Beatriz Cortez, Ilopango, The Volcano That Left

[music]

0:00:06.2 Dr. Steven Zucker: We’re at the Storm King Art Center, standing in front of a large pyramid of metal. This is a sculpture by Beatriz Cortez, who was born in El Salvador but lives in L.A. It’s a sculpture of a volcano…

0:00:18.9 Dr. Beth Harris: A volcano named “Ilopango” in El Salvador. Today, the site of this volcano is a lake. After the volcano erupted, it left the caldera, a hollow space in the Earth, that over a millennium became a lake.

0:00:31.8 Dr. Steven Zucker: Scientists believe that the eruption was one of the largest volcanic eruptions in the last 7,000 years, and its impact was felt around the world.

0:00:40.8 Dr. Beth Harris: And so here we see Cortez remaking this volcano. It’s made out of welded steel. We can see a skeletal structure that holds these pieces of welded steel in their place. And the steel has been beaten and transformed to look like lava, to look like organic material.

0:01:02.5 Dr. Steven Zucker: The surfaces are amazingly complex. You have these sheets of rough steel, a kind of skin that seems almost to be strapped together. There are areas where it is rough, and then there are areas which the artist has likened to obsidian and which are smoother and shinier than the rougher surfaces. And you can see two main flows down the mountainside. There are even some areas where it’s left jagged and open so that you can see into the volcano.

0:01:32.9 Dr. Beth Harris: It’s as though we’re watching a volcano both in the midst of its eruption, but also after some time has passed and that magma has turned to obsidian.

0:01:42.8 Dr. Steven Zucker: Well, time is central to the work of this artist, who thinks in terms of both geologic time and even celestial time.

0:01:49.7 Dr. Beth Harris: The artist is asking us to radically alter our perspective: to think about the vastness of time, the vastness of space, and change over time. So, for example, she refers to the way that the debris from the volcano could be found as far away as Greenland and even where she lives in L.A.

0:02:13.1 Dr. Steven Zucker: Well, she’s taken this massive volcano, and she’s shrunk it down. She speaks of how it takes hours and hours to drive around a volcano, to see it from different perspectives. But here we can walk around it and see those shifts and those changes. In a sense, she’s telescoping us out so that we can see these cosmic changes. We can see a mountain in flux.

0:02:35.5 Dr. Beth Harris: The idea of the volcano in motion was really central for her. And she says, “The shape of Ilopango in my imaginary kept changing. And I thought it has to be organic. It has to look as if it’s flowing and like it has motion. And it does look as if it’s moving and transforming before our eyes.”

0:02:55.7 Dr. Steven Zucker: She used the word “our,” and what she’s referring to is the team of artists that she worked with, that community of people who each brought their own vision, was important to her. And actually the making of this sculpture, which is about movement, itself moved. It was initially constructed in part in France, then it was brought to Los Angeles by ship, where more work was done on it. And then it was transported by truck here. That journey is expressed on a secondary work of art that is a few dozen yards away, which is called “Stela Z,” which uses glyphs to actually depict the journey of this volcano.

0:03:31.3 Dr. Beth Harris: And it will continue its journey, its performance, up the Hudson to Troy, where it will be reinstalled. And it will leave a footprint here at Storm King, much the way that Ilopango in El Salvador left a footprint that is now a lake.

0:03:47.1 Dr. Steven Zucker: And of course, the title of this sculpture is “The Volcano That Left.” And so we are seeing it just before it does that.

0:03:54.2 Dr. Beth Harris: And I think that the title is really important because we think, “How is that possible, ‘The Volcano That Left’?” Because we look at a volcano and think about it as a rather permanent fixture, because it lasts so much longer than a single human life. And she’s reminding us that the landscape is constantly evolving and changing.

0:04:13.8 Dr. Steven Zucker: Now, the sculpture is surrounded by yet another sculpture by Beatriz Cortez, which are a series of boulder-like forms, also wrought in metal, that simultaneously function to reference the boulders that would have been spewed during the eruption from the volcano, but also are placed to replicate the constellation of Orion. And so there is this dialogue between the Earth and its movements, and the stars and their movements.

0:04:41.5 Dr. Beth Harris: The artist is asking us to shift our perspective: to think about the world, think about the Earth, in a way, from a non-scientific perspective and moving beyond our human perspective.

0:04:52.7 Dr. Steven Zucker: You can look at this sculpture as an abstraction of a volcano. And the artist talks about how abstraction existed, not only in the modern world that is not only in the 19th, the 20th, and the 21st centuries, but existed in the ancient world as well.

0:05:07.6 Dr. Beth Harris: We tend to use the word “modernism” or “the modern” to describe the period in which we live. We have a tendency to see all other periods before us and in fact all places outside of the industrialized world as not modern. And Cortez talks about how we can understand ancient cultures of the past, for example, in Ancient Mesoamerica, as having their own modernism, as being scientifically advanced in their thinking.

0:05:37.0 Dr. Steven Zucker: And when we look at this sculpture of the volcano, this volcano would have been witness to those various modernisms.

0:05:43.4 Dr. Beth Harris: And she says, “For me, this work is also a conversation about ancient forms of abstraction. I have always been fascinated by the idea that in ancient times, there were other modernities, there were other developments, scientific developments, knowledge that was so precise that, sometimes, some of it we don’t have now. And there was the ability for abstraction.”

0:06:05.0 Dr. Steven Zucker: In fact, she recognizes that the eruption of this volcano cooled the Earth at a time that she suspects it had been heating up. And so she’s thinking about the Earth’s ability to heal itself.

0:06:17.1 Dr. Beth Harris: This sculpture will travel up the Hudson through what is acknowledged as a hot zone by climate scientists, a place where the Earth happens to be warming more quickly than in other places. So, here we have the sculpture acquiring new meanings as it moves through this place that is being transformed by global warming.

[music]