{"id":2450317,"date":"2019-10-24T16:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-10-24T22:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspentimes.com\/?p=314908"},"modified":"2019-10-24T16:00:00","modified_gmt":"2019-10-24T22:00:00","slug":"go-ahead-touch-the-art-at-abraham-cruzvillegass-aspen-art-museum-show","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/local-news\/go-ahead-touch-the-art-at-abraham-cruzvillegass-aspen-art-museum-show\/","title":{"rendered":"Go ahead, touch the art at Abraham Cruzvillegas\u2019s Aspen Art Museum show"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
Attendees of the Abraham Cruzvillegas exhibition watch as a woman creates clay on the floor of the Aspen Art Museum on Thursday, October 17, 2019. (Kelsey Brunner\/The Aspen Times)<\/strong>
Kelsey Brunner\/The Aspen Times<\/em><\/figcaption><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

Abraham Cruzvillegas has filled three galleries in the Aspen Art Museum\u2019s lower level with a varied array of cultural flotsam and jetsam from Aspen and Austin \u2014 sculptures of found materials, percussion instruments, wood barrels, desks, books, potted plants, beer kegs.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s up to viewers to make meaning of it, in a radically interactive approach that will mutate, enliven and reinterpret the artworks over the next three months. Yes, you can touch the artwork. You must for \u201cHi, how are you, Gonzo?\u201d to work.<\/p>\n

\u201cMuseums are places where artwork cannot be touched and you have to behave in a particular way \u2014 this is different,\u201d Cruzvillegas said last week before the show opened. \u201cPeople can touch and move things, they can transform the layout of objects, it\u2019s an exceptional experience for them. I\u2019m not asking anything in particular, or for particular kinds of people or events. Anything is possible. There are no mistakes.\u201d<\/p>\n

The artist brought three collaborators with him from Mexico City for the exhibition opening on Oct. 17, to do first activations in the space. Those included performance art, sound pieces, craft stations and clay sculpting on the floor. Beyond those, Cruzvillegas is leaving it up to Aspen to bring creative life into the exhibition. He and the museum are calling on locals to propose activations for the space (see infobox \u201cIdeas Welcome\u201d).<\/p>\n

\u201cI am trying to open this as an arena for exchanging and sharing, more than proposing any content or meaning on my side,\u201d he said. \u201cI have ideas, but those are mine and they are never the best.\u201d<\/p>\n

The show includes works made from found objects at the Aspen and the Contemporary Austin, which co-organized the show and hosted it this summer. The sculptures double as props and furniture for the activations. They\u2019re Frankensteinian things, combinations of odd bits, constructed by museum staff and often tagged by Cruzvillegas himself with his signature graffiti ape.<\/p>\n

Regular museum-goers may recognize some repurposed pieces of these sculptures from recent museum shows including the staircase for E.J. Hill\u2019s swing installation in 2018 group show, pieces of the corrugated roof of Shigeru Ban\u2019s temporary schoolhouse in the 2014 \u201cHumanitarian Architecture\u201d show and pieces of the large table that held Judith Scott\u2019s yarn sculptures in 2016.<\/p>\n

When the show was up in Austin, activations included skateboarding, performances, interactive workshops and music. Suggestions for Aspen so far have ranged from concerts to ski-tuning. The museum will be partnering with local groups and educators to bring the space to life, and expects to stage activations each Wednesday evening. It also is moving much of its regular programming into the space \u2014 its Movies at the Museum series and children\u2019s workshops, for instance \u2014 for the length of the exhibition.<\/p>\n

Cruzvillegas provided the museums with rough sketches of what he thought the installation might look like, and left it up to their curatorial and installation staffs to find the materials and construct the works.<\/p>\n

\u201cI call it a blind date,\u201d he said. \u201cA blind date means you don\u2019t have to stay there forever but you take the risk anyway. We pretend that we might love each other, but you never know. It\u2019s very exciting.\u201d<\/p>\n

The approach is in keeping with Cruzvillegas\u2019 long-running experiments with \u201cautoconstrucci\u00f3n,\u201d a brand of conceptual art that aims to take the artist out of the process. The approach was born out of the artist\u2019s childhood in the hardscrabble Ajusco neighborhood of Mexico City, where reusing materials and collaborating to build a community was a necessity.<\/p>\n

\u201cI am trying to get rid of myself and my own experiences, who I am, who I think I am and where I come from,\u201d he explained. \u201cAutoconstrucci\u00f3n is about people, communities constructing together, sharing, exchanging. It\u2019s all about togetherness. It\u2019s about being with local communities and learning from local people.\u201d<\/p>\n

He is uninterested in prescribing interpretation for any kind of art, and won\u2019t tell locals how to do their part in his show.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey will construct content or meaning according to their own experience and values,\u201d he said. \u201cIt would be na\u00efve of me to propose a unique interpretation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cruzvillegas dug into Aspen history to get a sense of what makes the town tick. He studied the history of Aspen and the Ute tribe, the local wildlife and the counterculture history of the town.<\/p>\n

The title of the show is a nod to the cultural polestars of Austin and Aspen, respectively: the recently deceased singer-songwriter Daniel Johnston\u2019s album title and T-shirt slogan \u201cHi, how are you?\u201d along with Hunter S. Thompson\u2019s gonzo journalism and Dr. Gonzo character from \u201cFear and Loathing in Las Vegas.\u201d<\/p>\n

There\u2019s no direct depiction of these artists in the show, though it was conceived with their spirits in mind.<\/p>\n

\u201cHunter S. Thompson, I admired for a long time because of his political ideas, not because of his self-destruction, even though I\u2019ve destroyed myself in various ways,\u201d he said. \u201cI thought it was important to understand what this \u2018Fat City\u2019 means.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course, thinking about connecting to Aspen\u2019s community, Cruzvillegas also knew he needed to incorporate skiing in the work.<\/p>\n

Cruzvillegas is not a skier or outdoorsman himself, but he does have experience with ski sculpture.<\/p>\n

In the early 2000s, during a residency at Alexander Calder\u2019s studio in the French countryside, Cruzvillegas found a bunch of old skis at a local garage sale and built a sculpture out of them. Traveling back across the Atlantic, he didn\u2019t have a way to travel with the piece, so he destroyed it. When Aspen came calling, he wanted to give it a second life.<\/p>\n

\u201cI thought people in Aspen would recognize the object as something familiar here \u2014 not necessarily as art, but now it is part of an exhibition in a museum. It\u2019s something I tried to use as a link, with a possible understanding of the history of Aspen.\u201d<\/p>\n

On the museum\u2019s exterior wall, the ski sculpture \u2014 constructed from 12 alpine skis \u2014 juts over the sidewalk on Hyman Avenue (this week it has been appropriately piled with snow from the early autumn storms).<\/p>\n

One of the galleries inside also is filled with a functional table (yes, you can sit) made from found materials. Books like Lawrence Wright\u2019s \u201cGod Save Texas\u201d and Daniel Hernandez\u2019s \u201cDown and Delirious in Mexico City\u201d hang suspended above it, like a child\u2019s mobile, on strings from that dangle from a web of skis and snowboards.<\/p>\n

The artist\u2019s works on the gallery walls are slightly more conventional. Those include several of Cruzvillegas\u2019 \u201cblind self-portraits,\u201d for which he takes ephemera from his daily life \u2014 ATM receipts, invitations, business cards, correspondence, napkins, sugar packets, newspaper clippings \u2014 and then paints them and pins them on the wall to form massive, mostly monochromatic collage pieces. They are overpowering in their immensity \u2014 one in the Aspen show traverses a corner and runs across two walls \u2013 and in the overwhelming number of small, forgettable moments they represent.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey are blind self-portraits because they include information about my everyday life,\u201d he said. \u201cBut people cannot see them, so there is complicity \u2014 an act of faith that I am using material that describes my life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cruzvillegas also has painted graffiti-styled apes on gallery walls and on some of the sculptures, as well as in the bathrooms and corridors of the building.<\/p>\n

\u201cThose again are self-portraits,\u201d he said, noting he\u2019s been fascinated since childhood with the animals\u2019 ability to use their hands to make tools as humans do. \u201cThese ape drawings represent my ability to use my hands. I try to pay homage to the very nature of us as animals.\u201d<\/p>\n

He also has included one overtly political work: a projection on a wall displaying statistics related to U.S. authorities detaining \u201cunaccompanied alien children (0-17 years)\u201d on the Mexican border since 2012.<\/p>\n

The show is the third solo exhibition at the museum from Cruzvillegas\u2019 Mexico City cohort, following his mentor Gabriel Oroszco and collaborator Gabriel Kuri (both in 2014). The trio have worked together since the 1980s and led a new wave of contemporary art in Mexico. But Cruzvillegas waved off any idea that he and his friends are working toward a common artistic purpose.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are a family but we have very different focuses,\u201d he said. \u201cWe are contradictory and unstable and delirious and stupid and wise. We are different, that\u2019s why we are family. We can accept diversity as our richness.\u201d<\/p>\n

atravers@aspentimes.com<\/a><\/p>\n

via:: The Aspen Times<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Attendees of the Abraham Cruzvillegas exhibition watch as a woman creates clay on the floor of the Aspen Art Museum on Thursday, October 17, 2019. (Kelsey Brunner\/The Aspen Times)Kelsey Brunner\/The Aspen Times Abraham Cruzvillegas has filled three galleries in the Aspen Art Museum\u2019s lower level with a varied array of cultural flotsam and jetsam from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2450317","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-local-news"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-08-19 12:07:16","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSPN The Valley's Quality Rock","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2450317","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2450317"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2450317\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2450317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2450317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2450317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}