Galerie Dennis Cooper presents … Oscar Tuazon, co-curated by Thomas Moore

 

‘Oscar Tuazon’s art may be vulnerable, but you’d never guess. His sculpture-cum-architecture has used raw slabs of concrete, steel and untreated wooden beams, bark-encrusted tree trunks and weighty metal chains.

‘Born in 1975, Tuazon grew up outside Seattle, coming of age watching bands like Mudhoney and Nirvana (one spell in the mosh pit was so frenzied he once broke his leg). Having graduated from the elite Independent Study Program at New York’s Whitney Museum in 2003, he cut his teeth working for renowned extremist Vito Acconci, a performance artist and poet-turned-architect. After moving to Paris in 2007, Tuazon set up the gallery castillo/corrales with a group of artist and curator friends, and the past three years have seen his constructions of wood and concrete take over exhibition spaces across Europe.

‘Inspired by what he calls “outlaw architecture”, Tuazon channels the extreme DIY and freethinking of hippy survivalists who decide to go off-grid. If his industrial materials suggest a minimalistic stress on concept over making, he’s just as interested in the physical side of sculpture. He is not afraid to get his hands dirty: working with riggers and technicians, he starts off with a sketch, chain-sawing wood, developing ideas and patching up problems on the hoof. From the impromptu-looking concrete slab that intersects the two-storey wooden frame of his 2009 work, Bend It Till It Breaks, to the neon strip light glowing two and a half metres up an untreated tree-trunk buttressed by planks in I Wanna Live, his structures have a rough-shod, improvised feel.

‘As muscular and uncompromising as it can first appear, Tuazon’s work is ephemeral. Like the hippy idealists defining their environment on their own terms, the artist will always have to pack up and move on. Yet while they stand, pushing at walls and ceilings and taking over space, these makeshift constructions remind us of the imaginative struggle to make what we want of the world, no matter what rules and boundaries seem to press down on us.’ — Skye Sherwin

 

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Further

Tuazon, Oscar (b. 1975)
OT @ Luhring Augustine
OT @ Galerie Chantal Crousel
OT @ instagram
a sculpture is a hole in the world
STRUCTURAL TENSION: THE ART OF OSCAR TUAZON
Sylvia Lavin and Oscar Tuazon
Oscar Tuazon: Living as a sculptural process
DOROTHÉE PERRET & OSCAR TUAZON
Los Angeles Water School – LAND
Book: ‘Oscar Tuazon: Live’
Book: ‘I Can’t See’
OSCAR TUAZON — PEOPLE
Oscar Tuazon – Bend it till it breaks
Lanvin’s Lucas Ossendrijver speaks of space and the functionality of design with artist Oscar Tuazon.
Pipe dreams: Oscar Tuazon emulates LA’s aqueducts in his latest body of work
Gather Round Oscar Tuazon’s “Fire Worship”
Lauren Bon and Oscar Tuazon
Oscar Tuazon at Le Consortium

 

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Extras

Hammer Projects: Oscar Tuazon

Oscar Tuazon, “L’École de l’eau”, Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris (2021)

“In Plain Sight” artist Oscar Tuazon on mapping waterways and landscapes

The Language of Less: Oscar Tuazon

Production Oscar Tuazon, I use my body for something, I use it to make something, I make something with my body, …

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Interview

 

Sylvia Lavin: Can I ask you just a quick question? It’s weirdly wonderful to be thrown into an intimate conversation with somebody you’ve never met before, so it’s hard to know how much preliminary background is useful. But some of it is useful for me.

Oscar Tuazon: Yeah.

SL: The critical reception of your work that I am aware of always frames your work through the lens of the art/architecture problem. Do I have that impression because I come from architecture? Is it imposed as a bias from within the interests of art criticism? Or does it reflect your own thinking? Is that a boring, overworked conversation?

OT: No, for me it’s really essential to think about. I guess that’s probably where it starts. You know as a sculptor you’re thinking—or I was thinking—how does an object work in this space? How does an object intervene in a building? Now, I’m more and more trying to design spaces, and I guess I still do it in a very—I’m not quite sure how to describe it—I don’t think that I use design the way that an architect does to solve design problems, but I use the same tools.

SL: Well, I guess I’m thinking that from minimalism on—I mean obviously there’s a prehistory to it also—but let’s just say in relation to what you’re doing, the most relevant history seems the one from minimalism on. I suppose you could describe that history as having added various things to the debate, so let’s say: architectural materials, an architectural situation is part of it. I don’t think that when you’re looking at a Carl Andre floor, let’s say, that you’re really thinking of it as an architectural floor—you wouldn’t hire him to do your floor.

OT: Right.

SL: But people have hired Jorge Pardo to do their floors. I know you had a conversation with Pardo along these lines, because I looked it up on YouTube. I’m curious what you thought of that conversation, which was less about sculpture as such and more about “artists” working as architects, like Pardo, [Olafur] Eliasson and [Vito] Acconci—and now you. I’ve called you all “super producers.” Where and how do you think you do or do not fit into that category or way of working?

OT: Well, I think there’re so many different angles, but yeah, you never hire Carl Andre to do your floor, but also he wouldn’t. I guess what I’m saying is that the artwork was still an object—discrete, a thing in a space… You know to me what was interesting about Jorge Pardo and that whole generation was that it’s really hard to identify where the work ends and begins. It’s a space—I mean the interesting and kind of perilous territory is that not all the decisions really matter.

SL: So it seems to me that the maybe art/architecture is even too broad because really it’s mostly sculpture and architecture. Although there’re all kinds of other things, but I guess what I’m trying to think about is that the contact has become more urgent, and prevalent, and pressing, and yet increasingly less defined. I’m wondering about the stakes of that, and I’m trying to make sure that we think about where writing fits into this. Part of what was in the back of my mind is that the art/architecture situation has been largely discursively defined by the October crowd. So it’s a very specific channel within the world—Yve-Alain [Bois], [Benjamin] Buchloh, and Hal Foster, and so forth. So those are the people who have really attended to it, and as far as I know, the fact that that group is the one that established the parameters is itself not an object of much analysis, so I’m trying to figure out what are the stakes for them. For Buchloh, the stakes were very clear: architecture is always intrinsically a negative object, that’s its job for sculpture. Hal Foster, I think, would pretend otherwise, but I think it is also intrinsically…

OT: He’s always setting it up as, what would you call it, the kind of relationship…

SL: The bad boy, yeah, antagonistic…

OT: Antagonistic relationship, exactly! Also the figure of the architect as this kind of like…

SL: Complicit capitalist, that’s it!

OT: Exactly.

SL: That’s it. So that’s its job. Its job for the artist is to clarify the problems of capitalism. So, fine, as long as we’re understanding that you have to invent your antithesis, but what that discursive work doesn’t account for is this emerging generation of people who are crossing enough of the lines to make that symbolization of the architect no longer useful. So, if you’re entering competitions, let’s say—you don’t have to tell me any of the details, I’m just really curious—if you enter a competition and you win, do you get paid as an artist or an architect?

OT: I think in pretty much every case so far the competitions that I’ve entered have been defined as public art–type projects. I’ve tried to fit architecture into those, but they’re not really fit to make buildings in those kinds of situations. But they’re typically in it as sculpture commissions, but…

SL: But your bridge [Un Pont, a memorial project in Belfort, France], for example, and the different ways that you were imagining that bridge would have, amongst other things, huge economic considerations.

OT: Yeah.

SL: A concrete bridge versus a rope bridge, you know. Thinking about those budgets—how do you think about that? So when you were saying that you use a lot of the same tools as architects, I guess I’m trying to take the Buchloh/Foster thing and say that for them—and this comes from a long line of thinking about architecture—for them, the constraint of architecture that makes it essentially, fundamentally, and always problematic was not its space and those kinds of things but its relation to capital, its economic system. So if we think of the specificity of architecture as an economic condition—is that one of your tools as well?

OT: But that seems like that’s architecture with a capital “A,” right? If we’re talking about architecture as a representative force of a dominant, capitalist situation, then yeah, I agree. But I don’t think that’s necessarily the architecture that I’m interested in, I’m just interested in building stuff, you know what I mean? I’m interested in general contractor-type spaces and situations and using kind of simple tools. I’m fascinated by international architecture, but that doesn’t have much relevance to me. What is relevant to me is much simpler, like creating a space to sit down or those kinds of things. And to do those kinds of things, you need all of the tools, I’m interested in using the tools. But I don’t actually do any computer drafting myself, I work with someone who does, to be able to visualize spaces and then create in those situations.

SL: It’s funny that you would refer to architecture with a capital “A,” those are all very typically architectural, architect-speak distinctions. Do people say sculpture with a capital “S?”

OT: That’s a good question, I mean, isn’t it always? [laughs]

SL: With a capital “S?”

OT: No, I’m just kidding! But as a concept, sculpture necessarily dignifies itself and separates itself from the world, right? That’s my struggle, I have to fight against that all the time. To try and make lowercase sculpture, that’s what I want to do. But I think it’s challenging because, you know, where does this stuff end up? Well mostly, unfortunately, it’s destined to end up in an art gallery, or maybe somebody’s house, or a museum. Where else would it end up?

SL: So then maybe architecture is a misnomer, in other words, maybe what interests you about architecture is not architecture but building, if that’s a distinction, and you might be interested in building in order to invent a lowercase sculpture. Just so that you know my view of things—I think the distinction between capital “A” architecture and lowercase “b” building is a fantasy. And I think that lowercase building also imagines itself to be architecture, and I think architecture with a capital “A” is always full of innumerable prosaic everyday sorts of things. But the distinction is useful for various reasons, and I suppose this is why I was pressing on the competition. Competitions are very typical in architecture. For me, they’re stand-ins for all of the constraints that architecture both resists and embraces. I mean, architecture is envious of artists, because it imagines that they don’t have constraints. And I guess I’m thinking that now that you all are working in these new ways, I think you do have them. [laughs] You do. But maybe there isn’t the habit of talking about them in the same way.

OT: Totally. It’s so weird ’cause for example, I’m working on a project now for the Seattle Waterfront. It’s a project I’ve been working on for maybe a year and a half or two, and it’s interesting because the commissioning agency invited artists at the very beginning of the process. But rather than defining a site and completely defining where and what this thing is going to be, they invited the artist at the very early stage of the process with the landscape architect and the architect, when things are still nebulous enough that something could be proposed. To me, that’s the ideal situation, but it’s also really complicated because it’s almost like speaking a different language.

So I’ve been working on this for a long time. I came up with a really elaborate, developed proposal, finished engineering, consultation, and design, and I came to them with a question. I said, I want to put a pylon because I wanted to suspend this tree. This is the really pie-in-the-sky version. It’s an elevated walkway that would take you up to this tree, and the tree is suspended over the water. I came to my senses. Sometimes the design process tells you when the project isn’t working. The project that I came up with after realizing the constraints is way better and much lighter. It fits in and responds to the conditions in a much better way, but somehow getting to “no” is always important, I think. To me that’s what was always appealing about the architectural process is this fighting for a “yes” or a “no”—fighting for a “yes” and getting a “no”—maybe that’s what it is.

SL: Well some people have said that the distinction between architecture and other things is the toilet. I mean in the end, every practice has its own form of “yes” and “no;” every practice has its own form of economy. Every practice, at least post-minimalism, has its own form of space and social engagement.

OT: And function! I mean, as much as artworks are supposed to be functionless, and that’s the distinction.

SL: Right, I agree. I think that being responsible to the toilet is still the architect’s job. The notion of the function of a work of art is so expanded, that I would agree we can’t hold functionalism as an architectural problem, but what about the bathroom?

OT: By the toilet do you mean the plumbing? The infrastructure?

SL: Yeah, like some base condition for survival, let’s say. You can chip it away, and you can go live in The Land [Foundation] project in Thailand and cook and eat and do all of those kinds of things, but somehow fundamentally the toilet is not an art project.

OT: Yeah, well I did make a toilet sculpture, but… [laughs]

SL: Well, lots of people have made toilet sculptures! Those are very famous! But I’m not sure anybody ever took a shit in one of them. [both laugh]

OT: Exactly! Yeah, I think that’s kind of the answer right there…my toilet is not one that you’d want to have in your house.

 

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What I like about Oscar Tuazon
by Thomas Moore

I like Oscar Tuazon’s work because it feels like it’s taking over the room that’s holding it.

I like it because it feels like it’s trying to do an impression of the room it’s in and getting it wrong.

I like it because it doesn’t really need the room that’s containing it at all.

I like it because it contains itself.

I like Oscar Tuazon’s work because it looks strong.

Because it looks like you could break it.

Because it looks like someone already tried to break it and failed.

Because it’s already damaged.

I like it because it reminds me of things.

I like it because it doesn’t look like anything else.

I like it because it reminds me of Black Metal music.

I like it because it’s totally unmusical.

I like it because it doesn’t need anything else.

I like the work because it feels horny.

I like it because it looks useful.

I like it because it has no function.

I like it because it’s independent.

I like it because it needs you.

I like it because it doesn’t solve any problems.

I like it because I don’t always like myself.

I like it because it’s limited.

I like it because it feels infinite.

I like it because it’s precise.

I like it because it’s clumsy.

I like it because it’s intimate.

I like it because it’s private.

I like it because I can’t stop sleeping with strangers.

I like it because I’m lonely.

I like it because I’m happy on my own.

I like it because I stopped drinking.

I like it because the work can’t answer questions.

I like it because the work doesn’t need to justify itself.

I like it because I feel like it’s seen things that I haven’t.

I like it because I’ve touched it with my own hands.

I like it because it feels like it feels anarchic.

I like it because it follows rules.

I like it because sometimes I feel like a failure.

I like it because I’ve done too many things that I can’t take back.

 

 

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p.s. Hey. I have a semi-nasty head cold which will likely effect the quality of my comments today, apologies. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. It certainly wouldn’t shock me if they reopened that case. ** Misanthrope, Is it a gif? Because if it isn’t it wouldn’t have been in there come hell or high water. If it was, I didn’t find it. Paris has good Mexican places, or one or two — El Guacamole in the 10th is probably the best — but not good enough to make one helpless to stuff oneself with their wares. There are a lot of blah ones, even French Mexican fast food chains. They’re catching on over here, but fitfully and gradually. ** Bernard, So great to see you last night, obviously, Mr. W. Talk/chat today? ** Bill, The slow dying out of blogs as a popular destination has been an interesting yet melancholy thing to witness from the relative inside. ** Dominik, Hi, thank you! Me too. In fact I did get lost in it for days while making it. I think the reading went well. Seemed to. The audience was sizeable and attentive, I think. My head cold “kindly” waited until this morning to become a blown annoyance. What’s love going to do with all those copies of ‘Just Kids’. There’s a guy out there whose goal in life to buy every extant copy of The Beatles’ ‘White Album’ in its original vinyl-only release. I don’t know why other than to become very, very, very slightly famous? Love’s foggy brain spending a minute trying to think up a charming and unexpected form of love to present to you before giving up and just saying love, G. ** Tosh Berman, Of course I went back and looked at the seventh one down, and, yes, I see! How interesting. Glad you’re re-right as rain. ** Robert, Hi, Robert! Welcome, and thank you for coming in! Ah, good eye. I do think one of the sniffers is also a fake but a convincing fake at least. How are you? What are you and doing and enjoying? ** T.J. Hi. Yeah, I’m a Tyrell fan too. I did a post about her a while back. Let me see if I can find it. Here. There are a few now-dead videos in it, but it’s mostly still in tact. Being from LA, there was a time when Bukowski was inescapable. And a time when he was the only LA poet anyone outside of LA knew of. That colored things. I saw him read a few times, and he was very entertaining live. They love him in France. Yes, I’ve seen ‘Letters Home’. I thought out was fantastic. A not well known film by Akerman that she made for TV and is really a total jewel if you can ever see it is ‘Portrait d’une jeune fille de la fin des années 60 à Bruxelles’ (1994). The main girl in it is really incredible. Thanks a lot, T.J.! ** Okay. Today’s galerie show featuring works by the terrific artist Oscar Tuazon is a combo of the brand new and a Tuazon-related post that Thomas Moore made for the blog many years ago. I hope it interests. See you tomorrow.