temple exercises
Contemporary Temple Introduction Process Construction Performance
Special Thanks
Theaster Gates Residency Lecture: UNC Charlotte Crossroads Charlotte, UNC Charlotte Chancellor’s Diversity Fund, UNC Charlotte College of Arts + Architecture, First United Presbyterian Church Graphic Design: Devki Gharpure, Keihly Moore
Residency: Charlotte, NC Performance: McColl Center for Visual Art
table of contents
Introduction
temple exercises
Mini-Studio
Mini Studio Syllabus Arch 4050/6050 Temple Exercises Mini-Studio with Visiting Artist Theaster Gates, Jr. Premise
This mini-studio is informed by the words and the work of Visiting Artist Theaster Gates, Jr., who was in residence at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte College of Arts + Architecture from October 28 – 30, 2009. Gates’ work as an artist, an urbanist, and a community organizer guided two individual projects: a “Con/Temporary Temple” and a “Tea House” (explained further later). Each project was accomplished through 8 seminar meetings throughout the semester and construction time in between. We read, spoke, and designed through the cultural constructs of ritual, community, spirituality, and race to achieve design|build projects that resonate with the specific conditions of architecture that accommodates both mediation and meditation. “Hardships brought on by war, poverty, natural destruction and marginality have made the field [of architecture] much more agile and sensitive, not only to the needs of wealthy clients, but also to the small voices. While I may not be able to change the housing market or the surety of gentrification, I can offer questions within the landscape. To question, not by petitioning or organizing in the activist way, but by building and making good use of the things forgotten.” - Theaster Gates, Jr. We offered ‘questions into the landscape’ in two distinct phases of our semester, both of which posit architecture as a device for meditating and for mediating between social, cultural, and transcendent, or spiritual experiences inspired by material phenomena.
CON/TEMPORARY TEMPLE
introduction
students Brittany Sims Brian Sechrist Dawn Hicks Devki Gharpure Divina Jones Nick Faulk Rasha Dumarieh Robert Elliot
Architecture of Mediation The second Temple Exercise was a Con/Temporary Temple - designed and built to hold six people. The Temple was intended to be nomadic, and drew from the architectural and cultural aesthetic of a traditional African American worship service in Charlotte, NC. Theaster Gates, Jr. brought insights from his course, Black Heaven, and students engaged in these communities, drawing inspiration for transcendent experiences inherent and available in architectures of mediation and meditation from (seemingly) disparate cultures. While this studio was a Design|Build endeavor, and two inhabitable spaces were the products of the semester’s labor, it was important to note that the enthusiasm for building was tempered (forestalled) by investigations of culture, ritual, spirituality and race. The ‘temples’ that were created were born of the ‘exercises’ that engaged the students. These investigations took the form of meals, visits to worship environments, discussion, building collections of artifacts and images, non-traditional material investigations, and free writing. All of these spontaneous and engaged activities were necessary in order to bring forth the built environments – the ‘temples’ - in an authentic and appropriate way. This studio was built on the belief that architecture rises out of cultural discourse and exploration. The specifications for the temple were as follows: it was to be easily assembled and disassembled; it was to have a structure, a skin, and an interior space for one to six people; it was to capable of serving as a backdrop to a large public event; it did not need to be fully ‘weather proof;’ upon completion, it was to travel to the worship communities engaged. On November 18, 2009, the Con/Temporary Temple was publicly presented at the Levine Museum of the New South in Changing Places exhibition.
process
Photographs collected from student visits to churches
Qualities of light were recorded
hidden and revealed
process
Study Models
transparency
perforated wall transparency
light and shadow Study models sought to translate six specific conditions that the students agreed were essential to the experienc of a worship space - arrival, threshold, inhabitation, focus, departure, and gathering. The models also examine various methods of creating light and transparency.
screen movement
process
Students received feedback about their process from Theaster Gates via video calls over the internet.
construction
Structure & Framing
Construction process took place November 1st through November 14th
The temple was initially constructed in the UNC Charlotte structures lab.
Floor Structure
construction
Plyboo was graciously donated by our Dean, Ken Lambla.
Dressing the temple with one week to go
30 yards of white weather-resistant nylon was cut and hemmed in 48 hours
Fabric Cladding
construction
Fabrication of fabric walls
Testing opacity
3D router required constant vigilance
construction
Panels
Ryan Buyssens, Fabrication Lab Administrator
Hand-finishing and installing perforated wooden panels
Abstracted patterns from collected photographs were digitaly routed into plywood panels
Levine Museum of the New South
performance
11.18.09
The Con/temporary Temple was installed over a two hour period as a “performance” at the Levine Museum of the New South on November 18th, as part of the “Changing Places” exhibition.
Levine Museum of the New South
performance 11.18.09
The shacks in Japan and the shacks in Mississippi weren’t very different and so it started a kind of conversation. I thought, “why don’t I start at the beginning of what one might call an arts and crafts love?” It is really out of my love for making small and simple things that I have come to want to build bigger things. Japan had a pretty important impact on the way that I had imagined myself as a potter. I went to small restaurants in Japan and my food would come out and folk would be like, “you know this is the fish of the day and the pot was made by Hadioshi who is local and lives down the block.” Then, Hadioshi would come in and Hadioshi could eat free at the restaurant every day; and, whenever they broke his plates he would make more of them. It was this wonderful acknowledgement of the
who live there. Being a potter in Tokoname was more a way to finance other interests with all these foreigners who would come in awe over your tea bowls. I found myself at the same time really loving some of the daily rituals and daily activity of life in Japan but also feeling very much like the more I spent looking at this really specific place, the more I wanted to understand places that were much more familiar to me. That a shack in the middle of a field in Japan was for some reason much more beautiful than the shacks that I remembered in Mississippi until I went back to Mississippi and realized that the shacks looked like shacks.
UNC Charlotte
Storrs Auditorium College of Arts + Architecture
October 28th, 2009
Theaster Gates Lecture
lecture
Storrs Auditorium, UNCC
Can I just make….(addresses the audience) can I curse? Can I make things?” And, this place called Rodan, which was this pan-Asian place, thought it was trippy that this brother had gone to Japan and had spent some time and could make these things. They said, “We will even pay you and we’ll have a series around your works” (B). So, I started moving the craft from these individual one-off moments of sculpture and installation to this moment of industry where my interest in clay could have an output that was more grand than craft-fare. I was looking for the sexy way to enter my clay pieces into the city and into the cultural sphere. I found myself making a lot of Japanese style things--like a lot of white Americans go to Japan, and they come back with their headband, and they start saying their funny Japanese phrases. I went through that. But, it soon moved from this appropriation and fetishistic relationship to one that started to get digested and become more complex.
I want to be your potter. You know, can I be your potter?
value of craft represented in a way I had never seen by these restaurants. They all had their favorite potters. I was like, damn this is really dope! So, when I got back to the States, I went and found a restaurant and was like,
In 2003, I was awarded an opportunity to go to a place called Tokoname. It’s a potter town a couple hours south of Tokyo. Having been a potter for about 10 years, I was very excited to go to what a lot of people might consider the “motherland” of potters: the great Tokoname. And to be in a place where the rituals that I had imagined, that I had fetishized over with these tea bowls and these teapots (A) - where that ritual was playing out in real time. After getting there, I realized that the ritual that I was hoping to find had become kind of scripted by the folks
and everyday my problems are so big and I’m so broke that people have to help me with them.
really doesn’t feel like art. It kind of just feels like I am creatively going about my everyday....
It’s very good to be here. I probably won’t use the stage very much. Everything that we’ll go through today feels like a series of accidents and ambitions that either fell flat and got re-configured into other things, or that actually grew beyond my initial ambition such that other people started to help me and it was no longer something that was familiar only to me. I feel really honored to be here and to talk about my art practic, which most of the time
10.28.09
B
A
so I started a band called the Black Monks of Mississippi and we made music.
But it was also an opportunity to celebrate the potential functionality of these materials, which is what Yamaguchi had taught me. So, at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), which at the time was my most ambitious project at the top of the year, I decided once I had built this temple that I also needed some monks (F). I needed some people that could help me activate the space and
material allowed me to then connect with the history of a modernist sculptor-- that there was this room to say, have the material do what it do. I’m sorry, it does what it does. And, that I don’t really have to work so hard. But there was a part of me – the potter in me – that really wanted to make the material function; so, I decided to do both. I took over a space in the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago) and kind of created this temple. The temple was made out of this salvaged material but also the benches, the altar, the DJ stand, the booths, the shoe-shine area – it was all made out of this one material (E). So, I wanted it to be both a celebration of material and a non-thinking that my 1960s modernist brothers would have me know.
So, I had a show in 2006 where I took this strange relationship that I had to Japan combined with the fact that I grew up in a place very different from Japan. These two worlds, this Asian world in Chicago and this Black world in Chicago, coexisted in this same block. You are looking at a small installation where I took these 1960s protest poems written by black men and women and translated them into Korean, Chinese, and Japanese (C). I then took drawings that me and my friends collected all under the rubric of an imaginary person called “Mr. Yamaguchi.” Yamaguchi became my way of suggesting that there is a relationship between Asian craft and Black Americans--we just haven’t learned of it yet. And my assertion of this relationship was a man named Yamaguchi. Yamaguchi is a place, a region in Japan with a city in it called Hagi. Hagi is where tea ceremony as we understand it was birthed in the 16th century. So, I made this man up, Mr. Yamaguchi who was a 9th generation potter, who was bored with the kind of clay stuff that he had been doing and he had heard of the legendary black clay of the American South. The ceramic world was always thinking about porcelain, how can we make things whiter and I was determined to put my black a** somewhere in this craft! So, I decided that Yamaguchi would look for black clay and make black clay bodies. He found out that this place was near the place that I grew up in Mississippi (you may as well keep it real
lecture
Storrs Auditorium, UNCC
So, it (the exhibition) started to then help me ask questions about what institutions expect from their artists, what they expect in culture, and about the power that artists have to galvanize communities. This was also the first time the MCA had ever had a performance inside one of its exhibition spaces, so it was a chance to tease out questions like, “why would I go to the theater to perform when I just built a dope-ass church? This whole building looks like a church, why don’t I just perform here instead of performing in the performance venue?” These seemed like really simple questions to me. I also said, “Well, if I’m going to build a temple and the temple is about everyday hood activity – shining shoes, singing songs, shouting, emoting – all these things, like the black, emotional shouting man that I am supposed to be embarrassed by, and I am engaging the formal ‘white’ museological institutions, I thought, I can’t just do this at the MCA, I have to go back to my centers. We gotta do this at my crib, we gotta do this at Little Black
What was great about the exhibition was that there was a tremendous amount of fuss created. The Museum of Contemporary Art hadn’t seen a crowd like this for anything and the museum, which tends to be always looking outward for international artists and folks from New York, was really shocked that someone local, provincial (i.e. self-taught, even) could pull something like this off !
A warehouse on Lake Street and Cicero, which is about a mile and a half from where I grew up. So, purely on geography, this material and I had something in common that I wanted to investigate. When I saw the material in the truck – it was in this big semi – it was wrapped and hadn’t been used in 10 -15 years. It was discarded industrial waste--brown and nobody wanted it. There were too many of them to really do anything but burn them. I was like, this sounds like Negros and so I felt really compelled to take these little brown babies and figure out a way to use them--but use them for a purpose higher than the purpose they were made for. And, in the act of using them, I would restore a kind of dignity to the material. This would be a kind of reconciliation to the fact that I too grew up on the Westside and maybe had been discarded and no longer necessary, which is what my urban planning classes taught me, that black people were the urban problem – black people. So, in some ways the
(Due to technical issues a few minutes of the lecture were not recorded – Theaster finishes speaking about the Yamaguchi project and begins speaking about his use of reclaimed material from an old Wrigley factory to create architectural environments, specifically Temple 6916 on Dorchester Street, Chicago, Illinois.)
somewhere). He moved to Itawamba county Mississippi... (D).
10.28.09
F
E
D
C
I just kind of stood there – I didn’t really do anything most of the time
and by allowing these sisters to occupy the space with me and them bringing their families-- there was a moment of interesting cultural collision where the curiosities went both ways. Folks who had no interest in Jesus at all and had never heard gospel music in this old-time religious way were met with a very rich cultural experience. And these women who had never performed outside of a church felt like there was a new purpose to how they might present what they do.
sometimes it’s just about extending an invitation
decided I would make objects and bless them. Then I would send them to the exhibition space - in this case, Mt. Zion Missionary Baptist Church. In the exhibition space, I play it out in three ways – outer chord, inner chord, and then holy of holies where the choir got down. It was so awesome to have this choir open up the space and remember the North side and bring their families so that, where I would have been the only black artist performer performing for an all-white crowd in St. Louis on the north side, I now had a crew – this is back to the idea of the dinner table, that
They get their groove on until they pass out and when they leave the club, they say “oh my God I needed that so bad – I can’t wait till next week!” This is same way they talk about Jesus; “Preacher really did something today, Lord Lord Lord. I don’t remember what he said but he sho was good.” And, so the MCA was dumb enough to let me do it! So, I just started calling up all my friends and was about to get this cat – Leroy Bock, who was a guitarist for Wilco, this guy Andrew Bird, who was a violinist, and all these cats who for the day gave up their superstardom and
one’s ability to shout and forget, to have community, to witness, to be encouraged-that those functions of the church have been dispersed into the world and now people go to a club every week.
I was making the case that the creative activity that used to be housed in religious institutions –
Pearl Community Arts Center and I think that the MCA should pay for it and that the show is only complete if it’s at the MCA, at my crib, at Little Black Pearl, and at my club.
lecture
Storrs Auditorium, UNCC
Anyways, at this point in my career, the projects feel like they are starting to echo between things that happen on my block and the things that happen in a more formal art world. And, it’s exciting that Lucy R. Lippard, a really great writer, who has written about this idea of ‘localness’ has been an encouraging voice to say the more I concentrate on the things that are specific and particular, the things that I believe in and places that I believe in and things that I know really well, the more I give credit and creed to those things. And, not imagining those things as the smallest things, marginal things to the center but as the biggest things I could ever do. The more I commit to that, the more the world will hunger for an authentic thing – something sincere, if you will, sincere. So, I started to dig into my block called Dorchester. Anything that I could do – I mean I kinda wanted to own the block but I wanted to own it with other people. I just got real ambitious about this thing. I didn’t have ambition to be an ‘art dude’ but I just wanted to mow my lawn really nicely, start edging it up, get some kind of fence. So there is this echo now between performance-based work and object making and these things that happen on my block. Let’s see what happens.
because I’m not an artist you guys. I don’t know what the hell I am!
After the MCA, I was pumped. This is my calling! I was asked to do an exhibition in St. Louis at a place called the Boots Contemporary Art Space, on the North side of St. Louis, which had been an industrial zone, industrial area – black folk lived there – and it was a reasonably nice neighborhood. Section 8 allowed for a kind of integration between blacks and whites in the early ‘60s. This is all my urban planning stuff. Then eventually it became a little ghetto and nobody wanted to be there. The black middle class started moving to the South side of the city – or other parts, East. It was only the poorest of the poor who were left there until there was a small revitalization effort and people started taking these storefronts again. So I was like, I want to know who lived on the North side. I found Mt. Zion Missionary Baptist Church was in the North side. I asked them if they would come and be part of this exhibition called ‘Holiness in 3 Parts’ (H). For this exhibition, I was tearing down my building, Gordon Matta-Clark style, and I started keeping the wood and
became black monks with me and we just kinda rocked out (G). Again, I think part of what I’m suggesting is that I needed to move from the power that I felt craft had to these other ways of delivering messages about cultural plurality and the value that different kinds of spaces have in a city center.
10.28.09
H
G
Just as I was gutting the building, y’all – I’m telling you this is Jesus – just as I was tearing out the building, I got a call from the Art History department at the University of Chicago. They said, “Mr. Gates, we know that you like
I started thinking about what else I could do with this building, 6916 Dorchester (L). I started, I gutted the building for 8 G’s because gutting is expensive and then I just started having people over. I had architects come over and start talking about balloon framing; I would have designers over and they would speculate with me – what the building could be – just like your design studios (M,N). Then I was like, you know what, I don’t like this enclosed back porch-- I’m going to tear it down on a Saturday as a performance piece. So, I videotaped it; I am going to be the art guy – I’m going to be like Gordon Matta-Clark! I started tearing the back porch off and, as the building started to reveal itself, it became prettier and prettier to me. So I started tearing out the fences - one check at a time, little bit, little bit (O).
Dorchester Project. The Dorchester Project assumes that there are a lot of things that can happen with buildings besides renting them to low-income people. If I am going to rent it to low-income people, I am going to rent it to my sister and when I decide to quit my job then I have a place to stay and I will be low-income too.
So, I took the house that I could afford – really simple buy what you can afford. I bought it and started to love it and then that really started this idea that - this is the place that I am, so this is the best place in the world. I just started cleaning up things that I didn’t own and talking about them as if they were mine (J). About 8 months ago, the building next to my building became
“Where else am I going to find a $90,000 house anywhere else around y’all?”
In 2006, around the same time I had that exhibition at the MCA (Chicago), I bought this house on the right (I). The house was single story and was called the ‘candy store’. Everyone knew it as the ‘candy store’ because there was a deli there at one time. They sold hot dogs, cheeseburgers, and jumbo tacos. When I got it, a family had been living there and was ready to move on and the building was falling down. It had these 2 empty lots next to it that weren’t connected in any way –but, I thought I could get them. It was cheap and I had just got my job at University of Chicago and they were going to help me get it built and I was like, “I want that one.” They said, “Are you sure, Theaster? Are you sure you want to be that far South? Things are really dangerous down there.” I said,
lecture
So, I went to the Art History department and started meeting all these art historians. Now, I lecture in the Department of Visual Arts, which is on the other side of campus from Art History. Art History. Art. And never the two shall meet. But, I thought, man, this could be a really interesting opportunity for a practitioner to have something to say about Art History instead of art historians always
I could sell them for $5 a piece. I’d be a millionaire up in this place! No, I’m not going to do that. I could though… ..I could.
hell yeah, I want to see those slides! Are you crazy?
Everything is so tentative with smart people. Like, let’s have a conversation. I was like,
found materials and we know that you like heavy things. We are in the process of getting rid of our glass lantern slide collection, and we have approximately 80,000 of them (which is a lot of weight y’all). We were wondering, we were going to spend $4,000 to dump them because no one else will take them, which could probably cover the cost of a move. Might you have any interest in looking at these slides?”
So, there were a lot of empty buildings. I think I closed on the building for $17,500. I borrowed money from my mama; I called 2 or 3 friends who were older and had some loot and said I would work it off. There began the
available (K). It had been foreclosed and the dude who owned it owned like 10 other houses on the block and was renting them to Section 8 people –black people who had Section 8 eligibility – who were getting displaced from Cabrini Green. And they were moving into the hood, fucking up the lawns and stuff like that. He was renting to all these folks, charging these crazy rents, and eventually Section 8 laws changed so if there were so many empty lots on a block or there was a lot of rot in the buildings you were in, there was a way……..boy, these federal folks are smart, if you own a block that has lots of empty buildings, that block has great potential for redevelopment. But, if you are always letting the Section 8 folk move into the buildings that are occupiable, then the white people will never come. So, Section 8 said that if we want to encourage redevelopment on a block like Dorchester, we can’t keep letting these n****** move in. So, overnight, all of the Section 8 renters disappeared. These owners were left with these buildings and no one to support the mortgages that these Section 8 renters and the federal government were supporting.
10.28.09
O
N
M
L
K
J
I
Sometimes, the best thing we can do is expose things. Thank you.
their shoes shined everyday, another place that restored dignity everyday and I started to think about shoe shining as an act of humility and as an act that also restored dignity that transformed people’s shoes. So I started making these ghetto-fied, these tricked-out, shoe shining stands. Taking things from my backyard and just treating those materials formally (S, T, U).
So, this glass lantern archive is a recent project, but there is also an architecture bookstore in Chicago called Prairie
I found that gathering found bodies of knowledge also became interesting.
So, I bought these beams, brought them to my house and had my structural engineer come over and I said look at these beams in my yard - what’s up? He said yea, you need five footers and --boom boom boom boom boom boom boom -- $10,000 later for my free slides, I had this big truck come to my house and deliver these things (R). Now, no one told me that receiving 9 tons of slides would require so much money and labor but I think what’s happened is that while my practice had been interested in gathering found materials and being really happy with that,
talking about what they think artists are doing (P). So, I started measuring things and I called a structural engineer and found out that would have to create new footings for my building. I would have to get these structural beams, laminated. What do you call that? Yes, Glu-Lam. I could not afford that, so I found this dude who was a boutique structural scavenger and he had some 12x12 and some 8x8 members, at 30 feet long (Q).
lecture
I thought I would end with a conversation about how space informs objects that I make. As I mentioned earlier, the ware boards were very close to where I lived but also, were close to a shoe-shine place called Shine King. Shine King was where the Wrigley’s (Wrigley’s Chewing Gum Factory, in Chicago) men and other men would go to get
So, this is the archive being installed in the house and I kept thinking about the house like the ware boards, as a place, even though it was poor in frame. There was still the potential in it. There was a kind of dignity if I could sweep it out and tease it out. So, I started accepting the building as it was. Not really going overboard with renovations and drywall and making it plumb and square. Just checking it out. It became more and more beautiful to me.
Avenue Books that went out of business and I was able to acquire it for the cost of one month’s rent. The owners, an elderly man and his wife (Wilbert and Marilyn Hasbrouck) had been in the business (for 50 years), and were just ready to move on and chill out; so, these two bodies of knowledge ended up at 6916 Dorchester and I’ve been slowly re-fitting the building as new bodies of knowledge come up. I went back to my structural engineer and said, “I’m about to get 14,000 volumes of books, what else do I have to do?”
10.28.09
U
T
S
R
Q
P
GUESTS
Mini-Studio Students Paul Koska, Erin Leonetti, Miranda Porcenaluk, Zac Porter, Josh Shope, Richard South, Devki Gharpure, Brian Sechrist, Divina Jones, Rasha Dumarieh,, Nicholas Faulk, Dawn Hicks (NOMAS President), Brittany Sims, Robert Elliot Mini-Studio Professors Jose Gamez ( Associate Professor, Design and Society Research Center), Nora Wendl (Visiting Assistant Professor) UNCC Leadership Ken Lambla (Dean, College of Arts + Architecture, UNC Charlotte), Joan Lorden (Provost, UNC Charlotte), Susan Harden (Director of UNC Charlotte Crossroads Charlotte), TJ Reddy (Artist), Cheryl Myers (Charlotte Center City Partners), David Gall (Professor of Art & Art History), Janet Williams (Professor of Art), Angela Herren (Department of Art History) Charlotte Culural Center Leadership Dianne English (Executive Director, Community Building Initiative, Foundation for the Carolinas), Emily Zimmern (President, Levine Museum of the New South), David Taylor (President, Harvey Gantt Afro-American Cultural Center), Suzanne Fetscher (President, Executive Director, McColl Center), Ce Scott (Director of Residencies and Exhibitions, McColl Center), Dr. Patrick Graham (President and CEO of the Urban League of Central Carolinas), Christie Taylor (Director, Hodges Taylor Gallery, Charlotte, NC), Tom Hanchett (Chief Historian, Levine Museum of the New South) Charlotte-based Creatives/Artists Erin Sotak (McColl Center Artist in Residence, 2009), Sonja Hinrichsen (McColl Center Artist in Residence, 2009) Curators Annie Carlano (Mint Museum), Carla Hanzal (Mint Museum) Additional Distinguished Guests Tom Stanley (Professor, Winthrop University), Karen & Gerry Derksen (Professors, Winthrop University), Brad Thomas (Professor, Davidson University), Jessica Cooley (Davidson Galleries), Richard Thurmond (Charlotte Magazine), De’Angleo Dia-Bethune, Astrid Chirinos (Calo-energy), Jeff Jackson (NoDA film festival), Laura Meyer (FFTC), Stacey Richards (FFTC), Robert Bush (Arts and Sceinces Council), Scott Provancher (Arts and Sciences Council), Jean Greer (Arts and Science Council), Babak Emadi (UrbanaArchitecture), Wendy Fishman (Light Factory), Art Students of Sonja Hinrichsen
First Presbyterian Church
plate convergence 10.27.09
biography
Theaster Gates
Theaster Gates Brief Biography Theaster Gates, Jr. is a Chicago-based artist whose site-specific work employs architecture as a tool for mediation and meditation. In a description of his most recent and on-going work, Temple (6916), Gates describes the critical need for moments of interstitial beauty in the urban environment, small obscure places between the monuments. His notable work in Chicago provides just this, two re-constructed houses in an otherwise ‘blighted’ neighborhood in South
Chicago in which workshops, community gatherings, and exhibitions take place – an interstitial moment of beauty and transformation in a city that boasts such public art monuments as Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate and ‘The Picasso’ in Daley Plaza. His work has been recognized by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Illinois and, most recently, the Whitney Museum of American Art.
McColl Center of Visual Art
performance 10.29.09
residency
The Theaster Gates, Jr. Residency
The events that comprised the three days that Theaster Gates, Jr. was in residence at the University of North Carolina College of Arts + Architecture were structured around the rhythm of his own practice: one event was to take place at the School of Architecture, one event was to take place in the public domain and context of contemporary art, and one event was to take place at a community center. These events gave rise to a schedule that included a Plate Convergence dinner at the First United Presbyterian Church on the evening of Tuesday, October 27, a lecture at the School of Architecture on Wednesday, October 28, and a vocal performance at the McColl Center on Thursday, October 29, 2009. During his residency, Theaster Gates, Jr. was heavily involved with Temple Exercises, which he had been guiding at a distance, from Chicago. During the day on Thursday, October 29, Gates worked with the Con/Temporary Temple team to resolve design decisions and choose a final design that was constructed in time for the Changing Places exhibition at the Levine Museum of the New South in November. On the evening of Friday, October 30, Gates joined students of the Temple Exercises course in celebrating the opening of their (Sweet) Tea House at Hodges|Taylor Gallery as part of the exhibition Wabi-Sabi, the event that concluded his residency. Though in residence at the UNC CoA+A for just three days, Gates’ practice influenced the semester-long studio through Skype critiques and e-mail correspondence. The students were promted by Gates’ own words: “How do I pose questions, not in the activist way, but by making use of things forgotten?” The students involved with the Temple Exercises took this question further, making use of the forgotten traditions of mediation and meditation as they worked to create architectures that could intimate such conditions in the simple forms of a temple and a tea house.
10.30.09
Hodges Taylor Gallery
performance
Opening reception on October 30th, 2009 at the Hodges Taylor Gallery in Charlotte, NC
Visitors twisted the jars out of the lid attached to the metal shelves
Sweet Tea
construction
120 mason jars full of sweet tea formed the two main facades of the sweet tea house
Mason Jars
construction
Before the tea was added, the house was transparent
construction
Ice Bucket
the (sweet) teahouse ‘hearth’ - an ice bucket
construction
Tea Bags
Shoji screen was translated to southern vernacular with the construction of a teabag wall
Structure + Floor
construction
10.30.09 Tatami mats were represented through custom-made pallets
“The tea-room (the Sukiya) does not pretend to be other than a mere cottage - a straw hut. The original ideographs for Sukiya meant the Abode of Fancy. It is [also] an Abode of Vacancy inasmuch as it is devoid of ornamentation except for what may be placed in it to satisfy some aesthetic need of the moment. It is an Abode of the Unsymmetrical inasmuch as it is consecrated to the worship of the Imperfect, purposely leaving some thing unfinished for the play of the imagination to complete. These principles of Fancy, Vacancy and the Unsymmetrical or Imperfect became the guiding principles of the project, replacing the conventional Vitruvian principles of firmness, commodity and delight.
process
Kakuzo’s teahouse diagram
- The Book of Tea by Okakura Kakuzo
TEA HOUSE
introduction
Architecture of Meditation
students Erin Leonetti Josh Shope
The first Temple Exercise involved a “tea house” - designed and built to hold two people, and specifically for the site of the Hodges Taylor Gallery in Charlotte, NC. For this exercise, we studied wabi-sabi (the Japanese aesthetic of imperfection), and the architectural and cultural aspects of the traditional Japanese tea service. This exercise explored tea and meal time rituals, as well as traditional and contemporary methods of making architecture that leads to transcendent experience: conditions of light, manually manipulated natural materials, and qualities of sound, touch and taste.
Paul Koska
The tea house specifications were as follows: it was to be easily assembled on site at Hodges Taylor Gallery; it was make intelligent and creative use of free – or nearly free – materials; these materials were not be used containers or anything from the post-industrial landscape, but rather natural (or nearly so); it did not need to be weather ‘proof ’ and may have eroded under weather conditions; it was be 10’ x 10’ in footprint; it was to be specifically built for the interaction of only two people; it was to visually engage a viewer from a distance; and it was intended to visually and materially engage the two visitors within.
Richard South
On October 30, 2010, the Tea House was publicly presented at the Hodges|Taylor Gallery in Wabi-Sabi exhibition.
Miranda Porcenaluk
Zac Porter
temple exercises
Mini-Studio
Opportunity for meditation is found studying the patterns of old gum and wear on these boards, and mediation is offered across a large table in the same room around which artists, curators, neighbors and the wandering curious convene for tea or the occasion of a plate convergence.
become a destination for cultures traveling from hundreds of points around the world. Additionally, southeastern cities have become destinations for formerly displaced African American communities that had once migrated beyond the south in search of jobs and freedom.
A distinctly Chicago vernacular is evident in the underlying structure of the house and the parceling of its interior spaces, but in the repurposed furniture and materials – beams and boards from factories and other demolished structures, doors and furniture from a local and generous collector of Asian artifacts – the aesthetic of the environment surpasses geography and resides in something intangibly calm, focused. The challenge of Gates’ practice, and of this studio, was this effect: the production of architecture that, both through and beyond its materiality, offered mediation and meditation to those within.
The increase in migration has brought with it an increase in social tension. This tension stems in part from the fact that immigration is a relatively new phenomenon to this city and region; the southeastern US has not been a significant part of global migration patterns historically, but this has changed significantly over the past two decades.3 The Solid South seems to be melting into the air of multicultural modernity, and states such as North Carolina are now confronting the “complex nature of race relations in a post-civil rights era” in which bi-racial frameworks are “unable to grasp the patterns of conflict and accommodation among several increasingly large racial/ethnic groups.”4 Temple Exercises provided a venue to create spaces in which cultures might travel, bump, and mingle, and in which meditation might provide a form of mediation.
While it is certain that this studio began, conceptually, with a visit to a candy store, it was doubtlessly made real through two timely invitations in the early fall of 2009: Christie Taylor, of Hodges|Taylor Gallery, prompted us to question the form of the conventional Japanese tea house through the lens of Southern vernacular culture and architecture, offering a location for showcasing that response in the exhibition Interpreting Wabi Sabi in October 2009. Simultaneously, the Levine Museum of the New South broadcast an invitation to the College of Arts and Architecture at the University of North Carolina Charlotte to participate in the November 2009 exhibition “Changing Places: From Black and White to Technicolor,” which focused upon the changing demographics of Charlotte, North Carolina, responding to the growing cultural diversity and change created in this city by the influx of newcomers from across the U.S. and around the globe.2 Over the course of the semester, two explorations took place in one design/build course entitled Temple Exercises, borrowing both from Gates’ title for a performance piece, and the awareness that all architecture is an act — to be done, unmade, and redone — of approximating culture. The notions of mediation and meditation guided both: architecture as a location for mediation sought to transform the materiality and practice of a traditional Japanese tea house into something resolutely Southern in its materiality and culture, and architecture as a location for meditation drew inspiration from a semester of visits to historically African American spaces of worship in Charlotte. That Charlotte was the location for these two projects is not an accident. Charlotte’s changing cultural landscapes have coincided with the city’s rise to prominence as a national and, by some measures, global center. The topic of the exhibition at the Levine Museum of the New South points to the cultural transitions that cities like Charlotte now face; once an infrequently visited outpost in the global archipelago of migratory islands, the Queen City (as it is often called) has
2 Levine
Museum of the New South, “Changing Places,” retrieved April 27, 2010 from http://www.museumofthenewsouth.org/exhibits/detail/?ExhibitId=94.
Many acknowledgements are due for the success of this experimental studio. Our deepest appreciation to artist Theaster Gates, Jr. for his time and dedication to this project during a year that also required his focus in preparation for the 2010 Whitney Biennial. Ken Lambla, Dean of the College of Arts and Architecture supported this project from the earliest phases, finding resources both within and beyond the College to make it possible. Chris Jarrett, Director of the School of Architecture, first suggested turning what was proposed as a workshop into a more extensive course. Christie Taylor provided the motivation and funding to create a (Sweet) Tea House, gathering critical audiences for its opening. The community of First United Presbyterian Church in Charlotte, led by Dr. Rev. Gregory Busby, were remarkable collaborators in our design phase, and their insights directly informed this studio. Susan Harden, coordinator of Crossroads Charlotte, an ambitious community project that strives to steer Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s future as a diverse and global city, provided necessary funding and support. Dana Martin Davis swept us all away by giving the (Sweet) Tea House a permanent home at her residence, among many more worthy artifacts. Rasha Dumarieh, Robert Elliot, Nicholas Faulk, Devki Gharpure, Miranda Porcenaluk Gavalis, Dawn Hicks, Divina Jones, Paul Koska, Erin Leonetti, Zac Porter, Brian Sechrist, Josh Shope, Brittany Sims, and Richard South decidedly made Temple Exercises what it is through their generosity of time, energy, ideas and weeks of patient fabrication. Dr. Jose L. S. Gamez, Associate Professor of Architecture, University of North Carolina at Charlotte Nora Wendl, Assistant Professor of Architecture, Portland State University
3 See:
Kavita Pandit, “The Southern Migration Turn-around and Current Patterns,” in Southeastern Geographer 37 (November 1997): 238-50.
4 Michael
Omi, “Out of the Melting Pot and Into the Fire: Race Relations Policy,” in Policy Issues to the Year 2020: The State of Asian Pacific America—A Public Policy Report (Los Angeles: LEAP Asian Pacific American Public Policy Institute/UCLA Asian American Studies Center, 1993) 9.
temple exercises
Mini-Studio
Arch 4050/6050 Temple Exercises Mini-Studio with Visiting Artist Theaster Gates, Jr.
Introduction This design/build studio grew out of a summer visit to a candy store called Temple, which is actually neither. Located on the South side of Chicago, this candy store was once a series of shotgun apartments, and the shotgun apartments were once a single-family house fronted by a real candy store. However, Temple is not a space for worship, of sugar or gods. It is instead a catalyst, as all architecture can be, for “mediation and meditation,” the focus of the far-reaching studio practice that artist Theaster Gates, Jr. has built from this neighborhood. The words “mediation” and “meditation” reference two seemingly disparate architectural precedents: the Black Storefront Church, and the Zuisenji Shrine. The former, as Gates notes, “has often acted as an intermediary between people and god, and the poor and a city’s bureaucratic largess.” 1 It is here, he suggests, that both Spirit and Resource reside. The latter is a specific and remote Buddhist temple in Japan, as renowned for the tranquility of its gardens and the monastic order within as it is for its architecture. These precedents emerge in the former candy store, Temple (6916), in surprising ways. Spirit and resource are spoken through the spearmint scented wooden boards lining the gallery and conversation room, adapted and re-used during the demolition of a Wrigley factory blocks away.
1
Theaster Gates Jr.’s website, retrieved August 25, 2010 from http://theastergates.com/section/31729_The_Candy_Store_and_Other_Dorchester.html
(sweet) Teahouse Introduction Process Construction Performance
Special Thanks
Theaster Gates Residency Plate Convergence: First Presbyterian Church Crossroads Charlotte, UNC Charlotte Chancellor’s Diversity Fund, UNC Charlotte College of Arts + Architecture, First United Presbyterian Church Graphic Design: Devki Gharpure, Keihly Moore
Biography: Theaster Gates Jr. Performance: McColl Center for Visual Art
table of contents
Introduction
temple exercises