The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum: Ernest Neto: The Body That Gravitates on Me

Neto

Ernesto Neto: The Body That Gravitates on Me Curated by Richard Klein October 19, 2014, to April 5, 2015

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

The Body That Gravitates on Me, 2006 Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York

Ernesto Neto: The Body That Gravitates on Me

The following interview between Ernesto Neto and Aldrich exhibitions director Richard Klein was conducted in New York City on July 29, 2014.

Richard Klein: Coincidently, The Aldrich Museum was founded in 1964, and you were born in 1964.

Ernesto Neto: That makes the Museum fifty years old, the same as me!

RK: We are marking the anniversary of the Museum by looking back at its first decade, 1964 to 1974, which was the period that defined the future course of the institution.

These were not only the years when Larry Aldrich, the Museum’s founder, did his most prescient collecting, but it was also an incredibly transformative period in culture that still reverberates in the present day. We’ve borrowed back a handful of iconic works that Larry Aldrich acquired during this period, and invited a group of contemporary artists to show work in juxtaposition with these pieces. The idea is to place the contemporary work in the historical context of the period. The Aldrich hasn’t been a collecting institution since the late 1970s, so our focus is on the present. An anniversary obviously provides an opportunity to remember the past, but we wanted to look back through the lens of art being made today. We’ve invited you to do a project both because of the way your work relates to that of Eva Hesse and Richard Serra, two artists that Larry Aldrich collected very early in their careers, and because of your exhibition history with the Museum, having exhibited here in both 1997 and 1999.

EN: When I first saw the Serra piece in the corner using two plates of steel, not held in place with anything except gravity—I think it was 1987—it was very important for me, because I was already working with the idea of gravity. I wanted to be an astronaut, an astronomer, before I became an artist, so the pull of the earth has always appealed to me.

When I started making art in the 1980s, I was working with steel. The Brazilian artists Amílcar de Castro, who worked with steel in the 1960s, and José Resende, who worked with materials such as lead, were also very important to me.

The truth is that I never really focused on Hesse. I know the work because I have read about Minimalism, and Eva Hesse was always there. I have a sort of attraction for it, I feel comfortable with it, but her sculpture is often coated with polyester, and this kind of put me off, because I always had some difficulty with the slickness of the surface. You have the materiality, and when you coat it, it freezes the materiality. With Serra you don’t have this freezing of the materiality—if it’s lead, it’s lead, if it’s steel, it’s steel. So the work of Hesse, even though there are many similarities, has not directly influenced me.

RK: She passed away at the age of thirty-four. She only had a career that lasted about eight years.

EN: Perhaps I was not so familiar with her work because of living in Brazil and the sad fact that her life was so short.

RK: When I last saw you—which was in New York in 2012—when I brought up the question about showing your work in conjunction with Hesse, you made a comment about how people quite often think your work is done by a woman.

EN: Oh yes, I remember that.

RK: I think this fact is fascinating. To me, it says a lot about how the world has changed.

Hesse opened things up, she was often connected with feminist art, but she really wasn’t

involved in the feminist movement. People included her because of the fact that she was a woman and her work was organic and dealt with the body.

EN: She wasn’t that interested in the feminist movement, but the feminist movement was interested in her and seeing her as an artist.

RK: Exactly.

EN: Being between all these male Minimalist guys, such as Serra and Donald Judd, I think had

Dreaming, Leaving, Moving, Time, 1999 Tulle, spices, ribbon Installation view at The Aldrich Museum, 1999

a lot to do with that. It is not always the artist creating the meaning; sometimes something outside picks it up and thinks “this is important for us.” I don’t think art should be interpreted just by what the artist says. Whenever we put the work on the table, the work is open to be reinterpreted by anybody else. I think it is very rich when an artist doesn’t want to control the interpretation of their work.

RK: The idea of the exhibition is not juxtaposing your work with Hesse and Serra and saying, “Oh, Neto has been influenced by these artists.” It’s more that there’s a continuum in art and we’re particularly interested in the way that art from the sixties and early seventies continues to

EN: I am very influenced by everybody from that time: the Brazilians such as Clark and Hélio Oiticica, the Minimalists, Arte Povera. I think that it was a very special moment for sculpture in general. People had the need to see the world through the body, to have the truth of three-dimensionality, to move away from illusion. Hesse is very inspiring to me because of her groundbreaking work with textiles. I’ve worked with fabric for over twenty years now and people have repeatedly said to me, “You should put some polyester on it.” I even experimented once with stretching fabric and painting it with polyester to make it hard. So, maybe because people were encouraging me to do this, and because she had worked that way, I responded by not wanting to go in that direction.

RK: Sometimes influence is a reaction against something! When you put polyester on anything that’s flexible, it freezes it and makes it stagnant. But it seems that your interest lies in the nature of fabric to stretch and conform to the forces of nature.

EN: If you coat fabric with polyester it breaks when you fold it. You can’t put it in your backpack and go somewhere. This is very important to my work, this idea that you can fold it up and go somewhere and unfold it. I live in Brazil and Brazil is far away from many of the places I work and this flexibility is part of the meaning of what I do. So, the freezing of the fabric would just destroy that.

RK: The title of the piece you are showing at The Aldrich is The Body That Gravitates on Me. This implies that the viewer is somehow complicit in the work because it’s attracted to them.

EN: Sometimes I like to put the viewer inside of the work, through the title, to have that feeling that we are pulled towards the object, that we are inside of a field that surrounds it. This personalizes the work, bringing it closer to us. This also helps to disguise its specific anatomy, to bring the form back to the viewer.

RK: Going back to this question about the sixties—not just with visual art, but culture in general—I know you’re doing work now with the indigenous people from the Amazon, and it involves ritual and ecstatic experience, something that was very important to the sixties counterculture.

EN: Yes, I’ve been collaborating with shamans from the Huni Kui. We did an ayahuasca ceremony at the Guggenheim Bilbao prior to the opening of my show there earlier this year.

The ritual involves drinking a mind-altering tea made from botanicals from the rain forest.

I believe that nature is the great teacher of art and that the ceremony was a way of connecting my work back to the earth. The sixties counter-culture was incredibly important and I think we’ve got to bring it back. I really love the music from the period.

I don’t know if it is because I was born in the sixties, but I really think that its spirit will come back—we need the counter-culture again—the world is not running well.

RK: Tell me about your experience with the people from the Amazon.

EN: The relationship I have with nature through my work is very important. I got a lot of confirmation from the Indians about the path I’ve been following. The most important thing to them is their happiness, to be happy, to develop a kind of spiritual happiness. And the society we have made is all about guilt. The majority of art from the developed world talks

Piff Piff, 1997 (front) Stockings, turmeric, annatto Paff (turmeric), 1997 (rear) Stockings, turmeric Installation view at The Aldrich Museum, 1997

inform the current dialogue. I know that Brazilian art from that period is important to you, Lygia Clark for instance.

about pain, about difficult things, whether it is expressionist or activist. The Indians don’t believe in it. They believe in spiritual happiness. It’s very interesting because people sometimes consider my work to be a little bit naïve. Well, I believe in respecting life, in trying to live well, to work at collaboration, to attempt to valorize the life that you have, because for me, happiness is the key to life. We take too much time looking to the sky to find God, to find the divine, to find the spiritual. The spiritual is on the ground here, is on the plants, is on the animals, is on the earth, is on the trees; it’s not over there. Life and happiness are right in front of us.

Ernesto Neto was born in 1964 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where he currently lives and works. He has exhibited his work worldwide, including recent solo exhibitions at the Guggenheim, Bilbao; Galeria Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo; Espace Louis Vuitton, Tokyo; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York; the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas; the Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, London; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rome.

Work in the Exhibition Dimensions h x w x d in inches The Body That Gravitates on Me, 2006 Polyamide fabric, Styrofoam, nylon stockings, sand 108 x 70 x 70 Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York

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The Body That Gravitates on Me (detail), 2006 Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York

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