with Michael Rakowitz

Michael Rakowitz Installation view of Return (2004-present) Longwood Art Gallery All images courtesy the artist

If you’ve walked the streets of Baltimore, Boston, or New York since 1998 there’s a chance you may have unwittingly glimpsed the work of Brooklyn-based artist Michael Rakowitz. His paraSITE shelters, which he designs in collaboration with homeless residents of the aforementioned cities, are tent-like structures that inflate by absorbing the air from urban buildings’ exterior ventilation systems, providing a portable refuge for their users. A paraSITE shelter is currently on view in the Museum of Modern Art's exhibition Safe: Design Takes on Risk.

Such symbolic interventions in problematic urban situations characterize Rakowitz's practice. In 2001 he was invited to contribute a piece to the temporary exhibition GZ: 01 at 129 Lafayette Street, on the northern periphery of Manhattan's Chinatown neighborhood. TriBeach Holdings LLC, the real estate company that owned the building, offered seven floors of the vacant structure as a space for temporary exhibitions, dually providing a pro bono service to artists and curators and cannily raising the market profile of the space. Rakowitz executed a project entitled Rise which extended a duct from the oven of nearby Chinese bakery Fei Dar several stories high into the gallery space, filling the room with the scent of baking buns. In a statement on the project Rakowitz wrote, "Mindful of the fissure between the community and the organizers of the exhibition, I wanted to bridge the gallery space with the local community in some way.”

For Dull Roar, Rakowitz’s first solo show at Lombard-Freid Projects in New York this past spring, he presented several drawings and sculptures, among them an inflatable recreation of architect Minoru Yamasaki’s infamous Pruitt-Igoe housing complex in St. Louis. Rakowitz’s structure deflated and re-inflated on its own, continuously reenacting the spectacle produced by the dynamiting of Pruitt-Igoe in 1972, an event commonly cited as marking "the end of modernism.”

Many of Rakowitz’s projects exist just as comfortably in the "real world” as they do in galleries or museums. In Return, for example, Rakowitz has recreated his Iraqi grandfather’s import/export business. The ongoing project was included in two exhibitions in 2004 and Rakowitz now aspires to become the first importer of Iraqi dates since the US enacted an embargo on Iraqi goods in 1990. For this interview, NYFA Current editor Nick Stillman met up with Rakowitz in his Brooklyn studio to discuss his recent work, the ongoing nature of projects that were conceptualized several years ago, his teaching position at the Maryland Institute College of Art, and baseball.

Nick Stillman: Let’s start somewhat generally. Your projects almost always involve a social interaction with local communities in cities you’ve been based in. What do you take away from these experiences and what do you hope the communities you’ve worked in and with will take away?

Michael Rakowitz Installation view of Rise (2001) From the exhibition GZ: 01 229 Lafayette Street, New York

Michael Rakowitz: Working with communities becomes a way for me to better understand a city. I want to understand my own urban situation, so I really am interested in how there are these social networks defining a city that I don’t always have access to. For instance, when I was conceiving paraSITE, it became clear that the homeless had a completely different topographical relationship to the city than I did, which was a fascinating education into how a city presents itself—or even conceals itself.

I don’t necessarily have a hope for what the citizens I’ve worked with take away from the experience. I view my projects as performing a necessary disturbance or jolt in everyday experience that will maybe slowly change our relationship to a crisis or a problem.

NS: When your projects hinge so completely around an active engagement with communities of people in a city, how and when do you consider them successes or failures—or even sufficiently fulfilling?

MR: I don’t know about fulfillment... I feel a real sense of discomfort about the capability of any of my projects to do anything on the level of function or pragmatism. I have an interest in design, starting from when I went to art school. I, along with my parents, thought the most lucrative way of being involved with art was to be a graphic designer—a very early ’90s way of approaching survival in the art world. After two years I realized that my desires to work spatially and three-dimensionally weren’t being met. But once I moved over into sculpture, what I started to miss was the way in which design could visually influence the viewer’s experience. That played into what I started to do in my undergrad work. I never wanted to show sculptural work in galleries, I wanted it to pop out of bricks and architecture and I wanted to hide things in matchbooks and produce disturbances in the everyday.

I also like the physical moment of—like in Rise, for instance—a piece of ductwork absurdly rising 125 feet into another building. If all formal aspects disappear, I have to say I probably would enjoy artmaking less. I am interested in the spatiality and physicality of making art, but I’m also aware of their existence as symbols. Their efficacy as a part of how the project is broadcast or understood is something that I hope lingers a little bit as an aftertaste.

With these projects, I’m interested in enlisting a sense of pathos, having the project do something on the level of metaphor. I look at my works as an alternative system of education for myself, a real urban education. But there’s an implicit understanding on my part; I know that they don’t solve problems. So I don’t see the projects as being things that are ever “successful,” but I wonder sometimes if my failures aren’t loud enough.

NS: You were just talking about enjoying the physicality of object-making, which is a good entry point into talking about Dull Roar, your recent solo show at Lombard-Freid Projects in New York. Are you as comfortable making work that will be seen in the “safe” space of the art gallery as you are making work that exists in the world?

MR: That’s a great question. I think it’s a lot less comfortable for me.

NS: I sense that. You’ve done a good amount of distinct projects over the past several years and the ongoing existence of almost all of them transcends their lifespan in a gallery or museum.

Michael Rakowitz Installation view of Dull Roar (2005) Lombard-Freid Projects, New York

MR: Showing work in galleries is a new relationship for me, one that only presented itself as an option last year when I started working with Lombard-Freid. It’s something I’m definitely interested in. I enjoyed suddenly having a place to show all these drawings and other ideas that mostly existed as research for all my other projects. The dynamiting of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in 1972 was really important to me and in some way influenced all of my work, so having the opportunity to engage in an almost scholarly discussion through objects and drawings how that one moment exists as this horrible poetry which defines all these other moments up until September 10, 2001 was almost like showing an equation—showing all the mathematical work that went into devising the solutions for the other projects I’ve been interested in.

NS: But the majority of your work seems tailored—custom-built, even—as a commentary on the site where it will be seen. Do you have a backlog of ideas ready to use or are the ideas you formulate contingent on the specific social and political connotations of the venue?

MR: It varies. I’m very thankful for having some training as a designer; sometimes it’s what saves me. I feel like I can operate with only 60 or 70 days to develop a project.

NS: It must help to be materially versatile in that situation.

MR: Yeah. And also to have really good friends and students who are so generous and willing to help. That’s a big part of anyone’s career. Climate Control, a project I did at P.S.1 in 2000 didn’t come from a backlog or arsenal of ideas, but I didn’t think twice about it back then. It wasn’t stressful. I had a good time with that one. And I actually really enjoyed working on the planning of it. Climate Control regulated the ventilation, temperature, and moisture levels of the room in which it was installed with a network of air ducts and fans to make it comply with institutional standards. It was really funny to be developing ideas about air. When I first had a studio visit with the curator and she told me to start to think about what I might do there, I had all these ideas about doing a series of performances where I would breathe into the ventilation system or maybe insert things into it, and I got there and there was no ventilation. Nothing. It was all radiators. So, I necessarily have to be flexible. When you’re doing a project about a city, you can’t help but work with people, and that requires building something from the ground up and being prepared to be surprised or even disappointed if the project doesn’t work out.
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