CUT & PASTE: OSCAR MURILLO AND MODOU DIENG TALK ABOUT THE NATURE OF POLITICAL ART
Recorded on October 25, 2018. Transcribed by Alex Bissonnette
Installation view of Cry of Victory and Short Walks to Freedom: You / Over You
Recorded in conjuction with the exhibition Cry of Victory and Short Walks to Freedom: You / Over You
Hi, I’m Jeremy Goodwin and this is Cut and Paste, St. Louis Public Radio’s art and culture podcast.
Now you may have heard there’s an election coming up in the United States, yes it’s true, so lets talk about political art. There is an exhibition in St. Louis called Cry of Victory and Short Walks to Freedom. It’s part of the For Freedoms initiative thats F-O-R freedoms which is sponsoring political art in all 50 states leading up to the election, this one is curated by Modou Dieng. He’s a curator and artist who was born in Senegal.
The show includes work from 15 artists, 14 of those pieces are on view at the projects+ gallery in the central west end and one is at the Kranzberg at Grand Center. Now, let me tell you about that one, it’s actually an installation that you walk through, it is an empathically multimedia piece. There are metal barricades like you might see out on the streets, there’s some black canvases and there’s more than 150 placards on wooden posts. The sort you might see at a rally or a protest, but there’s no obvious political slogans on any of them. There’s some painting, some magazine clippings, some plaster sculptures and at least one wig. You get the strong feeling that there’s a political message here but you can’t put your finger on exactly what is going on. It got me thinking about art and politics and whether one gets in the way of the other when you try to combine them and what exactly counts as political art. So for this episode of Cut and Paste I spoke with the curator Modou Dieng in our studios right here at St. Louis Public Radio and I spoke with the artist I just told you about, Oscar Murillo, who called in from a gallery in Bogota, Colombia. This podcast alternates between those two conversations. So lets start in studio with Modou Dieng. I begin by telling him some of the many thoughts that were running through my mind after visiting the installation at the Kranzberg.
Jeremy Goodwin: The way it resonated with me I felt like I recognized it and I didn’t.
Modou Dieng: Right.
JG: There was a grotesque sense to it….
MD: Yes.
JG: There was a realistic sense to it…
MD: Yes
JG: …and it occurred to me that this was a protest that I wandered into, that I wandered into someone else’s dream and I missed the beginning and I don’t quite understand and there’s something disorienting about that. Is that part of what you were trying to create?
MD: Exactly, the best way of describing a piece or talking about a piece is to let the audience do it.
JG: theres a real sense of place there, when the viewer arrives you’re entering into a different environment
MD: You can feel the drama, it’s a protest in limbo. You know, he describes that there is a lot of that going on, there is a lot of that going on in the world right now. Protesting for this and protesting for that, here and there. I thought it was a nice reflection of society, our contemporary society right now. A reflection on all of the aspects that he tries to speak to with his work. And, we carefully work within the space to make it the way the artist wanted it to be visible and be felt. It’s a kind of a sense of controlled chaos because a protest is chaos and also it’s a sense of sort of like giving the idea of a protest in an art context because we’re talking about an art piece. It has its own legitimacy to exist as a piece of beauty and a piece of cultural value and artistic concept.
JG: And part of the confusion or displacement for the viewer is we see all these pieces, some of the placards are right side up and some are upside down. They’re stacked together, we can see some of them and not see others but what I’m hearing from you is that is all precisely arranged.
MD: Of course, of course. Do you want to see all of them? [laughs]
JG: Not necessarily [laughs]
MD: When you are in a crowd you can only see a few faces, some people are turning their back, some people are walking faster or behind you so it’s a same sort of strategy because you know those are placards that are meant to be representing some sort of personality or identity. And I think it’s still in the making because it’s working with time and it’s working with the space.
Oscar Murillo: You walk around the space and there is this sense of a kind of… a space in limbo as I like to call it. A hoard of people left all these different placards after they had gone on a protest or anything before going on a protest. I sometimes fantasize about this space being overwhelmed with people and the seething kind of carry of the placards to some unknown destination, that was important here. It’s also that the placards being used in the protest implies that one is protesting against a course or protesting against something and in this case for me it is vital or very important that that doesn’t come across at all. That if anything I am celebrating aesthetics and freedom and form and color and being in the studio and making this work and making paintings. It becomes about painting primarily and I thought that the idea of the protest becomes at odds with itself. Also in that conflict you create energy for the viewer in their position of interpretation.
JG: You and Oscar both speak about the energy, maybe in a particular piece or in the space that people are interacting with it. What do you have in mind when you talk about the energy of a piece of art?
MD: Actually I had a conversation with two young guys who came to see the show from Ferguson or they were at the protests, I don’t know where they live, but they told me that they were there and it really reminded them of that moment and that they felt a little lost in it but that they were happy to experience it. In a sense that it sort of expresses what they felt there during that protest and a sense of abandonment, a sense of frustration and also not really knowing why they are there and what they were doing there even though they felt that they should be. And I think that for the artist to be able to capture, in general, those feelings that some people might have in a march or a protest and through just his own aesthetic and beauty and making is quite fantastic
JG: Speaking broadly Oscar, is this a political piece?
OM: It’s interesting because I don’t really know how to answer that because I don’t want to say yes because I don’t like to be tongue in cheek. I think it’s a piece that raises a lot of intrigue.
JG: Oscar, I think your work shows a commitment to an interest in social justice that might be addressed more or less explicitly from one piece to another. Could you talk to me just a little bit about, is there a specific political take away that you want your viewer to come away from with a particular piece?
OM: I’ve been thinking, actually, being here in Bogota recently, it’s interesting being here and having this conversation. We come from a place like Colombia or like being in Bogota, all these different injustices are at play constantly. Literally at every turn there is an injustice and how can I compete with that? I mean it’s impossible. I think primarily first and foremost, I am an artist but I think as a human being I also have this kind of burning energy and anger also. I think that to say that it’s rooted within a certain kind of injustice cause is maybe unfair to say. I think perhaps when I think about inequality, one could about racism, one could think about social injustice, injustice within the context of an economy, within trade, within geographies, within agriculture, if we get carried away with artificial intelligence. And so as an individual, all these kind of situations, they feel like a kind of anger and so yeah I think through my work I try to navigate the sense of how can I utilize my practice and think that it could make a difference or a change, but I also know that it can’t and I think that’s something that I’m getting to grips with and I’m still navigating and I’m still learning from.
JG: In these times, in these political times in the United States, is this a time when artists who are politlcally active in one part of their lives might want to factor that more into their work and how does that work?
MD: Well you need to ask them.
JG: Well you’re an artist, I’ll ask you.
MD: Well I’m not making work here.
JG: Well you make work elsewhere.
MD: Yes I do.
JG: Do you consider yourself a political artist?
MD: Well I’m a curator, I’m invited as a curator so I can only speak of one heart right now, which is the curator heart. I think art in itself is a political journey because making things… I really strongly believe that making beautiful things can make change because it gives people happiness. It gives people pleasure, it gives people ways of uplifting themselves and getting a better life and having a better journey and I think it’s a political gesture.
JG: You described that as a politicly gesture?
MD: Absolutely.
JG: Yeah, I think that this might be a time that words like inclusion and we have artists of all different religions, that is somehow becoming controversial in a way that we may have not have expected it to be.
MD: How so?
JG: There’s an inherent political content to simply saying “I have an exhibition with muslims and with christians and with jews and with people from different ethnicity and we’re welcoming all of this.”
MD: Of course, yes.
JG: And these are all American artists and this is American art.
MD: Of course.
JG: You know pluralism is not something that’s necessarily accepted universally right now, I think.
MD: Absolutely, I agree with you.
JG: What I’m hearing from you is saying that simply in an act of inclusion and maybe creating joy in a tumultuous time, that there’s a political element to that, just within it.
MD: Totally.
JG: The question I always think about is the balance between having some political content imbedded in your work somewhere but not being didactic, not coming down to a simple moral or a simple point that can be digested very simply because as an artist you’re not looking for simplicity you’re looking for ambiguity and complexity.
OM: Precisely, yes precisely. I think it becomes quite criminal also to make assumptions on what moves the audience, I think one can only be true to oneself and hope and pray engagement with a diverse number of people. And therefore, I know that I, as an individual, have… I know the things that fuel my desire to make certain works but I also want to make sure that that work is enjoyable and that the work has profound energy. And that it has a kind of huge spectrum of aesthetic resolve and to not get too caught up in a message of sorts because at the end of the day, a lot of this work ends up in storage, ends up in a museum, ends up in a collectors house and then just becomes a kind of performative record.
MD: My intention was to bring pretty much what’s going on right now within the contemporary art field to St. Louis and what they share is a sense of collective consciousness. Their work is very close to the people, lets say speaking of the title Cry of Victory and Short Walks to Freedom, when we think of the journey to freedom we always think of it as a long walk so I’m trying to say here that it doesn’t have to be. It could just be a short walk, I want it to be a celebration of the things that we share together. Sort of like a closure to what happened in the recent history in St. Louis in terms of thinking about Ferguson and the racial divide and all of the travel that we went through, the protests here in St. Louis. I felt like this was a moment for all of us to sit together, to find closure and let it go and move on to a future, a better future, a beautiful future.
JG: In dealing with things like that, the Ferguson uprising, racial strife and disparity, how does art come into that conversation?
MD: Well art is a space for beauty and it enlightens us, it gives us light, it gives us beauty, it gives us love. There’s a lot of love in art, we make beautiful things, artists make beautiful things. That pleasure can be shared and gives you a moment of peace, a moment of happiness.
JG: Don’t you sometimes want to agitate?
MD: Of course, we are all agitators and I think agitating could be making it wonderful, we can agitate the peace. Shake it up so that people can see it.
JG: Something that I wonder about, a word that we use a lot when talking about art is timeless. That pieces speak to us across the centuries, that I can have an emotional, an intellectual experience with a piece of art that might be similar to the experience someone had 500 years ago when they created it. What I wonder is in creating art, lets loosely call political one way or another, in what you gain in its topicality and its political relevance, do you lose some of that timelessness? Do you restrict the work to a particular time and place?
MD: I don’t know. What I can say is that in the context of this exhibition I have many different artists coming from many different walks of life. For example, Kwame Brathwaite, who is 83 now and his pieces were made in the 60’s in Harlem, between 1963 and 1965. Next to it you have a piece that was made yesterday or a month ago lets say, to be precise, here in St. Louis by a young artist so there is a great conversation that we can have within the space speaking about time and speaking about relevancy and speaking about the content and the intention of the artist.
And that was my conversation with Modou Dieng and Oscar Murillo. You know who I am, I am Jeremy Goodwin and this is Cut and Paste, St. Louis Public Radio’s arts and culture podcast.