Hidden agendas: Theaster Gates
American artist Theaster Gates has found his own way into the global art world
Let's start with the name. It's real: his father is also Theaster Gates, so he's actually the junior version. Theaster means "star of God" - he grew up in the strict tradition of the Baptist faith - and the fact that it contains the word theatre is merely a happy coincidence. He's no relation to Bill (although they've both attended the Economic Forum at Davos) but like that other Gates, he's certainly into portals - though in Theaster's case, it's in an entirely literal, as well as metaphoric, way.
You probably won't have heard of him. Until last year, few people beyond the art scene in his native Chicago would have recognised the name. But in 2012, Gates, 40, appeared as "commissioned artist" at New York's Armory Show art fair in the spring; and in that summer, he was at Documenta, the German exhibition of modern art that lasts for 100 days in the town of Kassel. By November 2012, when magazine published its Power 100, he was at No 56 on the list. He had become, as put it, one of those artists who are shifted around the art globe in the way you move a top hat or a thimble in the board-game of Monopoly.
I want to seduce you with an object and I don't even want you to know of my social agenda. The object will be like a key
Luckily, he's good at transplants. It's what he does. For Documenta, he took the guts of a decayed house in Chicago and grafted them into a hollowed house in Kassel, once inhabited by Huguenots - Protestant refugees from Catholic France. In New York, he gathered desks from an old primary school, assembled guests and friends, and chalked up conversational themes on school blackboards. In both locations, he sang, because Gates is a performance artist in the usual understanding of the word; with his gospel-influenced band, called The Black Monks of Mississippi, he's serenaded Barack Obama, another Chicago success story. At the recent opening of his White Cube show in Hong Kong, however, his song was an apt solo: .
The rendition was at the end of a transplanted, jet-lagged day. His first interview that morning was this one, for which he does a good job of simulating let's-go, brisk cheerfulness. (By mid-afternoon, when he takes part in the gallery's media talk with Tim Marlow, White Cube's director of exhibitions, his eyeballs will be fried and his sentences will start … slowly … fading away into …).
The Hong Kong exhibition, "My Back, My Wheel and My Will", is being shown in tandem with another at White Cube Sao Paolo. "It's all been in three years," the artist says, still marvelling at himself, at the amazing speed of his intercontinental moving and shaking.
Part of what's remarkable is that he's an urban planner by training, with a minor in ceramics, who bought a run-down house in dodgy, south-side Dorchester Avenue in 2006, when he was working at the University of Chicago as an arts administrator. The subsequent property salvage, the renewal of adjacent spaces, the gathering of people together over soul-food would, 20 years ago, have been called gentrification. Gates has made it all art.
Even by current art world standards, in which hardly anyone actually paints, he's extending definitions. The only sign of a brush in this show is a tiny black wooden figure, with bristles for her skirt - one of those bits of household bric-a-brac used for polishing that might have seemed golliwog-cute in the past but which induces a cringe nowadays - standing on top of a concrete pillar, and entitled .
The other works offer a variety of tasters from Gates' previous successes. consists of thickly folded fabric, faded and fitted into a wooden frame, and oddly pleasing to the ignorant eye, which turns out to be a decommissioned firehose - a reference to the firehoses turned on black civil rights demonstrators by police in 1963 Alabama. There are a few artefacts (a window, a stained carpet) from the Huguenot House in Kassel. There's , which looks a bit like a wheelbarrow and sounds like a sop to the exhibition's Asian location.
What's that about? "A rickshaw is a mobile unit that moves people and goods around, it's about ingenuity," replies Gates. "Yeah, I named it. For me, this idea of labour and commodity is very exciting."
He's never been in Hong Kong before but is happy to share some observations. "Yesterday I was talking to a Chinese guy and he was, like, 'We Chinese are not very religious'. I said, 'That's bullshit! You're 8,000 years religious! The way you line up at a bus stop, the synchronised movement, the willingness to submit to authority'. An internal moral strand is centuries of accumulated mystical practice. I see those queues at bus stops."
Right. Told that the bus queues may, possibly, have more to do with colonialism than, say, Confucianism, Gates says, comfortably: "Maybe my sense of God has to do with a sense of order."
He is an assured speaker and that has much to do with his success. He has his own overview of what's possible, and he can tell a story about it, and magnify the process until what he's doing becomes an essential part of the community. There's an artistic magic to that.
"I'm a bit of a trickster," he says, in the excellent Documenta catalogue, , which is worth reading at White Cube if only to convey what the show cannot: the sweat and toil behind two amazing projects. "I want to seduce you with an object and I don't even want you to know of my social agenda. The object will be like a key."
Trickster is a word he tends to use (again, it contains some echo of his own name). He's an excellent networker. The City of Chicago has just handed him a 1923 bank building on which to cast his restorative spell; in this, he was aided by the mayor (and former White House chief of staff), Rahm Emanuel. Gates can make doors open, in every sense.
Is he a thimble on a Monopoly board? "I don't know if the art world's any different from the rest of the world," he says. "It's man's appetite that takes beauty and turns it into a commodity. One simply has to want it to be."
Perhaps it's the art world that's the thimble on his Monopoly board, and "White Cube and these other capitalist conglomerates", as he puts it, are enabling his agenda. At the entrance to the show are several tarred panels, a reference (like the show's title) to his father who tarred roofs for a living, sometimes with the help of his 11-year-old son.
Asked by Tim Marlow if applying tar felt like an artistic process, Gates - who's been on the verge of sleep - wakes up. The story can only be spun so far before it collides with the real world. "Absolutely not," he declares. "It was hard work on a hot, stinking roof. There is nothing romantic about it."
My Back, My Wheel and My Will
