José León Cerrillo: Pt I

HOLD FAST TO THE VOID
By Andrew Maerkle


Place occupied by zero (RAL5022 and RAL3015) (2013), powder coated aluminium, dimensions variable. Courtesy José León Cerrillo and Andréhn-Schiptjenko.

Based in Mexico City, José Léon Cerrillo investigates the ramifications of abstraction as a failed form. His “Substraction Screens,” for example, are free-standing rectilinear “frames” which both evoke the legacy of minimalist sculpture and suggest an attempt to flatten space. In other cases he has made large-scale architectural interventions that create the sense that space itself has the potential to shift or rotate along multiple axes. In turn, such works question abstraction’s role in the formation of the subject, whose position is destabilized in the encounter with the work.

In Mexico City, Cerrillo has exhibited at galleries and institutions including Proyectos Monclova, where he made the exhibitions “Hotel Eden” in 2009 and “The Wittgenstein Suite,” in collaboration with the Swedish performance artist Saralunden, in 2013, respectively, as well as at joségarcía and at LIGA, where he had solo exhibitions in the past year. Internationally, he has had solo shows at venues including Andréhn-Schiptjenko in Stockholm, Kiria Koula in San Francisco and Dispatch in New York, and was included in the New Museum Triennial in 2015. He is also included in this year’s Gwangju Biennale.

Cerrillo’s work is being presented for the first time in Japan at the Okayama Art Summit 2016, “Development,” where he has made a new large-scale, site-specific installation. ART iT met with the artist when he came to Japan for a site-visit earlier this year, and spoke with him about the ideas informing his practice.

The Okayama Art Summit 2016 remains on view at multiple venues in Okayama through November 27.

I.


Installation view at Okayama Art Summit 2016. Photo courtesy José León Cerrillo.

ART iT: Let me begin by saying that I have never seen your works in person, so there is a necessary gap between my impressions of them viewed through images and how they are in actuality. That said, one question that came to mind as I was researching your practice is: Where do we take modernism from here?
Over the past decades there has been a justifiable critique of the hegemonic aspects of modernism, but with the current resurgence of nationalist, fundamentalist and exclusionary politics around the world, we must also recognize that modernism proposed certain values that are worth upholding. I feel we cannot allow ourselves to be complacent about being “post-modern” – debatable in the first place – and must continue to reconsider the principles of modernism in a complex way. What are your thoughts on these issues?

JLC: Well, Latin American modernism has a very particular history. Or perhaps it’s the other way around: Latin America – especially Mexico and Brazil – has a very particular relationship to modernism. I’ve made works that deal with this history directly in some cases and indirectly in others. The Mexican Revolution at the start of the 20th century lasted almost 30 years. When it finally ended in the late 1930s, the country was in complete turmoil and totally divided. It was in this context that the ideas of modernism were used to propagate the idea of the “new Mexican”: to unite Mexico to the extent possible, and to centralize the nation in the capital. This ideology propagated the construction of many buildings, in particular the campus of the national university, UNAM, designed by the famous architect, Mario Pani. All this happened under the pretense of forming the “progressive Mexican.” But what is interesting to me is that of course it failed, because, as you note, this is exactly what led to the implementation of hegemony in Mexico, and allowed a single party to gain control and establish a dictatorship that lasted for the next 70 years. Of course it’s simplistic to put it in these terms, but there is some correspondence there.
Parallel to this, the image of the progressive Mexican was somehow contaminated by the local integration of modernist ideas. For example, Oswald de Andrade published his Manifesto Antropófago in Brazil in 1928, and similar things happened in Mexico as well. There was this idea of digesting imported ideas of progress and modernism, as well as the problematic idea of the universal man, and in doing so making them new in relation to the local, instead of the universal.
But in terms of your question, it’s hard to say where we can take modernism from here. Mexico is an incredibly chaotic place. Modernism was always used as a tool for development, and now it’s difficult to uphold the pillars of modernism with the way capital has overtaken it. Modernism brings development, but then capital insinuates an overarching control that dilutes the initial values of progress.

ART iT: What is the relation to the modernist canon in your own work, which plays with abstract forms and elements of constructivism?

JLC: In relation to my work, I always think of modernism as a failed form. But it’s not about fetishizing the beauty of ruins or anything like that. I am interested in questioning how one can use this failed form to think about abstraction. That is, we can consider abstraction to be an always already failed form that simply points to different ways of thinking. It’s a tool for positioning the subject within the world. We’re skirting dangerous territory, because it’s easy to slip into philosophical talk here, but for me abstraction is precisely a way to mediate the subject in the world, and binary oppositions like modernist questions of form and content are dated. It’s something that still permeates the work, certainly, but always through this idea of subject formation.

ART iT: Do you say that abstraction is an “always already failed form” because it can never be purely abstract? And is that why it is implicated in the idea of subject formation?

JLC: That’s right. Abstraction is really a pointer or marker indicating a way of thinking. For example, one has to position oneself as a subject in front of abstraction, and this way of positioning oneself can be translated into a way of thinking about and dealing with the world. It has to do with experience, it has to do with perception, and all these things continually point to the subject – and one can argue that the subject is an abstract construction as well. My main interest lies in how we talk about this. My work is always language-based.


Above: Installation view, “Hotel Eden,” Mexico City, 2009. Below: BLOCKAGES (2009), wood, MDF, lacquer, dimensions variable. Both: Courtesy the artist and joségarcía mx.

ART iT: Is there a lineage or trajectory of abstraction that helped you arrive at these conclusions?

JLC: My thinking developed more through literature and text, or even architecture, for that matter, rather than through actual sculptural work per se. In the past my projects were always preceded by a text, usually written by someone else. There would be a text that seemed relevant to me, and then the work would be generated from the text. It was a parallel way of working. I find that the work is incredibly circular. Sometimes I use elements of a past project in a new project, and most of the work is serialized. So there’s a continuum rather than a lineage, I think.

ART iT: What kind of texts are you talking about?

JLC: It varies. For example, in 2008 I made an exhibition called “Hotel Eden,” which took as its basis the book by Pierre Guyotat, Eden, Eden, Eden. Formally, Guyotat’s text interested me because it has no grammar or punctuation. It’s a long run-on sentence. Thematically, it’s a very violent text dealing with the war in Algeria, and it basically unfolds as a sequence of violent acts. It’s a short book, but difficult to read cover to cover. Yet, strangely enough, it works as an absolute text, because you only have to read a bit to grasp the whole. In subverting the codes of grammar, there is a possibility for total or immediate communication. So this text generated several installations or sculptural objects, and a series of what I call “Blockages” – a cross between a sculptural object and a sign. These are blocks that have been hollowed out to form words, so you read through the void, and the void becomes the word.
The thing is that the texts I use operate in a phantasmagoric way, because they are always behind the work or in the work. It’s not important for me to directly present the text, although of course I am happy to talk about it. For the “Hotel Eden” exhibition I wrote a text as a press release that went with the work and was part of the work itself. It functioned as a poem directly addressing the book in relation – in this case, yes – to high modernist ideals. At some points it talked about Adorno, and at others Wittgenstein, but always in a poetic way, almost as characters who circulate through the work. There was also a performance that accompanied the exhibition, for which the Swedish musician Saralunden performed a series of songs we composed together out of Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Color. It was a very pop-synth take on Wittgenstein, and it was performed entirely in shadow throughout the exhibition, giving it a quasi-Platonic atmosphere. So with “Hotel Eden” there are already multiple texts that accompany the exhibition.
I mentioned continuums and circularity, and the thing about these texts is also that at different points of the working process or in my life I come across texts that of course have some relation to each other. With “Hotel Eden,” it was Guyotat and Wittgenstein, and then Wittgenstein became important, and over a period from 2008 to 2013, Saralunden and I ended up making 13 Wittgenstein songs after starting with three – a full album, essentially. During that time, I would incorporate the project into different exhibitions, always in the same way, with the performance done in shadows or behind projections. So if you want to talk about modernism – since modernism always deals with modular systems, the project became a way of thinking modularly, because I would take things from past projects and incorporate them into new contexts.


Installation view of Abstract Rules for a Concrete Action (marble) and Abstract Rules for a Concrete Action (granite) (both 2014), silkscreen on glass, marble, and steel hardware, and silkscreen on glass, granite, and steel hardware, respectively; glass dimensions: 120 x 120 cm each; marble and granite dimensions: 30 x 150 cm. Courtesy the artist and joségarcía mx.

ART iT: But that’s also a linguistic structure, right?

JLC: And poetic, which is very important for me to have.

I | II

José León Cerrillo: Hold Fast to the Void

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