Slet’s imagine people from construction coming to Oscar Tuazon’s “Building” exhibition, to be translated as building as well as building – people who carpenter, screw, weld, build buildings every day. What would you say to the sculptures made of heavy wooden beams that the Californian sculptor placed at the beginning? Solidly mounted, you can tell, even if here and there, where the squared timbers meet, the last precision was not worked; cleverly helped with concrete to lengthen a pillar that had turned out to be too short. Someone had to improvise, especially since the beams used are obviously old material that was recycled. This is how do-it-yourself works, could be the conclusion. If it has to be really good, it could all be done a little more accurately.
Certainly, the question would also arise as to what the scaffolding should be used for, through which one enters the exhibition as through a gate. That is art, sculpture in the aftermath of minimal and post-minimal art, would be the answer of visitors who are a little familiar with contemporary art and expect nothing else in a museum. For their part, you will ask yourself: How can you tell that it is from today and not from the 1960s or 1970s? What distinguishes Tuazon’s sculpture as contemporary? At first glance, this is not an easy question to answer, but with this question you are right in the middle of the oeuvre of the artist, who was born in Seattle in 1975 and to whom the Kunstmuseum Winterthur is dedicating a “mid-career show” – a half-time assessment of his work to date, which has been on the radar of the international art scene for a good fifteen years.
Only at first glance resembles the chimney in the background: Tuazon’s “Burn the Formwork (Fire Building)” from 2017
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Photo: Oscar Tuazon
“I think with my hands,” says Tuazon about himself. First of all, that is the formative impression of the exhibition: the encounter with completely analogue art, created with a grasping hand, but without an ingenious attitude, with simple structures that are in perceptually prove to be ambiguous, or with complicated constructions that want to be seen through, such as a staircase made of galvanized sheet steel, plasterboard, wood and glass that has been laid on its side. That looks like it was cut out of an apartment. Honest craftsmanship everywhere. This oeuvre also includes extremely heavy abstract paintings, in which Tuazon pours plaster into steel frames and treats them with various printing techniques. Then at the end there is a photo with a scrapped domed building à la Buckminster Fuller – the wooden house in Indianola, Mississippi state, the artist has put back on the road, it testifies to his interest in original architecture, which somewhere in the prairie was privately owned for personal use arises.