Alex Da Corte has a deep connection with the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. His visit 20 years ago left a lasting impression on him. The architecture of the museum, along with its permanent collection, became not only a place of reflection but also a source of inspiration for his future work, particularly Martin Puryear’s “Ladder for Booker T. Washington” and Ellsworth Kelly’s monochromatic canvases “Red Panel,” “Dark Blue Panel,” and “Dark Green Panel.” Da Corte’s experience with the seamless integration of art and architecture at the Modern changed his understanding of how art interacts with the space it occupies. The artist reflects on a novel idea: that art can extend into and harmonize with its surroundings. His new show at the Modern, The Whale, is grounded in the idea that art, space, and symbolism all come together in unexpected ways to convey deeper meanings.
Weekly: The Whale surveys several bodies of your work over the last 14 years, including an “alien view” of the familiar. Could you elaborate on that?
Da Corte: I guess I’ve always felt like an alien, and, for one way or another, I’ve felt sort of on some kind of perimeter of, say, society. And so I have found that, you know, in being what I like to call “a wallflower,” someone like sort of living on the edge, that you kind of have the best view of what is in the center, what is familiar, what is common, and bringing that perspective to the familiar … makes the work or makes the familiar change. It makes it stranger. … Over time, your relationship to the work can change because you yourself change, and I didn’t want to look back at the work with any kind of sentimentality. I wanted it to feel like I could approach the work as though I was receiving it or looking at it for the first time and therefore arrange it in ways that were new to me or alien. And I could also do that with the work from the collection that was also familiar to me because it is in history books and in the world for a long time, not to disrespect the work but only to see it fresh and see it as though I’m meeting it for the first time.
How important is creating an environment when presenting your work — the murals, the benches, the colors of the display tables — and showing your art in tandem with the Modern’s permanent collection?
Da Corte: Well, you know, I have a kind of aversion to whiteness, and, historically speaking, the white cube has been the kind of place where there are rules around how art is shown. And although art is free in its making within an artist’s studio, it gets kind of confined. There’s a potential for it to be confined and constrained within the white cube space, even so far as calling the label that accompanies the painting or the sculpture on the wall a tombstone. It’s a wild thing. … A museum wants the work to stay alive. Its mission is to keep artworks alive and preserve the legacy of an artist and remember them, so my interest in changing the white space — making it a color, making the benches different — is just to say, “I want to introduce precarity when looking at the work. I want to destabilize the white space, so that when you’re viewing the work, what you think is a real Warhol is actually a replica of one or what you think is a real Marisol is a replica of one.” It creates a kind of anticipation that what you’re looking at or how you’re looking at what you’re looking at is not secure and that it’s liable to change, which is just to say that change is good and change is righteous and to introduce color to white walls is to introduce a new feeling or a new way, sort of psychologically speaking, of viewing work that is old to you or familiar to you. And what does it feel like to look at work in a red room if red makes you hungry or red makes you angry? What does it feel like to look at a Manet in a purple room versus a white room? It may feel quite luxurious or just different, and those differences are the things I’m wanting when viewing work.
I love the fact that you chose Vernon Fisher’s “84 Sparrows.” I love that piece, and I loved Vernon Fisher, and I loved the fact that he had a degree in English, in writing, that was very important to him, so he has this kind of absurd story. It’s about … a guy who, I think, is dying. He’s bleeding to death under a van. And those sparrows are this metaphor or somewhat of a reference to blood. … You’re used to seeing a contained canvas or a sculpture. It’s one piece in a space. Here you get three disparate pieces telling one story. Loved it. And I see that with what you’re doing. There is a little bit of absurdity. There is a little bit of humor. There is a little bit of, “You know what? The world’s wacky, and there’s some crazy stuff going on, but it’s also beautiful. It’s a beautiful world we live in, but it’s rough.”
Da Corte: But it’s also been rough for a long time, like, as long as time has existed. And I wanted to start with Vernon Fisher’s work because of all the things you say. It’s out of the frame. It’s talking about color. You know, it’s thinking about red and all the ways that red is. It’s thinking about humor. It’s thinking about violence. It’s thinking about the cosmos and being alive and being a person in the world. You know, I was thinking about how the art world oftentimes loves itself and sort of looks at the world but thinks that it doesn’t need the world. But we know that the world needs art and the world benefits from art, but oftentimes the art world forgets that it, too, benefits from the world. And Vernon Fisher is a perfect example of an artist who’s looking out into the world, embracing it for all of its strangeness, and then bringing it back in and saying, “Now look at this, look at how strange and weird and mad this world is” but not dismissing it. Just saying, “Let’s consider it.” How cool that you knew Vernon.
Photo by Abeeku Yankah
I just thought he was so funny. Well, there was some sadness to him, but he was very funny. I thought he was a fantastic artist.
Da Corte: He is.
By embodying Marcel Duchamp and acting the part [in the video “ROY G BIV”], what did you discover about him and his intent as an artist?
Da Corte: That’s a great question. Well, with embodying Duchamp and then Rrose Sélavy, his alter ego, one of my first wants was to kind of humanize him because I myself did not know him, [but] a friend, Calvin Tompkins, did know him and … wrote the biography on Duchamp and a very cool little pamphlet … The Afternoon Interviews. It’s really a quick read, and it’s fantastic for any artist. It’s like the best thing ever because it’s just him and Duchamp talking about things and what it means to be an artist that’s so, so deeply cool. It’s very cool. But I grew up, you know, going to the Philadelphia Museum [of Art] and seeing these works, his final work, “Étant donnés,” and all of his other works, which are paintings, and these, you know, very opaque sculptures, and although I knew they were celebrated and at some point I understood why they were radical, I felt like I was being lazy in my understanding of them. I accepted that to be true, but I thought, “Why am I accepting that to be the one radical thinker of that time?” Or, “Why was that act so singularly celebrated, and who was that person?” And so outside of reading so much about him, I wanted to kind of put that skin on me. I wanted to kind of wear the clothes and kind of feel, even if just for a day or two days or weeks of rehearsing, like him, and studying him, I wanted to kind of just understand what was it like to be that body, not my body, to maybe understand a little bit more about how things were lifted, how things were cobbled together. It is in some ways like a kind of a method. It would be like method acting, but you don’t think about that in terms of artmaking. But here I am just trying to immerse myself if only to understand and to say, “Even if I don’t get you, even if it is not you and will never be you, how can I empathize and really understand you?”
When did you start doing performance? When did you start dabbling in that, bringing that into your process?
Da Corte: It was about 1999. So, it’s been quite a long time since I started making work. I was in undergraduate school, and I had met some friends who were interested in that. It’s not what I studied. I was studying animation, but they spoke about installations, and we spoke a lot about making a diner. And in my mind, I thought, “Installation art sounds pretty cool because if it means making diners, I like diners. That works for me.” I didn’t think about it in terms of art. I just was like, “Gosh, I like diners, a place to drink coffee all the time.” But that then slowly introduced kind of performances around being in a diner: drinking coffee, living inside of a salt shaker, carrying a ketchup bottle. … Due to so much time spent in the diner and being immersed in this really safe space — which was just a booth with some friends, unlimited coffee, French fries, ketchup, salt, pepper, sugar, the whole bit — that became our theater, and we started imagining all of these cool ways to kind of have our theater be bigger than that. And that’s when I started performing. I started making little videos where I was, you know, dancing all night and, you know, watching some balloons fall.
It must be fun, but that’s work.
Da Corte: It’s absolutely work, and it’s also, you know, like I said, I can be quite a wallflower. It was not my nature to speak at all, like I was so quiet, and as a young person, I was in my head. I was a nerd, and I was not, you know, not saying much at all. … And so to even be a performer: As young people, when you’re taking risks and learning, you want to try on a new hat, and you want to say, “I can get outside of this show because although I’ve been this person, maybe there’s something else I don’t know.” When the young person becomes a flower, that’s a beautiful thing.
You’re learning about yourself.
Da Corte: Exactly. And who that is and how far can it stretch. And I think my interest in performing and being Duchamp or Jim Henson or Eminem is to say, “How far can you stretch this mask?”
Photo by Abeeku Yankah
How did being a kid with two homes, New Jersey and Venezuela, shape your imagination and worldview?
Da Corte: It is a great question and so essential to how I think about everything. As a young person, when you’re developing a sense of family and what that is and home and what that is, [it] sort of links to, for some, security or a kind of stability. My relationship to living in two places always meant that, in my mind, I was always half complete. I was always like a half of a finished person in that all of my loved ones were very far away. And because this was before the internet and before cell phones, you know, when we were still making very expensive long-distance phone calls or writing letters, there was a kind of distance. … The ways that I remembered places were through color or through smell, which are these really formative things. And so I remember being steeped in Caracas and being with my abuela and my abuelo and all of my cousins, and all of the piñatas and the fruits and the clay tiles and all of the colors and textures that I love, and then to leave and go somewhere very far away, where all of the textures and colors were different and all of the people were different [along with] the names and the language. It stretched my mind in ways that have stayed with me, because I have since tended to want to bridge a gap between different things. I’ve wanted to say, “How is Eminem something so very different [from] Life cereal?” Or “How is Duchamp like the Muppets?” You wouldn’t think that typically, but it is to say I am a person who is of many places. You know, that is a kind a common condition for a diasporic body. They’re stretched across places.
And yet you kinda feel like you don’t belong anywhere.
Da Corte: You don’t belong anywhere. You know, they call that kind of being an immigrant of time, a person who sort of says, “In time, I will land somewhere,” and yet you can feel like you never land. You know, in all of the discussions I’ve had with my dad about being an immigrant, he says, “I’ve been here for 56 years now, and yet something about me is always incomplete because my home is elsewhere.” And there’s also a part of me that says, “Maybe I’ll never be welcome here.” And that kind of longing is also baked into the work because there’s a kind of, as much as there’s humor, there’s also a melancholy in the work. And there is a kind of sense for searching for home and searching for belonging.
You first came to [the Modern] 20 years ago?
Da Corte: Yup.
What impression did it leave, and how has that influenced you making your art — or has it? — from seeing it 20 years ago?
Da Corte: I was raised Catholic, and so a lot of the art we were looking at was sort of born out of art that would be in Rome. And so, it’s not quite the art that you find in the Museum of Modern Art, et cetera, or here. And, in my early 20s, when I came here 20 years ago, I remember both being struck by the museum itself and its grandeur and its very complicated architecture but also the actual artwork that was there. I hadn’t seen Stellas, and I hadn’t really known Warhols, these pillars of 20th-century art. And then, really, what kind of blew me away was Martin Puryear’s “Ladder for Booker T. Washington.” And that, I think, singularly changed my life. I was so moved by it for its craft, for its ability to be transformative, to be beyond metaphor, to be so inspiring and free and yet still abstract, for it to be made by a person, for its relationship to history and politics. It blew me away. And I don’t think I ever was the same after that. I just really left. … I just didn’t even know what to do with myself. And I went to school for craft. I went to school for animation, and then I transferred to a school that now just recently shuttered, University Arts, which was the Philadelphia College of Arts, and it was one of the oldest art schools in the country. And it was really known for craft, wooden craft, jewelry making, metal making, you know, ceramics. And so that was my mindset. That was sort of my space, where I thought good art is really made by hand and made well. And the first time I ever saw Martin Puryear’s work, I just think that changed my life.
Photo by Abeeku Yankah
Da Corte: Well, The Whale is named after Carl Jung’s writings around [Jonah] and what it might mean to be consumed by a whale. And if I think about this experience in the museum as a whale that has consumed many artworks, Jung proposes that you can change, that the body inside the whale will change. In darkness, they will change. Things that were one thing may be new because of a relativity. I hope that for any moment in time — be it going into a sandwich shop or going into a museum — that the viewer, the visitor, will change and is open to change. And that change does not have to be, “I like the art.” That change doesn’t have to be just two thumbs up. It can be, “I don’t like cartoons,” or “I don’t like that art at all.” That’s also good. But my want is that viewers are open and receptive to renegotiating how they thought about something they hadn’t thought about before.
And “What is an art museum? How does that display work?”
Da Corte: Exactly. And saying, “Hey, we have kind of rested on our laurels in relationship to white walls and paintings that’re 60 inches high and tombstones. What if we introduce a newness to that experience, which will give it life, which will say, ‘These wall labels aren’t tombstones. They’re celebrations. They’re ways of reenergizing and requestioning and reinvestigating work that has been supposedly laid to rest in a museum, but now here we are, and it can be new, and it can be fresh.’ ”
Local artist Janeen Newquist has been a docent at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth for 18 years.
