THE TYPOGRAPHIC ISSUE
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Editorial Daniel Kunitz EDITOR IN CHIEF
Ellen Fair MANAGING EDITOR
Scott Indrisek EXECUTIVE EDITOR
Oritt Gat ASSOCIATE EDITOR
Nancy E. Sherman COPY EDITOR
Penny Blatt CREATIVE DIRECTOR
Kristine Larsen PHOTO EDITOR
Rena Ohashi ASSOCIATE ART DIRECTOR
Claire Cohen ASSOCIATE PHOTO EDITOR
Coline Milliard U.K. EDITOR
Doug Harvey WEST COAST EDITOR
Nicolai Hartvig PARIS CORRESPONDENT
Alexander Forbes BERLIN CORRESPONDENT
Tyler Green COLUMNIST
Thierry Bal Steven Henry Madoff Holly Myers Sarah Trigg Roger White Rachel Wolff CONTRIBUTING EDITORS
Charlie Ambler Kate Nelson Rob Smith Gerogina Wells INTERNS
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RULES ABOUT TYPE R.B. KITAJ DIVERSITY IDEAS COLOR INTO PARTS
I NTRODUCI NG // OSCAR MURILLO
“BLURRING THE BOUNDARIES between art and life” has been a cliché for so long that even though the maxim is ever present, it has become all but invisible. Fueled by artists (Robert Rauschenberg famously claimed to act “in that gap between the two”) and eagerly taken up by critics of all stripes, the concept in nonetheless fundamentally flawed. No matter how fuzzy the dividing lines between art and life, the mere positioning of the two entities as distinct tacitly validates the possibility an autonomous artistic real, unencumbered by life. Oscar Murillo’s multifarious practice brilliantly resists this commonplace of art criticism, although the artist has occasionally had recourse to it himself. For the London-based Royal College of Art graduate, producing art—whether it’s painting, or exchanging party videos with friends from his native Colombia—is indissociablefrom everything else. “We live, and that existence is generating a residue,” Murillo tells me from his hometown of La Paila, where he is taking a short Christmas break. “That residue can either be discarded as a kind of by-product, or you pay attention to it and decide, This is art and this is my work.”
show, the artist attracted considerable attention in the U.S. with a solo presentation at Modern Art galley’s booth at Independent (where his “low-lying sculptures” were singled out by the eagle-eyed Roberta Smith of the New York Times). This led to a residency and an exhibition at the Rubell Family Collection, in Miami, which will remain on view until August 2, that’s been deemed so successful it inspired the curatorial team to launch a yearly residency program on-site.
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This year will be equally packed. Murillo kicked it off in January with “Ossie’s Bingo Boutique,” setting up bingo afternoons and evenings at Rotterdam’s Showroom MAMA, and continues this month with exhibitions staged simultaneously at two London galleries: At Modern Art, in Fitzrovia, private-view visitors will be greeted by an e-mail invitation to a gallery dinner blown up to monumental proportions on the wall. Instead of steering the audience to a chic restaurant, however, the invitation will direct guests to a Murillo-concocted Ossie’s Bar & Restaurant in an East End warehouse, where a feast-cum-performance will take place. This text will also
An exceptional young artist rejects limits
For Murillo, 2012 was busy year. Following his RCA graduation
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various levels of exclusivity strictly based on how useful the guests (collectors, curators, and writers) might be to the host. A guest list in an accurate reflection of what kind of gallery the host is or aspires to be. But in Murillo’s proposition, notions of exclusivity and self-affirmation lose all relevance. The social trimmings that usually accompany an exhibition opening become the exhibition itself. Murillo’s family works in the cleaning business in London, and he worked with them for several years. His anti elitist drive has clear political implications (no
be displayed in the grittier Ishikawa gallery, alongside paintings and a floor installation of copper sheets recording the traces left by gallerygoers. (These sheets will be cut up and displayed as individual pieces at a later stage.) “I want very much to democratize this idea of the artist’s dinner,” Murillo says, alluding to the art world’s entrenched hierarchy and the contrasting crowds gathering at the two commercial galleries. While redolent of strategies adopted in the 1960s and the ‘70s by the likes of Gordon Matta-Clark (Food), Allen Ruppersberg (Al’s Cafe), and Dan Spoerri (Restaurant Spoerri), the move exemplifies Murillo’s inclusive generosity. It also puts into sharp relief the highly codified rituals of the art industry, all designed to maintain 14
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doubt influenced by his background)—a development that’s particularly urgent in Britain, where the social divide widens every year. For an artist still in his 20s who shot to international recognition in the space of 12 months, this might also serve as a way for him to keep together the professional and the private (the very spheres are often mislabeled as “art and life”.) Murillo’s relatives regularly attend his performance events which continue the Colombian tradition of festivity he’s known since childhood. just as they went to the summer and Christmas parties thrown for years by the cleaning firm until the recession. As always in Murillo’s work, every experience has potential as artistic material. Last September’s The Cleaner’s Late Summer Party with Comme des Garçons, held at Herzog & de Neuron and Ai Weiwei’s Serpentine Pavilion, was decorated “as if we were having a family gathering,” the artist
I NTRODUCI NG // OSCAR MURILLO
“I want very much to democratize this idea of the artist’s dinner.” told Bomb magazine’s Legacy Russell. Murillo spent his $10,000 credit, earned collaborating on an ad with the high-end fashion brand Comme des Garçons, on clothes—some to deck out his family and friends for the night, others for use as prizes in a raffle and dance competition. Films from the birthday parties from the artist’s father held in Colombia and London were projected on stretched canvases, and all the original guests were invited to party along with the art crowd at the Serpentine. Performers and audience, art happening and social occasion boisterously collided in this one-off event. Some of these occasions bring to mind the relational aesthetics of artists such as Rirkrit Tiravanija, who came to prominence in the 1990s by turning exhibitions spaces into social spaces.
Yet Murillo is wary of this lineage. “I have problems with Tiravanijahs more symbolic and conceptual gestural approach. It’s a practice that, in my opinion, unravels through a series of at-times disconnected conceptual gestures,” he says. In Murillo’s production, interconnectivity is key. Just as his dad’s birthday led to the Serpentine party, which in turn was echoed in Rotterdam’s “Bingo Boutique,” Murillo’s labor-intensive paintings obey a logic of recycling. Older pieces are routinely reused. The new material— canvases dyed in bulk, soiled, burned, or marked using a crude stamp-like tool—are left lying around the studio until they have acquired the appropriate level of grime, effectively accumulating layer of time for the works to come. “It’s like aging cheese,” Murillo says. The artist considers dirt a great leveler—“democratic,” as he told Tate curator Catherine Wood—because it is “real and everywhere.” Only at the very end of Murillo’s process does direct composition intervene, first when the artist sews together different pieces of canvas and then when he adds a few final touches—sometimes a word, other times a number, as in the 19-part Untitled, 2012.
by COLINE MILLIARD
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A Wade Guyton
B Sarah Lucas
C Mary Kelly
Next Page
Untitled, 2006 89 x 54 in.
Bunny Gets, 1997 41 x 28 x 35 in
My James, 2008 29 x 53 in
Fetanis Ioannis Tourism, 2009 23 x 26 in
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B Sarah Lucas
Bunny Gets, 1997 41 x 28 x 35 in C Jean Arp
Fenetre, 2009 23 x 26 in D Mary Kelly
My James, 2008 29 x 53 in
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Wade Guyton Untitled, 2006 89 x 54 in.
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