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With the frenzy of the Venice Biennale's opening festivities having long subsided and the throngs of art lovers drawn to the event's lavish parties and networking opportunities having moved on, it's finally possible to give some real consideration to the art. One artist in particular whose work rewards some time and attention is Jorge Otero-Pailos, whose installation, "The Ethics of Dust: The Doge's Palace, Venice, 2009," was included in the Arsenale section of Biennale curator Daniel Birnbaum's exhibition, "Making Worlds."
A New York-based artist who teaches at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Otero-Pailos works at the intellectually rich intersection of installation art and historic preservation, transforming the process of cleaning buildings into an artistic intervention that raises questions about the cultural and historic status of pollution. For his Biennale piece, the artist coated a pollution-blackened wall of the Doge's Palace in Venice with latex and then peeled off the substance after it dried, removing the dirt and leaving a pristine wall behind. The skin-like sheet of latex and captured pollution is exhibited in the Arsenale--a record of the city's smoke, industrial exhaust, and accumulated grime.
ArtWeLove spoke to the artist about the thinking behind his piece, which is the second iteration of an ongoing "Ethics of Dust" project that he began at last year's Manifesta 7 art biennial.
How did the idea for this work arise?
I had been interested in cleaning for a long time because cleaning is a central problem in preservation, and I had written about what is politically and socially at stake in cleaning monuments. Raqs Media Collective, the curators of Manifesta 7, asked me to participate because their show was to take place in a Fascist-era aluminum factory that was undergoing preservation. The biennale was the first stage in a process of transformation that was to end with the building turned into offices. The local preservation architects were completely cleaning the building to get it ready for the biennial, and we were all very critical of what was being done to the building. My project involved asking them to leave one wall soiled and then save that pollution with latex. The larger project that came out of Manifesta was to think about a history of pollution and how pollution has changed our understanding of architecture from something stable, solid, perhaps even timeless to something unstable, fragile, and temporary.
So you transplanted the project to Venice?
The move to Venice has to do with the fact that the project is also a dialogue with the work of John Ruskin, who was one of the 19th-century founders of historic preservation. He promoted the view that we should not clean buildings, because he associated their outer layer with their age and historic value. When Ruskin traveled from London to Venice on the Grand Tour he stopped in the Alps, close to that Fascist aluminum factory where I did the installation for Manifesta 7, and gave a series of lectures that later became his book The Ethics of the Dust, after which my project takes its name. Ruskin’s more famous book is The Stones of Venice. That’s why I wanted to do something in Venice. My work rethinks Ruskin’s ideas about cleaning, dust, and history by revisiting the places where his thinking on the subject first took form.
How did you come to choose the Doge's Palace as the subject of your work?
It was a very important building for Ruskin, and in many ways you could say it is one of the cradles of modern preservation. It so happened that the Doge's Palace was in the process of being cleaned around the time of the Biennial; the walls that got cleaned were the ones that tourists can see. In a similar way to in Manifesta 7, I found the last soiled wall in the building, just a little off the tourists' gaze, and I cleaned it. But unlike what the other preservationists did, I preserved the pollution that I removed instead of discarding it. In am interested in the idea that our culture has no place for pollution, and yet it is our most common output.
How does your latex process work?
I paint the entire wall with a special latex that has a chemical dissolved in it to loosen the pollution. As the latex dries the pollution gets transferred onto the latex. Then I peel the dry latex. What you're left with is just the pollution, in the same pattern as it settled on the wall but now separate from the original surface. It's not an intentional aesthetic because nobody decided the way the grime would arrange itself on the wall--it simply settled on the building the way it did. I'm interested in materials produced unintentionally, perhaps because I am searching for a form of aesthetic creativity that is not based on subjective intentionality. Pollution interests me because it achieves an aesthetic coherence that is not based on my intention.
It's interesting that latex is both at the forefront of preservation techniques and also so closely linked to the practice of contemporary artists, going back to Eva Hesse and Bruce Nauman. Is latex a material you came to use because of its art-historical resonances or is it simply part of the preservation process?
It's really both. I became interested in latex really as a function of my interest in Eva Hesse and the kind of exploration of fragility that is latent in her latex pieces. They don't age very well, and conservators are working on how to conserve them. My first introduction to latex was from this conservation angle. From there I started to really get into Eva Hesse and to look into how the fragility and temporality of materials could enter into preservation. And then as it turns out this new cleaning technique was just emerging. I became very interested in it and started collaborating with Filip Moens, the manufacturer of the latex in Belgium, and one thing led to another. Surprisingly, art and historic preservation operate as unrelated worlds, but they are deeply intertwined. Once their interconnectedness becomes apparent, both become much more interesting.
Your work is titled the "Ethics of Dust." Speaking of ethics, pollution has a very pejorative moral connotation. Is there a moral component to your work?
That's a tough one to answer. I don't see my work as moralistic, but it's raising ethical questions. Pollution has such negative connotations that we tend to do whatever we can to make it disappear. We stigmatize those who make it, but at the same time our livelihood depends on its continued production. It is the major product—we call it a byproduct but you could just call it a product—of modernity. It's part of our history. But on what basis will that history be written if all physical traces of historic pollution are destroyed? To eliminate it from our history would be wrong, or maybe that's too strong a word, but it would certainly be a distortion of the story of modern civilization. Yet that is what is happening in every major city. Pittsburgh, which once had so much pollution in the air that you could not see the sun in the middle of the day, and had some of the blackest buildings in America, is now totally clean. Malraux cleaned Paris in the 1960s. The same thing happened in London. I recognize that in the current cultural climate it's impossible to keep building facades soiled, even though it is not necessarily bad for our health. It's an aesthetic choice, really. I’m trying to create a record of pollution, just like we take pictures and make films, but this record has more relevant information in it.
Do you see beauty in pollution?
Our conceptions of beauty have been stuck in the idea that it has to be related to intentionality, either that of a creator or that of an observer. I’m interested in aesthetic problems, but not necessarily concerned with questions of beauty. One way forward might be to think of unintentional aesthetics. This idea has only been discussed in the most unproductive ways, like through romantic theories of the ruin or of the sublime where nature takes over, or stands in, for the work of the artist. In more recent years unintentional aesthetics have been theorized in relation to the art of the mentally ill and associated with irrationalism. Part of what I'm trying to do is to reclaim a place for the unintentional within human aesthetic creativity. That is what I see in pollution: the possibility of an unintentional aesthetic human production. Pollution has very strong unintentional aesthetic effects—smog completely alters the color of our cities, we can't see the night sky because of it.
Do you see your artistic practice as separate from your preservationist practice?
I like to think that I have one practice, not two. I would say that the issues that drive my work, like the ethical stakes of cleaning, the possibility of rethinking pollution as world heritage, questions of fragility and history, or the search for unintentional modes of creativity, resonate differently in the worlds of art and preservation.
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