Abraham Cruzvillegas: Pt I

AT THE WATERFALL
By Andrew Maerkle


Installation view, “The Water Trilogy 2: Autodefensión Microtonal Obrera Campesina Estudiantil Metabolista Descalza” at Ginza Maison Hermès Le Forum, Tokyo, 2017. Photo © Nacása & Partners Inc., courtesy Fondation d’entreprise Hermès.

An artist of protean imagination and inventive humor, Abraham Cruzvillegas was born in 1968 in Mexico City, where he continues to live and work. He is best known for his sculptural assemblages and installations made of found materials, such as Indio (1997), a room filled with thousands of Indio beer bottles, or Horizontes / Horizons (2005), comprising objects ranging from golf clubs to sickles and hula hoops that were painted in pink and green bands and arranged on the floor, and his large-scale commission for the Tate Modern Turbine Hall, Empty Lot (2015), for which he constructed a gigantic scaffold for holding planters filled with soil collected from London parks, out of which sprouted, over time, whatever weeds happened to be hidden within. A guiding tenet of Cruzvillegas’s career has been the idea of autoconstrucción, inspired by his experiences living in the Ajusco district of Mexico City, which started out as squatted land and therefore was built up in an ad hoc and continuously ongoing manner. For Cruzvillegas, autoconstrucción is realized through practices of recycling and adapting materials for unconventional purposes, but metaphorically it also extends to the processes by which we opportunistically construct our identities out of elements drawn from our surrounding environments, or the way that we assemble our ideas by collecting hints from our forebears and peers.

Recently, Cruzvillegas has embarked on a new project, “The Water Trilogy,” spanning exhibitions at three venues in three different cities. The trilogy kicked off in April of this year with “The Water Trilogy 1: Ichárhuta: Autodefensión Approximante Vibrante Retroflexe,” held at Galerie Chantal Crousel in Paris, followed later the same month by “The Water Trilogy 2: Autodefensión Microtonal Obrera Campesina Estudiantil Metabolista Descalza,” at Ginza Maison Hermès Le Forum in Tokyo. The final exhibition in the trilogy will open in October at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam as part of the museum’s “Sensory Spaces” series. Together, these exhibitions obliquely touch upon issues of water usage and environmental change, while also opening up to disparate digressions, from microtonal music to Metabolist architecture and the endangered axolotl salamander, which is native to Mexico.

ART iT met with Cruzvillegas prior to the opening of his exhibition in Tokyo to learn more about “The Water Trilogy” and how it relates to the artist’s broader practice.

The Water Trilogy 1: Ichárhuta: Autodefensión Approximante Vibrante Retroflexe” was on view at Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris, from April 1 to May 13. “The Water Trilogy 2: Autodefensión Microtonal Obrera Campesina Estudiantil Metabolista Descalza” was on view at Ginza Maison Hermès Le Forum, Tokyo, from April 21 to July 2. “Sensory Spaces 12: Abraham Cruzvillegas” opens at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, on October 14 and continues through January 28, 2018.

I.

ART iT: In thinking about your work and the context behind the “Water Trilogy,” I keep circling back to the idea of the indigenous as a point of tension between the state, modernization and uniformization on the one hand, and alternate approaches to social organization, land usage and natural resources on the other. In politics and society, this tension has played out in many forms over the years throughout the Americas and across the world – as in the recent Standing Rock protests over the North Dakota Access Pipeline in the US – but it is also relevant to how we consider notions of universal versus local values in art and culture as well. What are your thoughts on this topic?

AC: This is a good starting point for discussing the “Water Trilogy.” I think it’s important for artists to take a proactive attitude toward these problems – one example being Oscar Tuazon, who was actively involved in the Standing Rock protests. From the start, I was thinking about approaching water not as a subject matter but as a real problem – something that is really happening, and not just a metaphor.
Normally artists do it the other way: they approach things as subject matter, and then in the end it becomes a justification for them to get more recognition for their work. It’s not that art always has to be political. Being proactive means first going out and doing things directly at the source of the problem, which means doing things at home, with our friends and relatives; which means discussing the issue as much as possible with everybody, not just going with a placard to a demonstration. Of course that helps too, but it’s not the only way.
On the other hand, it is not my intent to make didactic art. I don’t want to educate people. Art is about learning for myself rather than teaching someone else. I don’t think that art is a tool for communication as such. Quite the opposite – which is probably a contradiction in the eyes of many, but I like accepting this way of thinking. Otherwise, art becomes a service. It is also important that art does not become a caricature of an ethnographic gaze – art that says, “These poor Indians, they are losing their lands, they are destroying their environment, their traditions are on the verge of collapse…,” and so on. Then it’s only them, never us, never me.
Over a decade ago I made an exhibition in Los Angeles in which all the sculptures had titles related to natural catastrophes and the tendency people have of projecting disasters onto external forces. Already there I had a work called Namazu. The mentality is, “Oh, that is the animal that produces the tsunami, not me!” In his book Campo de guerra (2014), the Mexican writer Sergio González Rodríguez analyzed the prevalence of violence and corruption in Mexican society and how it extends systemically from domestic violence at home all the way to drug dealers and the government. That is a real catastrophe. He uses the analogy of anamorphosis, as in Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors (1533), which shows an unidentifiable shape floating in the foreground before two elegant men. When viewed from a certain angle, though, the shape is revealed to be a human skull, a memento mori. So Rodríguez writes that it will never be possible to transform society, or the water crisis, or the crisis of violence, the crisis of drug dealing, the crisis of human trafficking and migration and so on, if we continue looking at things from afar without seeing ourselves as part of the problem. We have to accept that we are part of the problem. I am the problem. I accept it. I am the namazu. Yes, I love it – being the namazu. I am the drug dealer. I am the destroyer. I am the violence. I am you.

ART iT: And what is your next step or action once you make that recognition?

AC: I would prefer to speak about the prior action. I started thinking about approaching water as a learning device because of a specific fact. The neighborhood where I was born and raised in Mexico City, Ajusco, has always had a shortage of water. It was settled illegally, and it has taken the community a long time to get access to basic rights like utilities, schools and markets. The people fighting for these rights are mostly women who organized themselves. My mother was in her 30s when I was born, and she is 74 now. It was not her plan to become an activist. It just happened because of the urgency of all these needs – survival. And it’s not a drama. It’s just the way it is. All these ladies are still very humorous. But recently they found out that a construction company developing a new project in the neighborhood had discovered a well with lots of water. The company tried to hide the well from the authorities by covering it up and building a pipe to drain the water into the sewer. They were throwing away clean water in a place with chronic water shortage! So the people got together to protest. They have sat at the site for over two years to halt the construction. They have been repeatedly beaten and taken away by force. The government uses the army and police to protect the construction company and not the people. When the company argued that the water was bad, the protestors took samples to universities in Mexico and the US to confirm that it was potable. This is a group of 70-year-old ladies, most of whom are illiterate. But they organized seminars to inform themselves on the issues so that they could fight back. The most beautiful tool possible is a learning device. So, what’s the next step? Then you. Then me, myself.
But I’m not a politician. I’m an artist. I use the tools I have to make my things – which are chaotic, stupid, useless – and share them with whoever wants to find something they can apply to their own circumstances. It’s not that I’m saying art is universal. Art comes from local things. The local for me is what I have in my hand. And I’m not universal. I’m very local. But I think I can share with you the source of the problem, for instance, and I think you can understand it.


Horizontes (Part 1 of 3) (2005), acrylic enamel glossy pink paint and chalk-board green paint on 266 found objects, dimensions variable. Courtesy Abraham Cruzvillegas and kurimanzutto, Mexico City.

ART iT: The indigenous also reveals the double standards in how rights and entitlements are protected under the legal framework of the state. All too often, we find that for certain people, rights and entitlements do not align perfectly. It’s easy for the state to say, “Customarily this is your land, but now we need to run a pipeline through it.”

AC: Absolutely. Their attitude is, we are entitled not to entitle you. But it’s our right, and we entitle ourselves. It is not something that should be given. My mother transformed herself over the course of her life, and now she runs a neighborhood learning association. She does not teach anybody. She’s learning with the community about exactly what you mention: their rights. And also how to say no, for instance. They actually held a meeting at the site of the well with people who came from Arizona to talk about their different problems. Of course they are different, until you get to the point of rights, and then it’s human – maybe not universal, but it is human. And of course this is when things can collapse, too. Culturally there is no real connection among them, but in any case they can speak with each other, so collapse can be good, too.

ART iT: In the past you purposely tried to avoid narrative or symbolic elements in your work, but does water have some kind of special significance in the “Water Trilogy”?

AC: Yes, of course. I constantly change my ideas. I never repeat a project. Wherever I go, I always make something new. It’s not just about making new things. It’s also about learning. With each new project, I try to keep learning from the local, and also try to learn about myself in the local. As you know, one of my main concepts or platforms has been the idea of autoconstrucción. I think of it as scaffolding, which can be changed in shape and rearranged according to every new need. For example, I have altered this scaffolding by referring to it instead as autodestrucción, self-destruction, or autoconfusión, self-confusion, and so on. It’s about trying to continuously change through learning, and in this process I am now trying to move from autoconstrucción as a platform to taking a more narrative approach. But in fact I think this new approach is also looser, because it’s not about me. It’s not about my biography. It takes my experience as a material – as a reference or tool – but I’m not talking about myself or about anything, even. I refer to many local things like the namazu or the Nakagin Capsule Tower, but the project is not about them. I do not want to be didactic. So the narrative allows me to have a wider reach, to put things together that ordinarily wouldn’t share the same space, like traditional huasteco music from Mexico together with the namazu together with Isamu Noguchi, the artist who was not Japanese but American, and with everyday life here and there, in Mexico or wherever, as well as this beautiful building we are in, designed by Renzo Piano. You might not realize because we are surrounded by it, but Piano is super present in the work, and I made many decisions in response to his building. I’m no architecture fan, but I think it is important to work with the environment, and not against it.

I | II | III

Abraham Cruzvillegas: At the Waterfall

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