i was asked to come here and speak about creation and i only have fifteen minutes and i see they're counting already and
i can in fifteen minutes i think i can touch only a very rather janitorial branch of creation which i call creativity
in this picture you know creation is what put that dog in that picture and creativity is what makes us see a chicken on his
when you think about you know
things then i became an adult and started knowing who i was and tried to maintain that persona i became creative
i actually did a book and a retrospective exhibition that i could track exactly looks like all the craziest things that i had done all my drinking all my parties they followed a straight line that brings me to the point that actually i'm talking to you at this moment
it's actually true you know the reason i'm talking to you right now is because i was born in brazil if i was born in monterey probably would be in brazil
i was born in brazil and grew up in the seventies under a climate of political distress and i was forced to learn to communicate in a very specific way in a sort of a semiotic black market
you couldn't really say what you wanted to say you had to invent ways of doing it you didn't trust information very much that led me to another step of why i'm here today is because
i really liked media of all kinds i was a media junkie and eventually got involved with advertising my first job in brazil was actually to develop
a way to improve the readability of billboards and based on speed angle of approach and actually blocks of text
it was very actually it was a very good study and got me a job in an ad agency and they also decided that i had to to give me a very ugly plexiglass
trophy for it
another point why i'm here is that the day i went to pick up the plexiglass trophy i rented a tuxedo for the first time in my life
and
what happened is when i went back it was on the way back to my car the guy who got hit decided to grab a gun i don't know why he had a gun and shoot the first person he decided to be his aggressor the first person was wearing a black tie a tuxedo it was me
fatal as you can all see
and even more luckily the guy said that he was sorry and i bribed him for compensation money otherwise i press charges
when i started working with my own work i decided that i shouldn 't do images you know i became i took this very iconoclastic approach because when i decided to go into advertising i wanted to do
i wanted to airbrush naked people on ice for whiskey commercials that's what i really wanted to do but i
do it so i just you know they would only let me do other things but i wasn't into selling whiskey i was into selling ice
the first works were actually objects it was kind of a mixture of found object product design and advertising and i called them relics they were
this is the ashanti joystick
has become obsolete because it was designed for atari platform a playstation ii is in the works maybe for the next ted i'll bring it the rocking podium
this is the pre columbian coffeemaker
actually
idea came out of an argument that i had at starbuck 's that i insisted that i wasn't having colombian coffee the coffee was actually pre columbian
table
and the half tombstone for people who are not dead
that into the realm of images and i decided to make things that had the same identity conflicts
so i decided to do work with clouds because clouds can mean anything you want but now i wanted to work in a very low tech way so something that would mean at the same time
and durer 's praying hands although this looks a lot more like mickey mouse 's praying hands but i was still you know this is a kitty cloud
they're called equivalents after alfred stieglitz 's work the snail but i was still working with sculpture and i was really trying to go flatter and flatter the teapot
i had a chance to go to florence in i think it was ninety four and i saw ghiberti 's door of paradise and he did something that was very tricky he
put together two different media from different periods of time first he got an age old way of making it which was relief
and he worked this with three point perspective which was brand new technology at the time and it's totally overkill and your eye doesn't know which level to read and you become trapped into this kind of
and so i decided to make these very simple renderings that at first they are taken as a line drawing
you know something that's very and then i did it with wire the idea was to because everybody overlook white
like pencil drawings you know and they would look at it ah it's a pencil drawing then you have this double take and see that it's actually something that existed in time it had a physicality
and you start going deeper and deeper into sort of narrative that goes this way towards the image so this is monkey
the same way the history of representation evolved from line drawings to shaded drawings and i wanted to deal with other subjects i started taking that into the realm of landscape which is something that's almost a picture of nothing
i made these pictures called pictures of thread and i named them after the amount of yards that i used to represent each picture these always end up being a photograph at the end or more like an etching in this case
so this is
six thousand five hundred yards after
nine thousand yards after
and i don't know how many yards after john constable departing from the lines i decided to tackle the idea of points like which is more similar to the type of representation that we find in photographs themselves
i had met a group of children in the caribbean island of saint kitts and i did work and play with them i got some photographs from them
it was just the name of the child with the little thing you get to know of somebody that you meet very briefly
but another layer of representation was still introduced because i was doing this while i was making these pictures i realized that i could add still another thing i was trying to make a subject
something that would interfere with the themes so chocolate is very good because it has
ideas that go from scatology
to romance and so i decided to make these pictures and they were very large so you had to walk away from it to be able to see them so they're called pictures of
freud probably could explain chocolate better than i he was the first subject and jackson pollock also
i used the dust at the whitney museum to render some pieces of their collection and i picked minimalist pieces because they're about specificity and you render this with the most non specific material which is
dust itself like you know you have the skin particles of every single museum visitor they do a dna scan of this they will come up with a great mailing list this
i bought a computer and told me it had millions of colors in it you know an artist 's first response to this is who counted
i realized that i never worked with color because i had a hard time controlling the idea of single colors but mostlyapplied to numeric structure then you
the first time i worked with colors was by making these mosaics of pantone swatches
they end up being very large pictures and i photographed with a very large camera an eight by ten camera so you can see the surface of every single swatch like in this picture of chuck close and you have to walk very far to be able to see it
the reference to gerhard richter use of color
and the idea also entering another realm of representation that's very
the same like robert smithson 's spiral jetty and then leaving traces as if it was done on a tabletop i tried to prove that he didn't do that thing in the salt lake
but then just doing the models i was trying to explore the relationship
the model and the original and i felt that i would have to actually go there and make some earthworks myself
i
for very simple line drawings kind of stupid looking and at the same time i was doing these very large
fifty meters away
now i would do very small ones which would be like but under the same light and i would show them together so the viewer would have to really figure it out what one he was looking
i wasn't interested in the very large things or in the small things i was more interested in the things in between you know because you can leave an enormous range for ambiguity there
this is another thing that i did you know working everybody loves to watch somebody draw but not many people have a chance to watch somebody draw in
a lot of people at the same time to evidence a single drawing and i love this work because i did this cartoonish clouds over manhattan
for a period of two months and it was quite wonderful because i had an interest an early interest in theater that's justified on this thing in theater you have
of an audience and in this you'd have like a something that looks like a cloud and it is a cloud at the same time so they're like perfect actors
a very great actor to do a version of king lear and i felt really robbed because by the time the actor started being king lear he stopped being the great actor that i had paid money to see
the other hand you know i
like three dollars i think and i went to a warehouse in queens to see a version of othello by an amateur group and it was quite fascinating because you know the guy
joey grimaldi he impersonated the moorish general you know for the first three minutes he was really that general and then he went back into plumber he worked as a plumber so plumber general plumber general
so for three dollars i saw two tragedies for the price of one
see
i think it's not really about impression making people fall for a really perfect illusion as much as it is to make i usually work at the lowest
of visual illusion because it's not about fooling somebody it's actually giving somebody
a measure of their own belief how much you want to be fooled that's why we pay to go to magic shows and things like that well i think that that's it my time is
you
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