Theaster Gates, Glass Lantern Slide Pavilion

0:00:06.6 Steven Zucker: We’re in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, standing inside a small enclosure by the artist Theaster Gates, and it’s called Glass Lantern Slide Pavilion. And as an art historian, I have to say I love it because my first art history classes used the very relics, the artifacts, that constitute the ceiling.

0:00:27.4 Valerie Cassel Oliver: In previous times, they were the windows to the world, the windows to what we understood as art history and the expressions of cultures from around the world.

0:00:38.6 Steven Zucker: These were used in art history classrooms in colleges and universities throughout the United States. This was the canon. These were the great masterworks that we were meant to learn from.

0:00:49.9 Valerie Cassel Oliver: Theaster Gates amassed an incredible collection of these three-and-a-quarter to one-inch glass slides. They were decommissioned by universities. The largest of the ones that are here come from the University of Chicago.

0:01:06.8 Steven Zucker: So Theaster Gates, the artist, was working at the University of Chicago, and he overheard that the art history department was going to throw away their enormous collection of glass slides, and he intervened. He rescued 60,000 slides from this collection, which are a record of what our culture held as most important at a specific moment in time that looks to us now to be quite limited in many ways.

0:01:34.9 Valerie Cassel Oliver: Theaster had begun working at the University of Chicago to expand the perceptions and understandings of art practices, and really the university invited anyone who wanted to have the slides to take them, assuming that people would take them as remnants of the past, take them as souvenirs. Theaster, however, had a very different idea. The archive, which he has been very deft at collecting and preserving for a public trust, is something that he was very interested in even at that time. And he stepped up to take all 60,000, but it wasn’t immediate because I think there were real concerns about how he would house these slides. Even though they were decommissioned, there was still an interest in their preservation, and so they wanted assurances that they would be in fact well-preserved in some manner. And he took it upon himself to create a repository of sorts for them, which ended up being the Archive House.

0:02:42.3 Steven Zucker: Theaster Gates does not only produce sculptures like this. He has a social practice that has to do with reclaiming architecture, reclaiming neighborhoods, reclaiming communities. And so this archival practice is a way of giving back to communities and reusing, never wasting. And in fact, we are surrounded by walls that are made from buildings that have been reconstructed on the south side of Chicago.

0:03:10.4 Valerie Cassel Oliver: Yes, Theaster calls it an economy of opportunities. Nothing is wasted. And it’s very much in line not only with his skills and understanding and embrace of urban planning sensibilities, but also his sensibilities as a potter, as a ceramicist who trained in Japan. So this notion of wabi sabi is very much at play in this pavilion of taking the excesses or the remnants of things and allowing them to be transformed to exist again, to be recomposed, reconstructed toward another service.

0:03:49.7 Steven Zucker: One of the qualities of wabi sabi is its love of the imperfect. I find it so interesting to think about his ceramic practices and then to look at the type of cups that he’s chosen to place on the shelf here. These are porcelain. They are hopelessly perfect. And yet they’re surrounded by a kind of reclaimed architecture that speaks to everyday life. We can see the heel marks of people who have walked on the linoleum tile that is just below the cups. And so we see this occupation of real people and real life, and then these precious and perfect porcelain forms that seem to me to talk about the contradiction that the slides above our heads also speak to, which is this ideal of the Western tradition versus our actual everyday lives in the real world.

0:04:40.2 Valerie Cassel Oliver: So it does fall into a notion of the high and the low, but that in and of itself, that binary is very problematic. So the bone china, which is really created from the ash of bones, and clay, that those are mixed together. These ideas of the glass slides, which are archaic, that he has recomposed, that he has repurposed to be a ceiling, the floors of a building, which he has reconstructed to be the sides of this pavilion, they’re all transformed into something else. These binaries of high and low, I think, is a very Western sensibility, which he really attempts to upend in the construction of this work and in so many others.

0:05:26.0 Steven Zucker: He’s so good at relocating meaning and taking us away from the given meanings that we would assume. For instance, in one wall, there’s a little square cutout, and within it, just behind some chicken wire, is a spiral hose that would be used for emergency purposes. In case there was a fire, you would break the glass, you would pull the hose, and you would hopefully extinguish the fire. This is for emergency use.

0:05:50.3 Valerie Cassel Oliver: It still alludes to, conceptually, this notion of the fire hose, even though we know it now as the archaic notion of a fire extinguisher. So it is here behind chicken wire, and it exists as a precious object, which is put behind something. Noticeably, the exterior of what would have been a wall, which is interior-facing. So it’s a very interesting shift, again, also disrupting and dislocating our ideas of the inside and the outside, of the high and of the low.

0:06:24.1 Steven Zucker: But I love the idea that you raised that the hose has become a kind of relic now. It has become something that’s precious, even though it had once been something that was mundane, that we would overlook. This is something now that draws our attention.

0:06:37.0 Valerie Cassel Oliver: Yes, very much like these decommissioned slides. So he is really knitting all of these different ideas together in such a beautiful and profound way, even though it has this very unpolished, if you will, imperfect space. The minute you walk in from the galleries, you are immediately transported elsewhere.

0:06:58.8 Steven Zucker: When we walk in, it’s slightly darker. It’s quieter. We feel enclosed. We feel safe.

0:07:05.1 Valerie Cassel Oliver: And that’s how the pavilions exist in different spaces. They are small, sacred venues, spaces of meditation where you can come inside and, as you say, feel encased, enclosed, a space of safety where one can meditate, one can be within oneself.

0:07:24.6 Steven Zucker: I’m so glad that Theaster Gates and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts has invited me into this one.

This work at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

The artist’s website

Lisa Lee, Carol Becker, and Achim Borchardt-Hume, Theaster Gates (New York: Phaidon, 2015).

Contemporary art, an introduction

1980–now in the United States, an introduction