Politics Meets Art in an Infinite Abyss

In a bizarre incident at the Buenos Aires art fair ArteBA, Mayor Mauricio Macri broke a sculpture by grabbing the arse of a television host and shoving him into the artwork. Immediately afterward, and still in front of TV cameras, the mayor shook the hand of the gallery director and promised to purchase the work (see video below).

“Fix it for me and I’ll buy it,” he said.

That was in June, and its creator – New York visual artist Seth Wulsin, who lived in Buenos Aires from 2005 until this year – has yet to receive proper remuneration for the damage. A delicate structure of glass, mirrors and silicone, the work examines counter-surveillance spaces, creating “visual spaces that extend far beyond their physical boundaries”, according to a recent open letter from the artist. The sculpture in its altered state has been renamed “Infinity Also Hurts”. Wulsin spoke with The Argentina Independent about the episode and his art.

How was this project conceived?

I started doing earlier studies for this project back in 2004 – but just formal studies on a much smaller scale with materials and geometries. And then in 2007 I did a residency at El Basilisco, in Avellaneda, for about two months, and that’s when I started working in earnest on this project. It’s part of a series of seven sculptures…They’re icosahedra, which are associated with the element of water. They’re different combinations of mirror and glass, with the mirror facing inwards. When I was originally working on this idea, I was thinking what I really wanted to see was how these figures interacted with different elements – air, water, solid earth, fire, light.

People? Or not people…

I showed them in a couple of exhibitions – it’s not like I didn’t want people to see them – but my goal for the sculptures was to put them out to sea, and to put them in the wilderness or in a random place in the city, where people would potentially interact with them — but unexpectedly, without preconceptions — and maybe not interact with them at all.

Why were the sculptures going out to sea?

Well, that’s the extreme situation of water.

OK.

These sculptures are one thing when they’re still, in a space. But when they start moving, and when they’re interacting with dynamic elements such as light or water, or clouds or sky, the inner space is activated to the Nth degree. But it’s not crystal infinity – it’s dynamic infinity filtered through the crystalline structure. It’s as though it comes alive. So in a way, the situation where these sculptures are most activated is when they’re floating out at sea.

Tell me about what the current, altered state of the sculpture represents.

I guess I should…talk about the counter-surveillance aspects of the work. Part of the amazing irony of this whole situation is that Macri happened to [laughs] do this incredibly stupid thing to a sculpture that comes from an exploration of counter-surveillance spaces…So, in a certain way, that – in and of itself – gave a kind of inherent poetic justice to the whole incident.

How does it examine counter-surveillance spaces?

Well, I’m interested in counter-surveillance spaces because surveillance systems – both horizontal and vertical, public and private — are becoming ever more varied and omnipresent in the world. Over the years, I’ve been thinking about how to create modes of action, or actual physical or metaphysical spaces that confuse surveillance systems or pass under their radar. Jazz, for example, is a certain kind of counter-surveillance space, because it’s such a high level of improvisation that any kind of pre-programmed system wouldn’t know what to do with it.

[These sculptures] were my first attempt to create a sculptural examination of the question. I happened across a Rainer Maria Rilke quote where he talks about how an essential facet of love is the protection of the other’s solitude. So in a society that’s based on certain just principles – at least in theory – the practice for carrying out those principles has to be through love towards the other – on a horizontal level and also from people in positions of power toward citizens.

Right there, this fallacious tendency to hype up insecurity fears as a way of justifying these tremendous structures of control, which are hugely profitable and whose whole purpose is to limit people’s freedom, is directly contrary to what the essential principle of a society is.

To get back to the concrete case of these sculptures: One of the properties that they possess is that they contain no technology. It’s all mirrors and glass. Mirror is this incredible medium that exists in the physical world that somehow gives you a perfect reflection of an image into an optically real space but that’s inaccessible to touch. All of the visual laws of optics hold in a reflective space, so what you have [with the sculptures] are these internally reflecting spaces that go off into infinity, and are constantly chopping up space into pieces based on the particular geometry of the structure, and they’re instantly transmitting whatever visions come in from the outside, at the speed of light, through to infinity. But because there’s no technology, the image is transmitted and dispersed.

The fact that the sculptures are enclosed means that from the outside they look like solid objects, and from the inside a whole inner life opens up. But from the perspective of a surveillance system, they’re not identifiable as anything more than a solid object. So on a physical level of interaction with any kind of surveillance system, they evade identification for what they really are, which is the first tenet of counter-surveillance.

The fact that they interact with the natural environment also gives them an un-programmed randomness, which makes their behaviour unpredictable. They don’t have the active improvisation that a jazz musician has, but they, as objects, are put into a set of conditions that are improvisatory.

And then there’s this other level of things: the icosahedron is associated with water as an element, and in ancient Hindu thought it’s associated with the numinous world that’s like the soul-world that infuses our phenomenological reality. Some people say that every moment that ever happens in the universe is recorded and accessible in a holographic record of history. Based on the way the truth seems to come to the surface after being buried for years and years, I think that might be true. So in that sense, the world sort of has its own built-in surveillance system. If that’s the case, then this sculpture, in all of its infinite transmissions, wouldn’t escape that same space. That space – if it exists – isn’t an object of control, but a record of truth. But surveillance systems are used as a way of collecting information in order to exercise control or manipulation.

So it’s especially ironic that Mayor Macri, who’s being investigated for illegal wiretapping, looked into your sculpture and was responsible for breaking it.

Absolutely. That’s the principal irony. The other stuff is almost just a question of really bad taste…

What’s the status on getting reimbursed for the damaged sculpture?

My interest is not to get reimbursed for the sculpture, but to shed light on a situation that runs deeper then the buying and selling mindset that seeks to de-activate the deeper potential of art. I have cut ties with the gallery. But they [the gallery], right after this happened, had interactions with the producers of the television show, Macri’s people, and ArteBA. So they were acting as an intermediary. At first, Macri’s people and people from the show were calling to make sure everything was OK. And then, I think they got the sense that a big deal wouldn’t be made of it, so they washed their hands of the situation, and went silent. Based on what I gather, I have the impression that ArteBA told Macri they would take care of things, which to them meant sending a glass guy to fix the sculpture. [Laughs]

They actually sent a glass guy?

Well, they offered but didn’t send him, because I obviously refused their offer. It was absurd. The video, regardless of how it was edited, with what intent and by whom, shows very concretely the attitude of the people involved.

I wrote the television show numerous times, asking them for access to the original footage they shot, to see it without edits and they never responded to my inquiries.

A couple months have passed, and there’s a situation that I think…illustrates dynamics that are present in the world of art and in the world in general, in terms of the way power players collude to act stupidly and destructively, and then try to make sure they can avoid responsibility for the consequences of those actions.

How do you feel about the sculpture possibly ending up with Macri?

I think selling him the sculpture would be selling it into captivity and the piece would be destroyed even further. It wouldn’t be a responsible way to look after the work.

Macri represents a political attitude, which is on the rise in South America, and probably on the rise in a lot of the world – one that exists in the US, most explicitly during Bush’s whole term, but continuing into the present: this insane and disingenuous overemphasis on security as a means to creating a good society. I can’t think of any situation historically in which an exaggerated security state has worked in the best interests of its citizens, because it’s always fundamentally corrupt at the core: it works out of fear. Macri is the primary representative of this tendency in Argentina.

The fact that the concrete geometry of the sculpture has been altered means that the infinity of the piece has been deformed, so now anything that reflects through the piece is reflecting the de-structuring that Macri produced…That’s not a situation that I want to propagate infinitely, and I’m looking for ways to deactivate the sculpture and let it rest…maybe through some kind of ritual burial.