This week we're meeting with Lee Boroson, who
can usually be found in Brooklyn but right now is
working in his summer studio in upstate New York.
He's in high production mode, getting
ready for his largest show to date, which will
open at MASS MoCA this fall.
He is best known for his large scale sculptural environments
that emulate geographical structures and phenomena
of nature, like lava fields, fog, icebergs, and waterfalls.
Lee thinks a lot about nature in his work,
and not the flat vista you see behind me now
but the real stuff.
The stuff that we humans experience physically,
and the way that it's represented in art.
So let's talk to Lee and see what kind of assignment
he has for us.
Hi, I'm Lee Boroson, and this is your art assignment.
The inflatable is something that I've worked
with for many, many years now.
And I've pushed it places where it won't go.
I've tried to represent things and do things with it that
are really not suitable for it.
And so I've tried to figure out what it does best
and use it for that.
Moving through fog is about being disoriented, having
some sense as to where you are at moments and other times not,
limiting your perception of the world around you,
although it's the world that you're in.
So one moment it can be clear, and the next moment
it's obscured.
And so I'm using materials that will do that.
It's not fog at all.
It's fabric, and it's frosted plastic materials.
It's one of the hardest pieces that I've tried to make,
because of the idea that it's supposed to be formless.
Because fog has no form.
It really is-- it's an experience.
It's like seeing a rainbow.
It's like this incredibly beautiful thing.
And it can move you, because it just
seems so grand and so huge.
And then when you boil it down, it's
not a thing that's out there at all.
It's just this reflection or this transition of the light
through the water particles.
And then to then turn the effect into a thing
is really what I was trying to do there
or trying to give you the experience that you could then
sort of walk through it.
It's like frozen.
That's the great thing about sculpture
is that it's not a moment.
You move through it, and your perspective changes.
So not only do you have the experience
that this thing was created over a long period of time
and that you're sort of unraveling it,
but you're also moving through it.
And you get the experience of it through time.
Here's your assignment.
What you need to do is go on the internet
and find images of a natural setting-- tourist destinations,
someplace that you've never been to,
perhaps that you'd like to go to,
that you know something about or you know very little about.
And use that as the basis to create your own desktop
monument.
We're not looking for a realistic depiction
of that thing.
We're looking more for the experience
of being there through what you research
on the internet and the images that you found,
or the image that you work from.
And the success of the piece is not
whether I would be able to say, oh,
that's Yosemite or oh, that's a geyser at Yellowstone.
But to you it has to be the experience of having been there
through the image.
That's the more important part.
So this immediately reminds me of the pyramid
of chewed Nicorette gum that I had on my desk
when we first met.
It was like this massive Pyramid of Giza style pyramid.
Each time I'd chew a piece of Nicorette I'd put it on top.
I remember it well.
I was so horrified and disgusted by it.
But now, looking back, I think it's kind of brilliant.
But it wouldn't be a good version of this art assignment
actually, because that just captures the visual experience
of something.
I mean, this is about capturing a broader
experience of feeling, in response to seeing a landscape.
Right, like looking at a picture of Giza,
and then imagining what it might be like to be there.
But I think I'm fascinated by this assignment,
because I think all nature is constructed, right?
So you might as well make it yourself.
I mean, there's no such thing as untouched nature.
Yeah, I mean there's this word we use in the study of history
all the time, the Anthropocene.
That we now live in this era of humans
interfering with every facet of life on the planet.
Right, like when you go to some natural setting,
how did you get there?
Did you drive?
Well, that road had implications, right?
And there are many people in history
who have thought about this as well.
Yeah, I mean there's artists like Olmstead, who are always
sort of arranging how you're going
to look the natural world.
I like thinking of him as an artist.
He was actually a landscape architect or designer,
but same difference.
As we're going to find out.
SARAH URIST GREEN: Frederick Law Olmstead
is mostly remembered for his fine work
as architect and chief of Central Park.
But one may not think of his landscape architecture
when it comes to places like Niagara Falls.
He was an important voice in the Free Niagara Movement
of the 1860s, which sought to protect
the area from industrialists and create
a scenic reservation, open free of charge to its visitors.
Olmstead's design for the park involved a network of paths
through the woods and along the river and creating open
vistas that increase one's sense of space and perspective,
with some darker forms in the foreground and lighter ones
farther away.
He was, in a way, turning nature into an art viewing experience.
He constructed the park goers relationship to nature,
privileging the overall composition
over the tiny details.
His work shows us how any human intervention
into the natural world changes not just nature but the way
we see and experience it.
Olmstead created new versions of nature.
And Lee Boroson is encouraging you
to do the same, to think about place, using
limited information to make your own version of nature that
captures the feeling of it, rather than just
the look of it.
And for me, it's also about not using the material
that we already associate with that thing.
So I'm constantly trying to use something
that is not at all of the same ilk as the experience
that you're trying to have.
So I'm not going to use water, obviously.
But I'm going to think a lot about water, and the way
that it has sort of broken down to become fog.
It's also a monument to the time that you
spent with that material.
It becomes like a mediation between you
and that image, too.
So it's the thing that came from you towards the image.
And it sort of rests partway between you
and that image, which you have a view of,
but you don't have the experience of.
Hi, I'm Lee Boroson, and this is your assignment.
I feel like I'm on "Top Chef" or one of those ones.
SARAH URIST GREEN: Yeah, yeah, right.
And this is your ingredient.
SARAH URIST GREEN: Yeah, the "Iron Chef."
Chef Morimoto.
[LAUGHTER]