We're in Grand Rapids, Michigan during ArtPrize,
an annual art competition decided
by both public vote and a jury of experts that takes
over the city for three weeks.
This is the seventh ArtPrize, and today we're
meeting with two artists who are participating
in this year's competition.
Carolina Borja and Amy Toscani are
both Minneapolis-based artists who
won a pitch night competition to install a work here
in Grand Rapids.
Carolina Borja was born in San Diego, California
and lived in Mexico before moving to Minneapolis.
And her work reflects on her experience of a collision
of cultures and traditions.
She studied industrial design and Mexican folk art.
And her work incorporates elements
of craft and popular art, while bringing them
into her own thoroughly contemporary aesthetic.
Carolina's work considers how identity is,
by its nature, a very fractured thing.
Amy Toscani takes as her starting point thrift store
collectibles and imagines other lives for them,
creating sculptures like Cucu, a dog
figurine she built out into an oversized, curious,
and ultimately sympathetic object.
Her sculptures are both playful and inquisitive,
approaching objects some might dismisses
as low-brow with humor and questioning, as well as
tenderness.
Amy's work asks important questions
like how and why we become attached and assign value
to objects.
Together, Carolina and Amy have made this work, titled
Constructing on Deconstructing.
And it's composed of these large-scale handmade pinatas
that audience members are invited
to whack at and rip apart.
With this work, Carolina and Amy are thinking a lot
about the collision of cultures and what
it means to not only make something,
but also to break it.
So let's go talk to them.
Hi, I'm Carolina Borja.
And I'm Amy Toscani.
And this is your art assignment.
Well, we talked a lot about the idea of having this tradition
and changing the tradition of breaking the pinata.
And then we wanted to meet at an intersection
where she felt she was bringing her own words and ideas
and I was doing my own work and ideas.
And for some reason we thought it was a pinata.
Carolina and I always had a conversation
about-- she would sort of anguish about,
this is not the traditional Mexican craft,
and if real pinata makers saw what we were doing,
they'd be appalled.
I went, don't worry.
We're doing it.
Don't worry about that.
We're making it our own, right?
So I think that's what we did here, is we
just made these pieces our own.
When there's no breaking session, people can still come.
And then it'll be a different kind of perspective
because you'll be able to view what has shifted.
Right now all the installation is hanging,
and as the time comes and the 19 days pass by,
the installation on top will become
an installation in the bottom and you'll
have a second one created.
Part of the beauty of this piece
is that you do get to break it.
So it has that lack of preciousness
that usually art has.
That you can't touch, you can't bump into, let alone
whack with a stick, right?
I have never seen a piece of my work destroyed purposefully.
I think maybe that's where I'm hesitant,
or I might be a little sad or morose about seeing
these things destroyed.
Because Carolina, the last night when we were installing,
we were like, oh, and this is my favorite.
And we picked out our own favorites,
and we were talking about it and just, sort of,
the memory of making them.
And then you let that go, right?
You let it go.
Your art assignment is to create something--
---and then have someone else destroy it--
---which becomes a second piece--
---or the documentation of destroying it becomes a piece
on its own.
So Sarah, what I love about this assignment
is that on some level, making things, for me,
is an act of putting something out into the world
and then having other people take it apart.
So this is very metaphorically resonant, I think.
Right.
And it talks about the assumption
that art is immortal, or that art can outlive you.
And even though some materials are hardier than others,
everything is going to erode.
Everything is going to go away.
Nothing lasts forever.
I mean, that's sad, but there's also something kind
of freeing about it.
Right.
And this assignment asks you to take that idea
and to fold it into the work itself.
You know what it made me think about?
When you took me to Venice in 2011
we saw an artist named Urs Fischer.
He did this amazing self-portrait made of wax.
And then it burnt like a candle, and it melted away.
Right.
And it also made me think about Janine Antoni's Lick and Lather
busts.
She made these bust sculptures of herself
out of chocolate and soap, and the chocolate
she licked and nibbled on, and the soap
she ran under hot water so that the features sort of became
less distinguished.
But actually, this activity goes back much farther
than those examples.
In 1953 a young Robert Rauschenberg
approached an artist respected tremendously, Willem
de Kooning, and asked him for a drawing
so that he could erase it.
De Kooning somewhat reluctantly agreed, and Rauschenberg
methodically and thoroughly erased it, and then
presented it exactly like that with attribution.
Some years later, Niki de Saint Phalle
began a series of shooting pictures, where
she'd fill plastic bags and cans with paint,
plaster them to the surface of a board, and then shoot at them
or invite others to do so.
In 1961, Rauschenberg and his friend Jasper Johns
did the honors, resulting in a work that
looked not unlike the popular Abstract Expressionist
paintings of the time.
And in 1968, Swiss artist Dieter Roth,
known for his preoccupation with impermanence and decay,
made a series of busts of himself
as an old man out of a mixture of chocolate and birdseed.
They were designed to be placed outside on a post
and enjoyed by local bird life until nothing remained.
While artists are often thought of as creators,
in each of these cases we see meaning
develop from the act of destruction
rather than construction.
What can you do that becomes significant in the act
of its undoing?
I think part of it, too, is having-- when you destroy it--
A surprise?
Yeah, that's what I was going to-- you blew it.
Having a surprise.
Having a surprise at the end of it, or a little payoff, right?
I mean, maybe that's why we're driven
to whack these things in the first place
is that there's the unknown, right?
And so it's like this Christmas present or something.
I think also it's not only just breaking it,
but you really have to disintegrate what is there
to make it something different.
So whatever they make or build, it can't be just broken,
it has to be destroyed and almost
about to take another shape of its own.
I think what is cool is when you have someone else break it,
you have the option if you're that someone else either
to enter it as your own and have no responsibility towards it,
or be aware that you're kind of collaborating in the sense
that it's a piece that hasn't ended yet,
and that you're participating at whatever the other person is
offering.
So I think it doesn't happen if it's yourself.
That's a good point.
It is a collaboration.
Yeah.
No.
She's like no.
I'm like, yes.
I'm like, don't touch that one.
I made that one.
That took me four hours.
And then we were talking about the time
that we put into these.
And each, what did we say?
Let's not talk about the time.
I know.