José León Cerrillo: Pt II

II.


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

ART iT: You made a group of works called the “Subtraction Screens,” which I find fascinating because they are so ambiguous. They could be a frame or window, a portal that you walk through, or even an obstruction, in a sense. Seen in images, they also suggest this idea of constantly shifting space, as though the space itself is being moved around.

JLC: The funny thing is that it’s not really the space that’s being moved around, but your position in space. This relates to what we talked about earlier. It’s a way of having the object address the position of the subject in relation to this abstract thing.

ART iT: Do you think of it as staging the space for the viewer?

JLC: Yes. There is a mise-en-scène in the sense that all the works in the room exist in relation to each other and to the space. It’s never interchangeable. Working with the space of the exhibition is integral to the work. That’s why it was imperative for me to see the space in Okayama, because the work sits in direct relation to space and architecture.


Above: Installation view of “The New Psychology” at Andréhn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm, 2014. Below: Place occupied by zero (RAL5022 and RAL3015) (2013), powder coated aluminium, dimensions variable. Both: Courtesy José León Cerrillo and Andréhn-Schiptjenko.

ART iT: What will you do in Okayama?

JLC: It’s still being resolved. I think it will be in relation to the “Subtraction Screens” and the series called “New Psychology.” I will be working in a former school, and I’m thinking of using the whole building. This is the thing about these works. You pointed to these screens as shifting in perception, but I also relate to the sculptures graphically, almost like drawings. They are practically invisible sculptures, because the space they occupy is more of a mental space – like a blueprint in space. It’s very subtle. That translates well to bigger spaces. Once you see it realized, there’s this contradiction where it points to the subject as being in the world, and the question of how we relate to ourselves in the world. It’s these very pointed, subtle ways of dealing with a bigger thing. But it’s not a Richard Serra.

ART iT: Is it almost like an absent mirror, in a sense?

JLC: It could be. There are some works that incorporate two-way mirrors, such that depending on where the light is shining, they become more transparent or more reflective. That certainly makes the work more self-reflexive.

ART iT: The other thing is that in looking at the “Subtraction Screens” as images, they start to resemble the multiple browser and program windows someone might keep open all at the same time on their computer desktop.

JLC: We do look at images of art all the time, and most of our experience of art nowadays is through the computer, so that’s absolutely an extra layer to the work, or an inherent layer to the work.

ART iT: But it’s not necessarily intentional?

JLC: I can’t say no. I do use the computer as a tool, working with architectural and engineering programs. That’s what I meant when I said my relation to sculpture is strangely graphical. As you say, when you see it flat on the screen, it becomes completely flat and you relate it to windows in a computer. But they do function a bit like that in space as well, because if they’re in these shifting positions, they become frames at some point, so it’s a frame in a frame in another frame.


Both: Installation view at Kiria Koula, San Francisco, 2014.

ART iT: How about the “Poem” pieces you showed at Kiria Koula in San Francisco in 2014? Since they were made on transparent panels, they had a similar nesting effect. The way they were lined up in a row along the wall created the possibility for the details of each work to collapse into a shared visual field.

JLC: Yes, or complicate each other, negate each other. It’s like a palimpsest. I started the “Poems” several years ago. It’s basically a compendium of graphical notations that always remain the same but are rearranged differently each time, which I feel allows me to address different media. This again relates to what we were discussing earlier about abstraction and content and language. The works are about the possibility of creating a system of meaning through repetition. As with the idea of shifting space, they point to the poetic act of interpretation, and then they make interpretation into form. In the version you mention, there were six different panels, and they all had the same characters arranged in different manners. So then the poetic act remains in this possibility of interpretation as form.

ART iT: In his book on Poussin’s paintings at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, The Sight of Death, TJ Clark writes about the running figure in the foreground of Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake, who holds his arm up in an awkward position as he runs, as if to make a gesture of warning or alarm. Clark says that, in contrast to the fishermen in the background, for example, this figure transcends narrative and is on the verge of becoming a sign, or becoming language. This suggests to me another way that interpretation can become form.

JLC: But it works for Clark because he’s going to the museum and looking at the painting every day. The figure becomes a sign and is differentiated through that repetition.
It’s funny for me to talk about the works separately, because they all inform each other, but the screens also work primarily because they are repeated. Repetition creates a way of, one, addressing meaning, and, two, addressing difference, because only through repetition can you understand that they are all different. I have another series called “Unstable Examples,” which perhaps exemplifies this idea. It’s always the same small frame, but they are painted differently each time, and thus read differently each time. Even if you were to see them next to each other, you would understand that the supports for the forms may be the same, but are still completely different. It’s the opposite of Clark’s running man, in a sense, because the running man becomes a sign only through his sameness each time. The repetition there is TJ Clark going to the museum each day and thinking about it and looking at it, but the running man stays exactly the same.
So it is something I think about and work with, absolutely. The “Poems” themselves are instances of repetition, and I like this idea that all the work can be a single work developing over time. It’s a work that happens throughout time, rather than just dealing with one space each time. It’s a sculpture through time.

ART iT: I see that with the “Subtraction Screens.” It’s like in calculus, when you calculate the area of a volume by slicing it up. The works give the sense of being parts of a coherent space that has been sliced into individual sections.

JLC: I like that. They are not really voids but they become space, like a pane of glass. It’s empty and full at the same time. It’s like Wittgenstein’s duck-rabbit form, which is both a duck and a rabbit at the same time, only you can’t see them both at the same time, you can only see one or the other.


CARNE (2015), site-specific installation at LIGA, Mexico City, powder coated steel, silkscreens on acetate, silkscreen on cotton paper, varied dimensions. Courtesy José León Cerrillo and LIGA.

ART iT: Speaking of glass panes brings to mind the site-specific installation you made last year for the architectural organization LIGA in Mexico City, Carne (2015), using the glass penthouse on top of their building.

JLC: LIGA is a really interesting organization. It was started by several young architects as a space for them to present work that isn’t necessarily architecture, but at some point they started inviting artists to exhibit as well. In 2008 I did a project called “Oh My Cannibal,” at Dispatch in New York, which drew from Oswald de Andrade’s Manifesto Antropófago, and dealt in particular with Mario Pani and UNAM. I think this was one reason why LIGA was interested in working with me, but I didn’t want to just rehash the same project at another venue. The LIGA building dates from the 1960s and it has a penthouse which is essentially a glass box – a simple grid structure with glass panes – that gives a 360-degree view of the city. I decided to use the structure itself as a support for displaying silkscreen works made by abstracting elements of different buildings, like the murals in buildings that had fallen down in the earthquake of 1985, and parts of the Espacio Escultorico at UNAM. So I cannibalized my own project, and then on top of that I added a spatial structure that mirrored exactly the structure of the glass penthouse. I took the existing structure and just rotated it. So it was a minimal gesture, but maximal in effect. Between notions of the full and the void, and outside and inside, it was like a hyper modernist concept, but then there was the whole city in the background, distorting the purity of the lines.

ART iT: So instead of post-modernism it’s a kind of torqued modernism?

JLC: Yes. The thing with post-modernism is that it turned architecture into a sign, something you could quote. It turned architecture into the hand of the running man. But the idea of torque is good because it’s not that you overturn it. You keep the same center, but just rotate the position a bit.


I | II

José León Cerrillo: Hold Fast to the Void

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