“If the roof ever leaks, I can fix it!” » Theaster Gates looks up at the ceiling of the huge LUMA Foundation hall, some 20 meters above our heads. “Does it drip? Hire me! », he laughs. How many stars of contemporary art could climb on the roofs to restore them? The 49-year-old American artist has never forgotten where he comes from, he celebrates it here through a harsh and dense journey. To seal, clog, he has what he needs on hand: his father’s tar cart is there, the beating heart of the exhibition that the Arles foundation is devoting to him.
“My father was very creative, it was with him that I learned to build, he confides in his steady voice. But, in the 1940s, there was no chance of an African-American farmer from Mississippi entering art school. » Theaster Gates’ father started a carpentry business in Chicago and the youngest of his nine children (the only boy) learned everything from him. “My only legacy, when he died last year, are the tools he left me. This wagon is one of the most precious things to me. When it lived, this object was dead. Now that he’s gone, he’s come alive. The embodiment of a lifetime of work and what he passed on to me. »
80 ruined buildings restored
Repairing, building, transmitting… the artist, who in ten years has become a phenomenon, has devoted his life to these missions. Since 2006, he has been working to restore one of Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods. Over the years, he bought and restored 80 ruined buildings. His Dorchester Project now houses a bookstore, a garden, a cinema, open to all the winds of the neighborhood. Art as social activism?
Until the 2010s, few believed in this trend. And suddenly everything changed. Here is Theaster Gates propelled in 2012 to Documenta in Kassel, a prestigious five-year event organized in the small German town: the construction site he set up with his team in the ruins of a Huguenot house caused a sensation, against a backdrop of live gospel music ( 12 Ballads for Huguenot House).
“It took Documenta to make me feel comfortable with the artist label. After a decade where everything happened very quickly, this exhibition at LUMA is like a balance sheet, he recognizes as a pragmatic man, capable of negotiating with the Gagosian gallery, which represents him, as much as with Japanese carpenters. Today I try to be more specific. Instead of showing 100 ceramics, I show one, and I try to make it speak. »
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