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13/11/2009

Oscar Tuazon / Serge Spitzer

Centre international d'art et du paysage, Ile de Vassiviere

Oscar Tuazon - Bend it till it breaks
Curated by Chiara Parisi

Oscar Tuazon is one of the most interesting, captivating and radical artists of his generation. His art work is characterized by the production of sculptures made of a variety of both natural and industrial materials. Born in 1975 in Seattle, the land of grunge music, Oscar Tuazon grew up in the Tacoma suburb, which he left to study art at the Cooper Union in New York. He subsequently attended the Whitney Independent Study Program, and worked under Vito Acconci at Acconci Studio. At the very first meeting with this artist, we are overwhelmed by a multitude of questions, beginning with the origin of his family name – deductible thanks to the name used by his brother, Eli Hansen, with whom he has always collaborated – and the tattoos that lead us to fancy that he descends from the Incas or else some historical family that fought against colonialism.

Even before experiencing his projects directly, one perceives an ingenious complexity applied to social work of a strong political calling. Oscar Tuazon moved to Paris, where in 2007 he set up one of the most dynamic collective projects in the city - Castillo/Coralles - comprised of artists, curators, writers and critics such as Thomas Boutoux, François Piron, Benjamin Thorel and Boris Gobille. Oscar Tuazon’s work is characterized by his attention to everything that society throws away. Debris and recycled remains become the structure of his sculptures, where beams and planks of wood found in the street or on building sites, assembled with concrete, iron or steel, become the protagonists of his projects, infused with energy and tension that suggest deep meanings. Bend it till it breaks – the exhibit presented by Oscar Tuazon on the invitation of Chiara Parisi, director of the Centre international d’art et du paysage at Vassivière Island – opens at 5 pm on 14 November 2009 and remains open until 7 February 2010.

This exhibit, follows various projects with equally original titles, such as VOluntary Non vUlnerable, I’d Rather Be Gone, Where I Lived And What I Lived For and Ass To Mouth, is the artist’s first one-man exhibit in France. Following the Art center of Vassivière, Oscar Tuazon will move to the Kunstahalle at Bern from 12 February to 28 March 2010, then to the Parc Saint Léger – Contemporary Art Center from 20 March to 6 June 2010. In these three very different places the artist will continue his new project as work in progress that will need to change shape to adapt to each location, a process of experimentation expected to last almost a whole year. At the Art center of Vassivière, through his surprising use of poor or industrial materials, the artist plays with the relations created between the spaces and the names that architect Aldo Rossi gave to these spaces: the nave, the studio, the study room and the little theater, but also integrating the sculpture wood.

Architecture and resistance
The exhibit Bend it till it breaks, which the artist himself translates as “try anything completely unknown”, is presented as an extreme experience for a place as unique as the Millevaches plateau where the Art center of Vassivière was opened in the 90s, a land that attracted and still attracts leading representatives of culture and philosophy. On Vassivière Island, Oscar Tuazon creates structures that stand in powerful opposition to Aldo Rossi’s architecture, where the spectator feels faint before such realism. Even if his work is often analyzed from the viewpoint of utopian architecture, his practice is inspired in a notion of resistance to matter: how a structure can be changed, altered and denied by using common forms and materials. Bend it till it breaks attests to the artist’s attitude toward creating, his desire to always measure things, to experiment actions whose outcome is unpredictable, to struggle - like a warrior - with materials, vegetal and mineral elements, to continue confronting nature, architecture, and the human beings who inhabit and cross wherever his radical interventions take place.

Likewise, in his intervention at the Centre international d’art et du paysage, Oscar Tuazon pursues his inestimable longing for freedom, exploring alternative means of building that use simple recycled materials often characteristic of the D.I.Y. (Do it yourself) movement of the early 50s that extolled the construction of autonomous and independent buildings by developing a truly individual way of living. The need to create, to be independent in the face of industry and the large economic corporations, to rediscover fast-outdated know-how, this leads the artist to look for alternative solutions to enable him to undertake as many things as possible by himself, in clear opposition to the practice of artists and architects who keep for themselves only what concerns conceptualization and ask others to fill in the executive portion of their projects.

For Oscar Tuazon, the experience of creation first of all passes through architecture, which becomes a means to live the exhibit space. His works engage in a system of signs that serve to dialogue with his friends, who are invited to carry out performances or installations using his creations. His artistic practice is first and foremost a philosophy of existence, life thought out as a social and political idea primarily concerned with durable economy, in order to obtain what he calls “immaterial architecture”: a life style that manufactures the space around it. In defining his working methods, it was important for Oscar Tuazon to discover and know artists like Ad Reinhardt and Lutz Bacher, figures who belong to the milieu of poetry and music like Eileen Myles, Cedar Sigo and Barbara Rose, and intellectuals such as David Lewis, Dennis Cooper and Karl Holmqvist.

The exhibition area
There is something utopian and unrealizable about the idea of an architectural exhibit inside a building erected by Aldo Rossi, a contingent and dependent structure that occupies the interior of another, inhabits and invades it like a parasite. A redundant operation that ends up revealing the absurd nature of the function of the new structure. At Vassivière, Oscar Tuazon puts in play unpredictable and self-destructive forces that operate in the intensely characterized space of the Art center created by the Italian architect. The nave, inspired by the majestic spatiality of Late Ancient Roman architecture (as in the Basilica of Maxence in the Roman Forum) is completely occupied by a structure made of a mixture of various building materials. Oscar Tuazon generates an installation of monumental dimensions composed of a concrete slab resting on a structure of wood and steel that stand balanced thanks to the forces mutually annulling one another. The ensemble lends life to the skeleton of a habitat comprised of rooms and stories.

Tension is a constant element in the artist’s work, in this case evidenced by the conflicting forces that issue from the structure of the Art center. The tension of the work presented in the nave derives from its duality, the idea of a flowing- out that is suggested but fortuitously and provisionally stopped. For the artist, repeating the use of materials corresponds to the repetitive use of the notes of a musical score that the artist tries endlessly to compose. In the studio, using a substructure on the level of the Island terrain, a tree trunk is imprisoned in a wooden element and in another made of steel. Presented for the first time in the public art manifestation Evento at Bordeaux, this monument, envisaged as a social proposition for the future, transforms into a dead tree, a sculpture oppressed by a working space.

Moving on to the study room and the little theater, a broad spectrum of materials - wood, steel, concrete and lights, all linked together with geometric forms - allows Oscar Tuazon to explore the tensions that can be created by juxtaposing and assembling them. The elementary-shaped work are partly generated by the intrinsic quality of the industrial materials that make them up, and function as objects that dispense with any device to present them. These works have no need of walls or light, they are – in the words of the artist – “only things. They can be left outside, all alone. They don’t even need to be watched. They don’t need anybody, they can function quite well all alone, useless and inexplicable”.

Always in search of a direct rapport, something immediate but with no obligations attached, Oscar Tuazon wants to start up a conversation with the visitor through a common language that they come to find together. The artist puts all possible combinations in play, from the simplest to the most complex. Each work undertaken for the Art center exists as a singular element of an ensemble of variations. Each one of his sculptures constitutes entities that must be seen in relation to the others, and the fact that joins them conceptually together redefines our experience of sculpture. From this point of view, Oscar Tuazon is heir to the “minimalist” practice of Sol LeWitt, for whom the conceptual and immaterial phase of the work should imply a confrontation with the work once finished and materialized.

The sculpture wood
After keeping the spectator under pressure through the tension of the forces in the closed and architecturally defined spaces of the Art center, Oscar Tuazon next faces the open, natural space of the Vassivière forest to continue the research project he has been engaged in for about four years, a work centered on landscape that privileges process, the creative gesture, the conceptual aspect rather than the finished object. In the sculpture wood, two elements are placed in confrontation with one another, one vegetal, the other mineral. An oak tree and a slab of Carrara marble seem to confront one another in tension dictated by gravity and the power of the elements themselves. If the tree in the studio, in order to be visible, has to look for space in spite of the obstacles, here the oak must accept to be crushed or else must find the strength to cast off the heavy marble stone, which could end up blocked and hanging among the branches of the tree.The opposition between the mineral element, the marble that traditionally recalls commemorative statuary and funeral art, and the vegetal element, the tree - sign of vitality and strength - underlines the capacity of plants to adapt to situations in order not to succumb. This becomes the paradigm of an existential condition, where the evolution of forces is always difficult to calculate and often remains in the field of experimentation - the future of experiences that is always manifested in total uncertainty.

Opening 14 november 2009 at 5 pm

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Serge Spitzer - Still life, 2001-2009
Curated by Chiara Parisi

Dicsussion between Serge Spitzer and Jean de Loisy the 15 november 2009 at 12am Serge Spitzer is considered to be one of the most important artists of his generation. A protagonist of the artistic revolution of the late 60s, he began to develop a production of concepts based on “models of reality”. The play of tensions between hidden and visible, order and chaos, weight and lightness, static and movement is a recurrent theme in Spitzer’s work, including references to multiple forms of economical, social and political structures. He combines artistic conventions with technological, biological or social systems to question the processes of communication and perception and tries to define their limits.

His works, shown in the most prestigious institutions and manifestations, are linked to their sites, such as Re/Cycle (Don’t Hold Your Breath) at the Venice Biennial, Re/Search (Alchemy and/or Question Marks with Swiss Air) at the Kunstmuseum in Bern, as well as now with his installation Molecular (ISTANBUL). In a historical space in Istanbul, an old disused synagogue that today houses an aluminum foundry, a rubber workshop, storages and a billiard saloon, Serge Spitzer’s installation functions like a pause for contemplation and reflection while in the other rooms the workers go about their routine activities.

The ephemeral project Still Life 2001-2009 on Vassivière Island, composed of tens of thousands of unique tennis balls in an area measuring a few hectares, is not a simple composition of static objects, as its title may ironically suggest. Fascinated by the multiplicities of typical landscapes, Serge Spitzer chose to terminate the cycle of creation of this highly enigmatic installation in the sculpture wood of Vassivière Island on the heights of the Deleuzean Plateau de Millevaches after having travelled in the “American BACKYARD” of the gardens of the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art at Ridgefield in 2008 and at the “Swiss ALPS” at the Galerie Tschudi, Zuoz in 2009.

In the sculptures wood of Vassivière island, the work is a demonstration of an imperceptible "reality model" which propagates like a virus and presents itself as a physical metaphor of the way that art interacts with everyday life. As in numerous “viral sculptures” conceived since the 90s, the ephemeral structure that Serge Spitzer has installed in the Island’s meadow is transformed over time by uncontrolled and accidental forces: the balls will be swept away by wind, storm and rain, or else knocked out of place by visitors; now and again, children will be tempted to play or just take a few; and the grass will grow slowly to recover the original structure.

Serge Spitzer has engaged in the design and the manufacturing process of this work to ensure the unique nature of each ball and without any concern to preserve the work. Each used ball has been printed with the image of a tiny detail of a piece of lawn photographed by the artist and blown up to arrive at this pixelated green, a near-perfect mimetism of the typical landscapes they were placed. Despite its very minimalist formal execution, Serge Spitzer’s project is entirely built around the imperfection of reality, with social and political overtones. His work takes possession of the surroundings with a simple repeated gesture that imply at one and the same time notions of leisure, play and almost military occupation. In the tradition of those artists who have used landscape as a vehicle for contemplation, Still Life 2001-2009 becomes a field for thinking.

Ping Pang Pong
Serge Spitzer
15th November at 12am

Serge Spitzer was born in Bucharest in 1951 and lives and works in New York since the beginning of the eighties. His works has been shown in the most prestigious institutions and manifestations, such as Folkwang Museum Essen 1979, Museum of Modern Art New York 1983, Kunstmuseum Bern 1984, Magasin Grenoble 1987, Gemeentemuseum The Hague 1992, Kunsthalle et Kunstverein Düsseldorf 1993, IVAM Centro Julio Gonzales et Centro del Carme Valencia 1994, Henri Moore Institute Leeds 1994, Westfälischer Kunstverein Münster 1995, Kunsthalle Bern 2002, Museum Moderne Kunst Frankfort 2006. He took part in many exhibitions and international biennials such as: Documenta 8 Kassel 1987, Istanbul Biennial 1994, Biennale de Lyon 1997, Kwangju Biennial 1997, and Biennale de Venise 1999. His work is represented in the most important public and private collections, like Brooklyn Museum New York, Fogg Art Museum Cambridge MA, Museum Folkwang Essen, Haags Gemeentemuseum The Hague, Kunstmuseum Bern, IVAM Instituto Valenciano d’Arte Moderno Valencia, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago IL, Musee d’Art Contemporain Lyon, Nationalgalerie Berlin, Staatliche Museen Neue Galerie Kassel, Staatens Museum for Kunst Kopenhagen, The Museum of Modern Art New York, The Menil Collection Houston, Yale University Art Gallery New Heaven CT.

Exceptionally, Serge Spitzer will converse with Jean de Loisy with who he made his first exhibition in France in 1984.
Jean de Loisy is an art critic and curator (amongst the unforgettable solo exhibitions : Urs Luthi, Allan McCollum, James Turrell, Bill Viola, Jeff Wall, Fischli et Weiss, Anish Kapoor, Gino de Dominicis, Huang Yong Ping ; or in the thematics Hors Limites - l'art et la vie 1952-1995 at the Centre Georges Pompidou, A visage découvert à la Fondation Cartier, L'image dans le Tapis à la Biennale de Venise, La Beauté en Avignon, Traces du sacrés au Centre Pompidou). He has been the director of the first Fonds régional d’art contemporain in 1983 at the Abbaye de Fontevraud, assistant director of the Museum of Nîmes, curator at the Centre Georges Pompidou, art critic in France Culture, artistic adviser of the Estuary project.

Opening the 14 november 2009 at 12am

Image: Oscar Tuazon, Elko, NV., 2007

Open to the public from 15 november 2009br

Centre international d’art et du paysage
Ile de Vassivière F - 87120
Open from tuesday to friday 2pm – 6pm,
week-end 11am – 1pm and 2pm – 6pm
Admission: full rate: 3 euros / half rate: 1.5 euros
for children over 12, students, unemployed / free of charge: children under 12, handicapped persons and their companions, Friends of the Centre international d’art et du paysage de l’île de Vassivière, subscribers to the Artothèque association.

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