Despite Pitfalls, Reyes Dazzles

If a middle aged man falls off a seesaw in the middle of a crowded art gallery, does he make a sound? As Ogden T. Ross ’75 and a room full of fellow art enthusiasts recently learned, the answer is yes—he does.

After lively opening remarks by Mexican contemporary artist Pedro Reyes last Thursday, the Carpenter Center’s Sert Gallery reception was thronged with eager attendees, a concerned HUPD officer, and a number of local EMTs.

And the aforementioned seesaw? It was the centerpiece of the show.

With his installation “ad usum: To Be Used,” Reyes presents a collection of what he calls “open systems” in art. Nearly each of the pieces features in the exhibition requires the participation of the viewer in some way.

“You don’t just look at the object,” explains Reyes. “The outcome is not given. It is necessary for people to put the piece in action for the aesthetic experience to be complete.”

For one viewer on Oct. 26, this experience included a trip to the hospital.

While testing out “Leverage,” a piece that encouraged attendees to hop on for a ride, Ross was thrown from his perch atop a giant seesaw when his seat suddenly detached from the rest of the contraption. After walking around a bit at the reception, Ross requested medical attention and reluctantly allowed himself to be strapped to a backboard for an ambulance ride to the local emergency room. This action, EMTs assured, was strictly procedure.

Despite the ensuing commotion, attendees warmly toasted Reyes for his unique and innovative work. Reyes says that he based the exhibit’s title on his own curiosity about the distinction between what is useable and what is useful.

“That they are ‘to be used’ doesn’t mean that they are useful,” says Reyes, who says he is influenced by game theory. “Usefulness varies with each contest. It could be said that games are a waste of time because they don’t actually produce or deliver a value but their aim is to introduce reflexivity. The concept of ‘ad usum’ is not a claim to be useful.”



A SMASHING SUCCESS

The red crane-like structure from which Ross fell is a primary example of the concept of usable—but not necessarily useful—art. Combining concepts of physics and simple machines to re-interpret a reliable playground staple, “Leverage,” is an asymmetrical ten-person seesaw. Due to its configuration, one person is able to counterbalance the weight of nine others. Reyes asserts that multiple readings are possible for such a piece.

“You could say it is inequity, or hierarchy, or team work. You could say it’s one individual fighting against the whole world. There are many relationships,” Reyes says. “At a certain you could find your lifestyle supported by many other people or at the same time you might find yourself working for someone who has far more leverage than you do. It’s what you could call the physics of society.”

Despite Reyes’ assertions about the show, several of the pieces on display are necessarily inactive, including artifacts from past projects documented in a video series called “The New Group Therapies.”

“Here in the museum, the whole situation that [these objects] were created for is not present,” says Reyes. “You see a document that is a record of that performance.”

One of the videos in the series, entitled “Instant Rock Star,” features several prop guitars of varying shapes and sizes which become active pieces of art when Reyes invites passersby to use them and perform to a song of their choosing. Each performance concludes with the smashing of the guitar.

“They are meant to be destroyed,” Reyes says about the instruments. “It has to do with the idea of creating a space for violence where violence can be practiced as an exercise of style. It is like a controlled accident.”



DEADER NOT BETTER

The son of chemical engineers, Reyes started thinking about the relationship between science and art early on, an interest that was spurred by the scientific metaphors his parents used in everyday speech.

“They used to say that an idea would ‘crystallize’, or describe a person by their pH,” he says.

This relationship would become more and more important to Reyes as his proclivity towards creative expression grew. Formally trained as an architect, Reyes was taught to come up with practical solutions given specific situations; as his career went on, he began to combine this education with his own artistic sensibilities in search of a form of “applied art”—to make visible what he refers to as “implicit personal or social geometry.”

Some of the large-scale sculptures Reyes has seen realized in Mexico include a floating pyramid, which creates a natural Jacuzzi using the water on which it rests, and a “vertical park” constructed from a former housing project and fed by waste water from the surrounding apartment buildings.

Many of Reyes’s works were inspired by ideas he encountered while completing a residency at Harvard in partnership with the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (DRCLAS). In 2003, Reyes was one of roughly 200 applicants for a fellowship with DRCLAS’ Art Forum, only two of whom eventually received invitations.

Over the next three years, Reyes made a series of extended visits to the center that enabled him to interact with faculty and take advantage of the University’s research facilities. It was on one of these visits that Reyes met Doris Sommer, Ira Jewell Williams, Jr., professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and director of the Cultural Agents Initiative. Through Sommer, Reyes became familiar with the work of another visiting Latin American fellow at Harvard.

“We began conversations, and I mentioned to Pedro a reference to Antanas Mockus who was currently teaching at Harvard a class on Hedonism and Pragmatism,” says Sommer.

Mockus—along with Brazilian theater innovator Augusto Boal and Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky—became a major inspiration for Reyes as both he and Sommer continued to rethink the societal issues facing the world of contemporary art.

“It was a unique opportunity,” says Reyes of his experience at Harvard, “because it was different from working with a museum when you are focused on delivering just an exhibition. In the visual arts there has been a trend towards creating relationships and making a social engagement in art. Doris opened a window and it was really refreshing to see some of these intuitions in other practitioners. That really challenged me, my assumptions about what productivity’s role could be in society.”

“Art is a vehicle towards knowledge and towards affecting change,” says Sommer. “And Pedro is very clear on that. If you don’t have pleasure in change the only way to imagine change is through force, and that’s unstable. Artists and critics still have a vestige of romantic assumptions because they associate art with revolution. But the kind of millimetric change that Pedro talks about in his work is a kind of change called reformism that has not seemed interesting or sexy for artists or critics for a long time.”

Whatever societal reforms it might inspire, “Ad Usum” also presents a more concrete possibility for change, at least within the sphere of the University. As Art Forum curator José Falconi notes, “Harvard is not a recognized place for contemporary art. It really means nothing. That being said, we’re tying to change that, at least at the Rockefeller Center.”

Reyes concurs, saying, “Harvard has a very conservative position towards contemporary art. They say ‘deader the better.’ Art is one of the fastest changing fields and yet the interest here is mostly the past. I think it’s important that I address that.”