On Valentines Day I listened to Abraham Cruzvillegas speak about Robert Smithson at Dia. I thought it was perfect for the holiday, a compassionate, subjective, rizomatic discourse on a day about connectivity, the untouchable, anti-capitalist personal identity, love- the only thing we truly own and that which unites us all. Abraham poetically linked glass, maping and Atlantis, he spoke about William Carlos Williams saying that all poems are about objects, Abraham's parents were shown to us, and they mapped, in their own words, the construction of their home. I appreciated the corporal simplicity of saying this is my mom and dad. I also appreciated that he wanted to break free of language, oh my god, excuse the expression, but it was so similar to the conversation that I had with Joey, Shelby and Julia about four weeks ago where the end result was that all art needed to be necessary, and that what is needed right now is the rebellion of zero, we have been about the attitude and force, the frenetic and commercial, and we really need that which cannot be named, or touched, we need that which is between two people, the exclusive, we need something outside of the repetition, or the boarder defined, we need something so big that it's small. This talk took those thoughts, and engulfed them, activated them and went further. I was very impressed and pleased.
Then I met him at the New Museum while working, it was a real joy to share with him my reaction. He is extremely, deeply, kind, a true artist. I think that we work with similar concepts, or he listed concepts that I related to, either way I respect him. During his talk at the museum he spoke about not liking nostalgia, I wanted to say that I made a piece about that five years ago called 'Before the Kiss A.K.A. the Creatures of Nostalgia' that slandered nostalgia as though it were a demon. Since then I understand the need, but I always have an eye out about it. He also spoke about creating hands off real porn in LA, he even used the word spontaneous, it was so similar to my own points in Narrator, I wanted to cry, or shake. The promotional card for Narrator talked about juxtaposing fabricated actions with spontaneous ones, and my performers who had sex on stage were told to 'perform' as little as possible, with a focus on privacy and sincerity on stage. Incredible.
ABRAHAM CRUZVILLEGAS
Interview by Arden Decker-Parks
. . .
abraham cruzvillegas, la invencible, 2002, mixed media
Abraham Cruzvillegas prefers to be called an “intergalactic indigenous,” seemingly for his ability to walk the line between the local and the global—socially, economically, and politically. His multi-media objects are made of found materials, or as he calls them, “leftovers” (feathers, sheep dung, knives, bacon, maguey plants, etc.) from both his homeland, Mexico, and any number of international locales. The materials are joined together in constructions whose inspiration is drawn as readily from Duchamp as from the collaboratively-built homes of his childhood. These incoherent assemblages involve juxtaposing the organic and the manufactured, the handmade and the mass-produced, making them seem to have landed in the gallery as a result of a series of clandestine and possibly prodigious events. As a sculptor and writer, Cruzvillegas began as a central participant in a new wave of conceptual art practice in Mexico City during the late 1980s and 90s, when he first studied under Gabriel Orozco. He has since become a fixture in the global conceptual assemblage scene and has exhibited at the 25th São Paulo Bienal (2002), the 50th Venice Biennale (2003), the New Museum of Contemporary Art (“Unmonumental,” 2007), and the Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA) in Glasgow, where he opened the latest installment of his long-term project “Autoconstrucción.”
Arden Decker-Parks: This year marks the fortieth anniversary of 1968, a pivotal moment for Mexico and the world. Coincidentally, this is also the year of your birth. Could you talk a bit about growing up in Mexico following the tragic events of 1968 and how it impacted your work?
ABRAHAM CRUZVILLEGAS: The brutal repression of students in Tlatelolco Square on October 2nd, 1968 is a black mark in the history of my country. It pointed to the death of the old political system and to an awareness for a possible democratic future, not yet achieved. Brilliant minds got together [to fight] against the government and for change at all levels of society. Since then, many young people have been looking for more equal conditions for labor, education, health, and culture. The events and consequences of 1968 deeply affected the development of culture and society and haven’t quite stopped doing so. The conditions for creation were considerably surveilled, with a paternalist control over every sentence, every brushstroke, and every image. But these circumstances also provoked diverse and autonomous [reactionary] practices, sometimes ideologized, other times just attempting to do things in a free way, open to non-traditional languages and techniques. Some artists created without funds, without support or collaboration, except for that which came from other artists and colleagues, and slowly, cultural institutions began giving money and scholarships. Meanwhile, independent spaces and projects developed different strategies, [providing] evidence of the rich, plural activity during all these years.
abraham cruzvillegas, aeropuerto alterno, 2002, wood, knives
Decker-Parks: How do you perceive your relationship to the Mexican conceptual tradition, if at all?
CRUZVILLEGAS: I don’t perceive any Mexican conceptual tradition. I see some individuals attempting to produce knowledge from the field of art, and I’m grateful for their work, ideas, and energy. I prefer to invoke concrete persons and events that have influenced my work and intentions, and it goes back long before the so-called “conceptual” tradition and far beyond the field of visual art. In the Foucauldian sense, I think of this as my genealogy: Víctor Jara, Germán List Arzubide, José José, Xavier Villaurrutia, Héctor Lavoe, Adolfo Best Maugard, Jimmie Durham, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, David Medalla, Maurice Blanchot, Hannah Höch, Piero Manzoni, Jean-Luc Godard, Lucio Fontana, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Francis Picabia, Werner Herzog, Jorge Luis Borges, José Guadalupe Posada, Marcel Duchamp, Bruce Nauman, Alighiero e Boetti, François Rabelais, Eva Hesse, Walter Benjamin, Constantin Brancusi, Robert Smithson, Josef Albers, Lynda Benglis, Hélio Oiticica, André Cadere, Rosalind Krauss, Melquiades Herrera, Luis Buñuel, Lucy Lippard, Kurt Schwitters, Arthur Cravan, Miguel Covarrubias, Louise Bourgeois, Alfred Jarry, Sol LeWitt, Robert Rauschenberg, Michelangelo Antonioni, Alexander Calder, Gabriel Orozco, Carl Lumholtz, Yoko Ono, Dan Graham, Harry Smith, Robert Morris, Lawrence Weiner, Buckminster Fuller, Roberto Bolaño, Marius de Zayas, Erik Satie, John Cage, Julián Carrillo, Tom Zé, etc.
Decker-Parks: Is there a connective thread running through this genealogy?
CRUZVILLEGAS: I always wanted to state my belonging to something I call a delirious chain of delirious facts. I like to feel part of a chaotic thread of facts, related to the possibility of widening our understanding of reality in a non-linear way. Then, it’s not a thread but many threads in a disastrous hank, ready to knit with.
abraham cruzvillegas, canon enigmatico a 108 voces, 2005, buoys, wire, rope
Decker-Parks: Your work relies heavily on the juxtaposition of the handcrafted and the mass-produced and is therefore often described as relating to a DIY aesthetic. In which ways, if any, did this quality grow out of your experiences in Mexico? Do you feel that it’s fair to understand your use of ephemeral and found materials as a product of the Latin American economic condition?
CRUZVILLEGAS: I don’t see my work as being related to a DIY aesthetic. In fact, it’s hard for me to relate it to any particular aesthetic will. I think it’s fair to understand my work through the use of some materials in terms of local economic systems, depending on where I’m working and with whom. It’s possible that my relationships with particular objects and processes are determined by my own education and context, but this is circumstantial. The most important thing for me is to make work independent of my biography; even when the prime matter of it is my own experience, thoughts, and practice, it must be autonomous and free. I make works that do not talk about me, but do not talk about anything else either. They are supposed to be speechless and mute. They neither communicate nor express anything except that which the viewer wants or thinks. There’s no chance for mistakes or misunderstanding.
abraham cruzvillegas, ront point, 2006, glass bottles, aluminum, acrylic paint, tape
Decker-Parks: In works such as Los Danzantes and Slow Growth (both 2004), you inject references to Mexico with fresh approaches to material and symbolism. Has this artistic acknowledgment of your Mexican background affected the reception of your work, especially considering that you are often described as an international conceptualist?
CRUZVILLEGAS: I like to play with titles, as they are sometimes used as keys for the “understanding” of the work. None of the references such as names for specific works are linked to any narrative, nor do they spark or activate any hidden meaning, as I usually try not to deal with meanings, much less try to hide anything. In some cases, the titles refer to the names of my favorite bars and cantinas, the names of beers and other drinks (as in Los Danzantes, my preferred mescal), the names of the streets of my changing neighborhoods, the names of diseases, people, places, catastrophes such as earthquakes, tsunamis, or hurricanes, or politicians’ nicknames. When I refer to the production of a self-portrait, it is almost always in a way in which the viewers reflect themselves in the work, imagining their own individual identities, as I’ve been trying to do all these years. I would prefer to be considered an intergalactic indigenous, instead of an international conceptualist.
Decker-Parks: Collaboration and participation are also essential components. How, if at all, do you relate your work to the broader dialogue of relational aesthetics?
CRUZVILLEGAS: I like Nicolas Bourriaud’s book, Relational Aesthetics (2002), which has fantastic examples, such as Rirkrit Tiravanjia and Gabriel Orozco. Some other references, not necessarily from art history, have also strongly influenced my practice and my language, as happened with my long-term project called “Autoconstrucción.” Here, I’m talking again about my experience of growing up in a particular environment as a trigger for shaping ideas and experience into sculptural processes. The house in Mexico City where I was born and grew up was built in a collaborative way over almost forty years and is not yet finished. It is composed chaotically, building, transforming, changing, adapting, canceling, and destroying itself, with the participation of every member of the family, along with relatives, neighbors, friends, and builders. Here, capitalist efficiency has proved not to be the best [strategy] for cultural production. Like much self-building around the world, my house shows the evidence of a social clash and uneven wealth distribution, but also of the ingenuity and the wisdom that [follow from] specific needs.
Decker-Parks: On that note, could you discuss the most recent installment of your “Autoconstrucción” project, which you just completed in Glasgow?
CRUZVILLEGAS: In “Autoconstrucción: Sound,” my exhibition at the Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA), there are some sculptures made in Cove Park during the summer, improvising with materials from that context: wool, sheep shit, chicken wire, discarded furniture, cardboard, stones, grass, and my own hair. I’ve constructed unplanned assemblages, testing new dialogues with odd, contradictory objects and prime matter, inspired by my parents’ house in Mexico City as an improvised space, chaotic, ugly, made without budget, ideas, or plans, and definitely unfinished. The room attempts to be a messy landscape overpopulated with objects; as the groups of objects and materials will be chaotic and unstable, the whole will make walking through unstable as well. All of the sculptures hang form the ceiling or lie directly over the floor. Also, while in Cove Park, I wrote some lyrics about my house. They were written in a hybrid combination of inspiring sources, such as romantic popular music, folk, bolero, dub, rock’n’roll, salsa, reggae, Brazilian music, corrido, punk, ska, cumbia, trova, funk, protest music, commercial pop, norteño, hip-hop, etc. Then, I asked bands from Glasgow to create the music for the eighteen sets of lyrics, and we recorded eighteen songs, all eclectic. When the album was ready, I played the music in the streets and squares of Glasgow with a sound system constructed as a mobile sculpture. This street cart was made in collaboration with John O’Hara in a workshop in Bridgeton, which is part of a project called The Common Wheel, whose members present themselves as follows: “We exist to provide meaningful activity for people with mental illness by recycling and repairing old bicycles.” The sound system was made with parts from used, discarded, or old bikes and diverse furniture, pipes, sticks, and carpets, recycling bits and pieces. The sound system directly refers to people riding in the streets of Kingston, Jamaica in the 1970s and 80s, but also to DJ and MC practices around the world, and especially the Sonidero tradition of Mexico City. Important parts of this project are collaborative and are created in a contaminated cultural environment, which means shifting something personal, from my own experience, to a local platform and circumstance. For example, the appropriation of the lyrics by the bands into their own subjectivity was central for the collaboration. Earlier, for other projects, I cooperated with people from diverse contexts and fields: craft makers, historians, professors, physicians, builders, students, and artists. The sound system is in the largest room of the CCA, playing the music of the album. Everybody is allowed to ride it in the space. There is a video, showing a documentation of the spaces where the music was played in the streets. This was made with a fixed camera on the vehicle, registering its transit in Glasgow, randomly capturing people’s lives and activities. The video is projected directly onto the walls of the room from a projector attached to a pole on the mobile sculpture. I wrote the lyrics myself with a pencil on the walls of the room, around the sound system.
abraham cruzvillegas, ac mobile, 2008, customized bicycle, steel pipes, wood, cardboard, cables, car battery, speakers, mirrors, car stereo, video projector, dvd player, tea flask, bell, horn
Decker-Parks: Given the current global economic situation, how do you think the role of the art object and of the artist are going to change?
CRUZVILLEGAS: Recently, I met designer Michael Marriott, who used to wear a jumper with a printed slogan that describes his own practice: Shop local. As a statement, it is powerful and meaningful. As an everyday practice, it is something that goes into a humble territory, which means that it is important to support regional survival strategies, more than fighting against transnational business and corporations. In that way, producing in a local manner may allow creation to describe specific contexts and structures. Ideas are individual, local, and eccentric, not global, even when the individuals who produce them could be surfing the globe, without a national, ethnic, or group identity. Working in a collaborative way—no matter the field or the reach of the extent—will always allow artists to extend, via sharing risks and joy, the ability to produce knowledge in small-cell organic developments.
. . .
2009 http://www.museomagazine.com/938447/ABRAHAM-CRUZVILLEGAS
Interview by Arden Decker-Parks
. . .
Abraham Cruzvillegas prefers to be called an “intergalactic indigenous,” seemingly for his ability to walk the line between the local and the global—socially, economically, and politically. His multi-media objects are made of found materials, or as he calls them, “leftovers” (feathers, sheep dung, knives, bacon, maguey plants, etc.) from both his homeland, Mexico, and any number of international locales. The materials are joined together in constructions whose inspiration is drawn as readily from Duchamp as from the collaboratively-built homes of his childhood. These incoherent assemblages involve juxtaposing the organic and the manufactured, the handmade and the mass-produced, making them seem to have landed in the gallery as a result of a series of clandestine and possibly prodigious events. As a sculptor and writer, Cruzvillegas began as a central participant in a new wave of conceptual art practice in Mexico City during the late 1980s and 90s, when he first studied under Gabriel Orozco. He has since become a fixture in the global conceptual assemblage scene and has exhibited at the 25th São Paulo Bienal (2002), the 50th Venice Biennale (2003), the New Museum of Contemporary Art (“Unmonumental,” 2007), and the Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA) in Glasgow, where he opened the latest installment of his long-term project “Autoconstrucción.”
Arden Decker-Parks: This year marks the fortieth anniversary of 1968, a pivotal moment for Mexico and the world. Coincidentally, this is also the year of your birth. Could you talk a bit about growing up in Mexico following the tragic events of 1968 and how it impacted your work?
ABRAHAM CRUZVILLEGAS: The brutal repression of students in Tlatelolco Square on October 2nd, 1968 is a black mark in the history of my country. It pointed to the death of the old political system and to an awareness for a possible democratic future, not yet achieved. Brilliant minds got together [to fight] against the government and for change at all levels of society. Since then, many young people have been looking for more equal conditions for labor, education, health, and culture. The events and consequences of 1968 deeply affected the development of culture and society and haven’t quite stopped doing so. The conditions for creation were considerably surveilled, with a paternalist control over every sentence, every brushstroke, and every image. But these circumstances also provoked diverse and autonomous [reactionary] practices, sometimes ideologized, other times just attempting to do things in a free way, open to non-traditional languages and techniques. Some artists created without funds, without support or collaboration, except for that which came from other artists and colleagues, and slowly, cultural institutions began giving money and scholarships. Meanwhile, independent spaces and projects developed different strategies, [providing] evidence of the rich, plural activity during all these years.
Decker-Parks: How do you perceive your relationship to the Mexican conceptual tradition, if at all?
CRUZVILLEGAS: I don’t perceive any Mexican conceptual tradition. I see some individuals attempting to produce knowledge from the field of art, and I’m grateful for their work, ideas, and energy. I prefer to invoke concrete persons and events that have influenced my work and intentions, and it goes back long before the so-called “conceptual” tradition and far beyond the field of visual art. In the Foucauldian sense, I think of this as my genealogy: Víctor Jara, Germán List Arzubide, José José, Xavier Villaurrutia, Héctor Lavoe, Adolfo Best Maugard, Jimmie Durham, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, David Medalla, Maurice Blanchot, Hannah Höch, Piero Manzoni, Jean-Luc Godard, Lucio Fontana, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Francis Picabia, Werner Herzog, Jorge Luis Borges, José Guadalupe Posada, Marcel Duchamp, Bruce Nauman, Alighiero e Boetti, François Rabelais, Eva Hesse, Walter Benjamin, Constantin Brancusi, Robert Smithson, Josef Albers, Lynda Benglis, Hélio Oiticica, André Cadere, Rosalind Krauss, Melquiades Herrera, Luis Buñuel, Lucy Lippard, Kurt Schwitters, Arthur Cravan, Miguel Covarrubias, Louise Bourgeois, Alfred Jarry, Sol LeWitt, Robert Rauschenberg, Michelangelo Antonioni, Alexander Calder, Gabriel Orozco, Carl Lumholtz, Yoko Ono, Dan Graham, Harry Smith, Robert Morris, Lawrence Weiner, Buckminster Fuller, Roberto Bolaño, Marius de Zayas, Erik Satie, John Cage, Julián Carrillo, Tom Zé, etc.
Decker-Parks: Is there a connective thread running through this genealogy?
CRUZVILLEGAS: I always wanted to state my belonging to something I call a delirious chain of delirious facts. I like to feel part of a chaotic thread of facts, related to the possibility of widening our understanding of reality in a non-linear way. Then, it’s not a thread but many threads in a disastrous hank, ready to knit with.
Decker-Parks: Your work relies heavily on the juxtaposition of the handcrafted and the mass-produced and is therefore often described as relating to a DIY aesthetic. In which ways, if any, did this quality grow out of your experiences in Mexico? Do you feel that it’s fair to understand your use of ephemeral and found materials as a product of the Latin American economic condition?
CRUZVILLEGAS: I don’t see my work as being related to a DIY aesthetic. In fact, it’s hard for me to relate it to any particular aesthetic will. I think it’s fair to understand my work through the use of some materials in terms of local economic systems, depending on where I’m working and with whom. It’s possible that my relationships with particular objects and processes are determined by my own education and context, but this is circumstantial. The most important thing for me is to make work independent of my biography; even when the prime matter of it is my own experience, thoughts, and practice, it must be autonomous and free. I make works that do not talk about me, but do not talk about anything else either. They are supposed to be speechless and mute. They neither communicate nor express anything except that which the viewer wants or thinks. There’s no chance for mistakes or misunderstanding.
Decker-Parks: In works such as Los Danzantes and Slow Growth (both 2004), you inject references to Mexico with fresh approaches to material and symbolism. Has this artistic acknowledgment of your Mexican background affected the reception of your work, especially considering that you are often described as an international conceptualist?
CRUZVILLEGAS: I like to play with titles, as they are sometimes used as keys for the “understanding” of the work. None of the references such as names for specific works are linked to any narrative, nor do they spark or activate any hidden meaning, as I usually try not to deal with meanings, much less try to hide anything. In some cases, the titles refer to the names of my favorite bars and cantinas, the names of beers and other drinks (as in Los Danzantes, my preferred mescal), the names of the streets of my changing neighborhoods, the names of diseases, people, places, catastrophes such as earthquakes, tsunamis, or hurricanes, or politicians’ nicknames. When I refer to the production of a self-portrait, it is almost always in a way in which the viewers reflect themselves in the work, imagining their own individual identities, as I’ve been trying to do all these years. I would prefer to be considered an intergalactic indigenous, instead of an international conceptualist.
Decker-Parks: Collaboration and participation are also essential components. How, if at all, do you relate your work to the broader dialogue of relational aesthetics?
CRUZVILLEGAS: I like Nicolas Bourriaud’s book, Relational Aesthetics (2002), which has fantastic examples, such as Rirkrit Tiravanjia and Gabriel Orozco. Some other references, not necessarily from art history, have also strongly influenced my practice and my language, as happened with my long-term project called “Autoconstrucción.” Here, I’m talking again about my experience of growing up in a particular environment as a trigger for shaping ideas and experience into sculptural processes. The house in Mexico City where I was born and grew up was built in a collaborative way over almost forty years and is not yet finished. It is composed chaotically, building, transforming, changing, adapting, canceling, and destroying itself, with the participation of every member of the family, along with relatives, neighbors, friends, and builders. Here, capitalist efficiency has proved not to be the best [strategy] for cultural production. Like much self-building around the world, my house shows the evidence of a social clash and uneven wealth distribution, but also of the ingenuity and the wisdom that [follow from] specific needs.
Decker-Parks: On that note, could you discuss the most recent installment of your “Autoconstrucción” project, which you just completed in Glasgow?
CRUZVILLEGAS: In “Autoconstrucción: Sound,” my exhibition at the Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA), there are some sculptures made in Cove Park during the summer, improvising with materials from that context: wool, sheep shit, chicken wire, discarded furniture, cardboard, stones, grass, and my own hair. I’ve constructed unplanned assemblages, testing new dialogues with odd, contradictory objects and prime matter, inspired by my parents’ house in Mexico City as an improvised space, chaotic, ugly, made without budget, ideas, or plans, and definitely unfinished. The room attempts to be a messy landscape overpopulated with objects; as the groups of objects and materials will be chaotic and unstable, the whole will make walking through unstable as well. All of the sculptures hang form the ceiling or lie directly over the floor. Also, while in Cove Park, I wrote some lyrics about my house. They were written in a hybrid combination of inspiring sources, such as romantic popular music, folk, bolero, dub, rock’n’roll, salsa, reggae, Brazilian music, corrido, punk, ska, cumbia, trova, funk, protest music, commercial pop, norteño, hip-hop, etc. Then, I asked bands from Glasgow to create the music for the eighteen sets of lyrics, and we recorded eighteen songs, all eclectic. When the album was ready, I played the music in the streets and squares of Glasgow with a sound system constructed as a mobile sculpture. This street cart was made in collaboration with John O’Hara in a workshop in Bridgeton, which is part of a project called The Common Wheel, whose members present themselves as follows: “We exist to provide meaningful activity for people with mental illness by recycling and repairing old bicycles.” The sound system was made with parts from used, discarded, or old bikes and diverse furniture, pipes, sticks, and carpets, recycling bits and pieces. The sound system directly refers to people riding in the streets of Kingston, Jamaica in the 1970s and 80s, but also to DJ and MC practices around the world, and especially the Sonidero tradition of Mexico City. Important parts of this project are collaborative and are created in a contaminated cultural environment, which means shifting something personal, from my own experience, to a local platform and circumstance. For example, the appropriation of the lyrics by the bands into their own subjectivity was central for the collaboration. Earlier, for other projects, I cooperated with people from diverse contexts and fields: craft makers, historians, professors, physicians, builders, students, and artists. The sound system is in the largest room of the CCA, playing the music of the album. Everybody is allowed to ride it in the space. There is a video, showing a documentation of the spaces where the music was played in the streets. This was made with a fixed camera on the vehicle, registering its transit in Glasgow, randomly capturing people’s lives and activities. The video is projected directly onto the walls of the room from a projector attached to a pole on the mobile sculpture. I wrote the lyrics myself with a pencil on the walls of the room, around the sound system.
Decker-Parks: Given the current global economic situation, how do you think the role of the art object and of the artist are going to change?
CRUZVILLEGAS: Recently, I met designer Michael Marriott, who used to wear a jumper with a printed slogan that describes his own practice: Shop local. As a statement, it is powerful and meaningful. As an everyday practice, it is something that goes into a humble territory, which means that it is important to support regional survival strategies, more than fighting against transnational business and corporations. In that way, producing in a local manner may allow creation to describe specific contexts and structures. Ideas are individual, local, and eccentric, not global, even when the individuals who produce them could be surfing the globe, without a national, ethnic, or group identity. Working in a collaborative way—no matter the field or the reach of the extent—will always allow artists to extend, via sharing risks and joy, the ability to produce knowledge in small-cell organic developments.
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