪♪

Each player only
has half a keyboard,

so there's a four-octave
keyboard that's been divided up

between the two sides
in alternating notes --

one has C, the next
one C sharp, et cetera.

♪♪♪

Each player pumps air for
the other player's notes.

Cameron's way of putting it is
that we have to breathe for one another.

[cheers and applause]

♪Auerglass playing♪

Playing the Auerglass feels
just barely not impossible.

The instrument has this quality
of near-symmetry but just off by

a click that feels like a
really activating relationship.

-It's hard!

-Yeah, it's hard.

[cheers and applause]

-[Tauba VO] It's great when
we achieve that synchronicity,

but I feel like the times when
we fumble in our performances,

I end up being
really fond of them.

♪Auerglass playing♪

I do a lot of drawings that
involve this knit structure,

and I often figuratively lose
the thread when I'm drawing,

I lose the rhythm.

They're really
fast, spontaneous work.

And then sometimes, I get kind
of fixated on completing one

long connected form that has a
set of changing rules to it.

It's almost impossible not to
go into a kind of trance state.

♪Auerglass playing♪

Often, when I'm
drawing, I ask myself,

"Can I move from the wrist?

Can I move from the
fingers, from the elbow,

from the shoulder, from
the center of my chest?"

♪♪♪

I feel like a better
thinker when I draw.

There's so much wisdom embedded
in techniques and procedures for

crafts passed from
person to person.

I think that if you're a person
who marbles end papers for books

for decades, you
know just as much

about viscosity and
flow as a scientist.

But you know it through your
fingertips and your senses,

and in a different way.

♪♪♪

The body is a
valuable thinking tool.

In the past, I was really moving
through the world from my head

primarily.

But now, the enterprise
is more about trust,

and a change for me in the last
decade is to draw on my own body

for knowledge.

♪♪♪

[cheers and applause]

♪ ethereal ambient music ♪