CM: So that’s deliberate, how do you reach as many people as possible?
AS: Exactly, what is going to titillate people so that they want to come and play in this little floating room? It exists in this pop up world which is only a 5 x 7 space, the bed inflates and pushes the sofa shut, this back and forth, this little soft space.

CM: The thing that is incredible about the work is that you have taken the idea of the hotel—a place to sleep, to deflate, to take care of yourself, to have the space be as desirable as possible. Its sexy to spend a night in a hotel room, although you are taking away some of the comforts, like a bathtub. Instead you make it into a viewing space, having a window view in one’s chosen destination would inherently be the best possible scenario, and you have done that on a 360-degree rotation.
AS: And it was important to me being able to sleep in this space in the middle of the city and look up at the sky. The curtains come up at night. It’s not usually a view we think of when thinking of an urban space, just the sky, and the parking lot is one of the few open spaces in the city.

CM: This parking lot theme suggests that it’s a portable hotel and that you can take it with you wherever you want to go.
AS: I can take it wherever I want to take it.

CM: The scissor lift is also an icon of popular culture. They are used everywhere, in construction all over New York, but we might not notice them. You are bringing attention to something that is quite literally happening all around us in this city, being under construction constantly. Is that how it functions architecturally for you?
AS: Yes, the van and the scissor lift combine the two most common modes of transportation, the elevator and the automobile. So, you’ve got the vertical and horizontal in the same piece, that moveable opposite is a distinctly urban piece.

CM: How high could you get the piece, not just how high does the lift go but how far up could you drive the piece? Hypothetically could you drive to the top of a hill or a six-story parking lot.
AS: One of the decisions has to do with defining it as a distinctly urban piece, not a rural piece at all. I could have added a generator but it relies on a regular outlet for power.

CM: You wanted the city experience.
AS: It basically ties in to the city through this umbilical cord, on the side of the van is this little plug and you have to find an outlet. Every parking lot that I visited has an outlet somewhere; you have to look for it because it’s not something you think about. It’s like a little building that has an umbilical cord to the city.

Alex Schweder, The Hotel Rehearsal, 2013. Performance image courtesy of Cristobal Palma.

CM: Is your interest focused solely on bodies in buildings?
AS: That, and the performative nature of the work—the understanding of the city as something that you can practice and rehearse. Basically, the parking lots are open spaces; they are potential buildings, and the hotel is just one of the many types of possible buildings that could go into a parking lot. I chose a hotel. I made this little hotel based on the desire of this site. What I like about the parking lot is that you can drive something in and you can practice. It’s a kind of autonomous thing; it could be a hotel, a library, any number of inserts, and that for me was really exciting about the parking lot.

CM: Which is curious when considering perception and physical awareness of space and how you get to thinking that a parking lot has desirability. The idea of what people generally consider a parking lot to be in terms of an aesthetic, you are turning that around. The temperament of how a parking lot is represented in ones mind is not usually rife with possibility. How did you get to that thought system?
AS: I’ve been working with parking lots for quite some time. When I was in graduate school doing my research I chose parking lots because there is nowhere to go but up in terms of making them interesting, usually it’s just a totally functional place. Questions arose as to why you would go there, why would you go to a parking lot as an experience. I had 16 parking lots in the underground city, in its ruinous landscape that no one can access, and if you open that landscape up and give it a lobotomy, you can make it safe for people. With a car you’ve got this little zone of safety through which you can drive into a dangerous landscape or a landscape which is not pretty and thereby charged—you have this pocket of safety in a danger zone. It became a way of cleaning up something that was ugly and seeing that treacherous area as something that you want to see.

CM: How does the performative aspect tie into the piece?
AS: I have been working with performance architecture for about seven years, studying how you perform the space. For instance, the wall texts that I put on the walls in the Chinati Foundation residency, a body of work called Architectural Performances in Geological Times, were a set of instructions. I had two studios in Chinati, the locker plant and the ice plant, which used to be butcher shop. What’s interesting about that is there was this sunny space facing the sidewalk and then just behind it was the meat locker, which is completely cool with thick walls. Without having mechanical cooling it was about 10 degrees cooler in the dark room than it was in the sunny room, so one of the instructions that I came up with, was: “inhale this warmer room and exhale it into the cooler room until their temperatures are the same.” Your body takes over the room and shifts that bit of warm space again and again, but its not like you would ever accomplish or realize this change.

CM: Its about being cognizant about what that means, taking a moment to actually think about what your body is doing in space.

The post Charlotte Meyer talks work with Alex Schweder appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

1. Robert Irwin: Scrim Veil -Black Rectangle -Natural Light at Whitney Museum, New York
A reminder of Irwin’s dedication to understanding perceptual awareness of space by transforming the fourth floor of the Whitney with an intricate but barely there work, recreated after 35 years.

2. Ad Reinhardt at David Zwirner, New York
The black paintings fill one room with subtle details which reveal themselves with each moment you spend, smart political graphic illustrations provide a layer mostly unknown, obsessive photography slides in the hundreds.

3. Jill Magid: Woman with Sombrero at Art in General, New York
The investigative nature of Magid’s work paired with the skilled manifestation of sharing just enough information seduces every time.

4. Subliming Vessel: The Drawings of Matthew Barney at Morgan Library, New York
Intense research, developed language, constant movement, revealing process, considered materials.

5. Dickinson/Walser: Pencil Sketches at Drawing Center, New York
Old fashioned writing thoughts down on beautiful scraps of paper.

See top 5’s from other NY Arts contributors here.

The post Charlotte Meyer’s Top 5 Exhibitions of 2013 appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

CM: There is a palpable emotional force that is present, a back story to your work that is very connected to your psyche, even when the narrative is clear, there is ambiguity, you are still leaving a lot to the audience.
OH: Basically it’s about my Dad, my relationship with my father. My father is always present in my life and work. He was a truck driver and when I was five years old he had a truck accident that left him paralyzed from his chest down. I have no memory of him walking, for me he was always in a wheelchair. Eventually I became interested in art and I had this vision of lifting him up and put him up on an unexpected spot just for a photograph. I wanted to place him on a big rock, a building, a ladder—an inaccessible platform and look up toward him. When I grew up I grew taller and taller and he always stayed the same height because he was in a wheelchair. So, my idea was to lift him up and look up at him, changing the angle of looking. This film has developed from this childhood longing.

CM: You went to great lengths. Your father wasn’t able to be physically available in your life since you were five. That physical burden made visible or manifest in 50 Blue with not only your brother assisting him by wheeling him across the Israeli landscape, but you include your family and the community to raise him up the platform you had built. You physically pushed those limits. 
OH: Right, when you growing up with an un-walking Dad you think of accessibility all the time. You think of motion, you see everything as a physical feat. Motion and accessibility became major issues in my life. The simple action of climbing the stairs becomes a huge challenge. I started to look at the world through my father’s disability. Its not just any person, its my dad—the person that set the example for me as a little boy. So it became a major issue, the burden, the hardships, the incapability. I think it’s also present in the situations that I develop in the films. Everything is awkward and heavy and cumbersome. People push big wheels uphill, they carry huge poles, it all comes from this primordial desire of mine to see my invalid dad on top of an inaccessible spot.

Film still from The Tractor, 2013. Image courtesy of the artist.

CM: The mind-body connection somehow was disrupted or interrupted for you. There is a physicality that you are questioning always. The hoisting of the rope—it doesn’t take one person, it takes many people to make this happen. 
OH: I think that’s another context story, I grew up in a kibbutz. It’s a small community, everybody knows each other, everybody depends on each other. It’s an ideology driven organization that is based on communist ideas of social equality and sharing. The community is like a big family that provides for its members, it creates living conditions of great dependence.

CM: That is in complete opposition to being here in America.
OH: Of course it’s a magnificent contrast. I think my work tries to explore the boundaries where the individual ends and the community begins. I seek the tension between the private and the collective. There is a theme that repeats in several of my works in which the entire society is being recruited to rescue one of their sons, this is where I manifest this tension. I also play with how much the identities are obscured, because the participants are usually covered.

CM: They are anonymous. 
OH: Yes, they look and act like an ant farm, everyone fills their role silently.

CM: You make collaboration happen in Israel from here. You have this ability to get everyone involved in your films, and you are about to go and physically make work with people again in the Ein-Harod museum in Israel. How are you able to make that happen in Israel from here?
OH: Maybe because I am in between, an insider, and an outsider at the same time. I left the Kibbutz and live in New York now, it gives me the opportunity to create these kind of spectacles. Since I come with the title of an artist, people actually go along with me. It’s really rewarding. In Nothing New I had a 90 year-old member, his name is also Oded. He came to me while filming and said that he hadn’t seen so many people together working in the field in 25 years. This is something I will remember forever. It’s very hard to convince people to participate, but with every production it becomes easier because the circle grows bigger and bigger. I started with ten people in my first film and it became 25, then it became a couple hundred. It’s a powerful experience to see all these people actually doing something together, and there is no incentive other than the pure idea of making art together.

CM: You are touching on another important component of the work though. In the kibbutz lifestyle community is first, this is key to the work you are doing.
OH: Yes, definitely. The context of my personal background, where and how I grew up, this is the junction where the community and the individual intersect and become present in my work. I try to create that equation.

CM: Even though there are no words but still a narrative, you have developed a strong visual language.
OH: Yes, in a way when you work with people in the field it’s exactly that. You don’t have to communicate with people verbally. As a worker in a factory you know your role in the assembly line and you know that each one must just do his job. There is no need for unnecessary distractions. You work together as an integral organized group that functions as a body together. For me talking is a distraction, there is no need for it in my films.

There are so many things that are being communicated without saying a thing, so many visual codes. Everything is something that tells the story of who you are. It’s the same in the kibbutz, but in a very different way. The codes are different, for example how dirty your clothes are, how rugged your hands, how strong your grip feels when you shake hands.

CM: The visual language is tied to who the person is and what they do with their day, which makes the mind-body connection so present in the work.
OH: There are many visual codes. I think that what makes the mind-body connection is the strict authenticity. The participants are Kibbutz members, not just random actors, and they really work hard out there to create those spectacles. In my last piece I had a 75 yr old who broke his back on set, it wasn’t nice. I went to visit him in the hospital and he was so happy for the opportunity to participate. He is OK now. People work hard and you can sense it in the intensity of the actions that are being performed. For the short time of filming it’s a mini-scale utopia in a bubble. I think there is art that can bring people together, I try to integrate that notion into the visual language that I continue to develop and work on.

odedhirsch.com

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