KultureFlash ::: Artworker of the Week ::: Gabriel Kuri

ARTWORKER OF THE WEEK #27

Gabriel Kuri @ Serpentine Gallery, London, UK

When screenwriter Nora Ephron wrote the truism "Everybody thinks they have good taste and a sense of humour but they couldn't possibly all have good taste and a sense of humour," (When Harry Met Sally, 1989) she could have been foreshadowing the playful witticism and socially sharp-eyed work of Mexican artist Gabriel Kuri. In his installations, photographs, drawings and sculpture, Kuri displaces personal observations of the day-to-day into the terrain of formal aesthetics with poetic results. In State of Play, Kuri's installation -- the interaction between electric fans and plastic shopping bags -- creates a delightful display, probing assumptions of how to look at the world. Gabriel Kuri (bn. 1970) lives and works in Brussels and Mexico City. He has presented solo exhibitions at Museo de las Artes de Guadalajara (1999), and Sala 7, Museo Rufino Tamayo (2001). International group shows include New Sitings: Contemporary Projects 4, LACMA (2000), Sonsbeek 9, Arnhem (2001), Venice Biennale (2003), and Interventions, MuHKA, Antwerp (2003- 2004).

State of Play at Serpentine Gallery runs through 28/03.

Additional Info:
With Liam Gillick in Mexico City (Kurimanzutto Gallery), 2003
Utopia Station project, Venice Biennale, 2003
In Lines of Loss selected by Gabriel Orozco, 1997

Jill Martinez Krygowski: Describe the impetus for the piece you included in the State of Play exhibition.

Gabriel Kuri: If I go way back, I suppose it starts with two aspects: the simple one being the physical sensation of carrying two or three heavy shopping bags on each hand, back home from the supermarket. The way their weight pulls down, and how that feels on the clenching hands. I can hardly think of -- or feel -- a more primordially sculptural experience. The other aspect has to do more with the world of signs. I have always been drawn to the world of advertising, packaging, distribution, exchange -- all the communicative aspects that take part in the dynamics of transactions. Back in 2000 I made the first artwork deliberately using a plastic shopping bag for its -- material and semantic -- properties. I basically just put a rock -- more or less the size of a basketball -- inside, and used it as a doorstop. Last year I made my first piece involving wind and shopping bags. I gently tied a group of shopping bags to the front grill of a wall-mounted pivoting fan. I turned it on to speed 1 and watched how all the wind produced by the apparatus got trapped in the bags; there was just enough to plump up their shapes (also giving evidence of their emptiness) while not too much as to rip them open. I have never been one for high tech in my pieces, which is probably why this one worked for me. As the light amorphous plastic cluster waved at you, pivoting from left to right, you could read the words "thank you" and "gracias" on a few of the bags. Then I wondered what would happen if I made two groups of bags collide with one another considering the motion of the pivoting fans, and the fact that the wind produced would always make them regain their exact same shape. The piece at the Serpentine was a natural consequence of this. This one came from observing a group of ceiling-mounted fans all working at the same time in a bar down the road. They created a gentle hypnotic effect, like observing a group of oversized insects gently hovering around the place. First of all, I would free it from the limitations of the wall, like the flatness -- lack of depth -- or the formation in a row. A possibility that opened up was the random distribution. I realised I could make the element spread out onto various parts of the ceiling and canopy, and manifest a sense of chaos. Another quality that came with their rising up to the ceiling, was the sublimation of the words "thank you" -- printed on many of the bags -- as one has to look up to them. They became more like clouds, "thank you" clouds. The great feature about the Serpentine is that I could place the pieces at radically different heights, so their resonance was contrasting. It is important that one is able to see the clouds inside, moving gently against the ceiling, and the ones outside through the window, moving in the sky.

JMK: There is a marked fluidity to your work in the sense of it occupying a changeable ground between biting social critique and witty playfulness. There is a suspension that takes place between the defining factors of process and context, author and viewer. How would you describe this "openness" that is so characteristic of your practice?

GK: I try to understand and comment on certain social mechanics through my artwork. However this is not done through a process that is just rationalist and aims for accuracy or answers. Fluidity results in a system that is open, that admits humour, which acknowledges hazard and error. Turning something upside down, or wronging it, is often the way to understand more deeply how it works. And I mean this not only with regards to the external factors that I respond to -- like an aspect of social mechanics, or a readymade object or image -- but also within my processes. I often bring certain elements into the work only to make other constituent elements redundant, or to cancel out their expected role.

JMK: The activation of everyday things in conjunction with the artwork itself is a rather Duchampian "readymade" dialectic.

GK: One of the wonderful things about making art is that, in the best possible cases, it can make one see things in everyday objects and their grammar that one would not otherwise. A lot of what I have learned about the world has been through making [art] or observing other people's art.

JMK: You often include text in your sculpture, which is also reminiscent of Duchamp's wit. Does this interest in text also evolve from your occupation as a writer?

GK: I don't write an awful lot of texts because I tend to be very selective. When I incorporate words into my artworks, they come after long hours of thinking, interrogating them, and hearing their resonance. Curiously I would not exactly say that these two ways of writing are very much related. My pieces that include text never really derive from literature or ideas developed in lengthy writing. They are more like images, you can read them in one first glance, and something about them vanishes when you do.

JMK: I understand that you attended Goldsmiths College at the same time as the artist Ceal Floyer, and there is a clear affinity between your work in its humour and social critique.

GK: She actually graduated a couple of years before I started my post grad. However, the London art scene was super vibrant in the mid nineties and she was one of the artists that one got to see and hear about. What I appreciate in her work is that it really requires to be observed carefully, it does not give away immediately, it looks very simple but it unfolds slowly in its complexity. And contrary to a lot of British work that was produced in the nineties, hers does not resonate with triumphalism; it would hardly make a good feature in a quick and glossy news story. Her critique is oblique and highly personal.

JMK: Many of your projects emphasise "time" in various manifestations. For example, in the sense that they will never exist in the same format elsewhere, are just short-lived abrevation (abrev) (2001), or embellished with text that eloquently describes an entropic force working its way through life a la brevedad posible (a.s.a.p.), (1999). Why is time a defining factor for your work? Perhaps you are in some way reminding us that there is not enough of it?

GK: I would prefer to use the word "timing" than time. Time as a universal value is something that surpasses my understanding, and I have no aspirations of really ever getting to grasp it as such. Timing is more about its effect, how this is manifested in objects, processes and the relation between things... punctuality, delay, coincidence, the difference between slow and fast, hot and cold... As if I did not have enough with the problems of form, space and content, timing comes in to thicken the plot. However I have always thought that timing is an ever-present quality in visual arts. The process by which a work is conceived, executed, how it is assimilated, all this is not just a matter of form... In my pieces different senses of timing -- like hot instantaneity on the one hand; and cold, slow and gradual preservation on the other -- often cancel each other out. I often play by confronting the immediate and tangible timing in, say, the expiry of produce, and the more abstract and unstable timing of memory or representation.

JMK: Your art has been described as playing on "themes of consumer behaviour" and "the orchestrated enthusiasm for the capitalist goods economy." Although this critique takes place with playful humour, it seems rather melancholy too, like putting a mirror up to our cultural excesses.

GK: I know that often I speak about the social, however it is always in first person singular, always. I never speak in first person plural -- WE -- or towards YOU in second person plural for that matter. Even when I go deeply into situations that involve other people and systems that are produced beyond my individual grasp, and whose consequences affect many others, I don't feel entitled to speak for anyone else. Maybe this results in the melancholic effect you mention.

JMK: Speaking of time, with all the advances in information technology, would you say that there is some sort of anxiety that occurs with this feeling of not having enough time to consume all the information that is available to us today?

GK: I think that the problem with present day speed is that there is an increasing demand for things to mean something. The quicker and quicker things get decoded, assimilated, consumed, their effects are already over before they even had time to say let me introduce myself -- that is if they were not consumed in anticipation or speculation already. We are overwhelmed with meaning and we can hardly wait for it to surface.

JMK: What do you do in your spare time?

GK: I expect to see the changes that happened while I was busy.

Jill Martinez Krygowski is an independent curator living and working in Los Angeles. She has organised exhibitions at LACMA, the Korean Cultural Center, and ART2102, and published in LACMA's magazine. Recently she has edited an issue of the online artzine, periscopes.org.