I visited Eduardo Abaroa’s studio in the Mexico City neighborhood of San Pedro de los Pinos.  Abaroa has been a major presence in the Mexico City art scene for quite some time, having established himself in the community with the founding of an important alternative artist-run space, Temistocles 44, in the 1990s.  His sculpture ranges from a few larger and politically charged public projects to a great many smaller handmade pieces in the studio.

Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer: Wow. You have a really big space. Is your studio always like this with so much work out and on the walls or did you bring it out for this visit?

Eduardo Abaroa: This is the way I work now in the studio. I put a few more things up for you to see, but the walls are usually full of work. The space floods sometimes, so it’s better not to keep much on the floor. But there are other people visiting the studio, so I keep it like this. This is mostly just work from this past year, with a few exceptions from 2006.Basically the studio is divided, with my work here in the front half and my wife, the artist Sofia Taboas, working in the back part.  She doesn’t have much finished work here right now, just some work in progress. We’ve been here for three years.

SLG: Your studio feels almost like an exhibition space with everything up like this. It’s very good for viewing. Does your studio often double as a private exhibition space?

EA: Yes, very often people come to see the work in person; it looses something in slides. My work can be hard to photograph and you really have to see them in person, especially the small ones. Also, because we are lucky to have such a big space, we’ve been planning to host some conferences here.

SLG: What are these little colorful constructions?

EA: They are plans I am making for some outdoor sculptures. Have you seen all the outdoor market stalls all over Mexico City? These are modeled on those structures. I am always amazed at how much stuff sellers keep in their tiny stalls, even though they sell relatively little. They must carry the same goods unsold for years and years.

SLG: Well, they have very few overheads and don’t pay taxes, so it must cost them next to nothing to stay in business. And these mockups are proposals for stalls you are going to build? You are intending them to be used by actual vendors selling inventory or to exist as public art?

EA: We are planning to put them on the street without anyone guarding or watching it to see if people will steal the objects we put inside. I really like to work in the public sphere, but I have done very few works like this in the past, like the one after Barnett Newman, called Portable Broken Obelisk (for Outdoor Markets) (1991-93). My stalls will be stocked as though by real vendors selling things, like pads of paper – I like the formal repetition of the little square booklets of paper. And the structures are basically variations on a cube. The four corners are in place, but the line that goes from one corner to the other is divided and broken. The vertices are in place, but the lines are crooked. Each of the four models are based on the same size cube. They are incredibly hard to build. I don’t even know if it will be possible.

SLG: What materials will you use to build them?

EA: The same material the real stalls are made from: hollow square metal rods that are joined together.  It is difficult to make acute and obtuse corners with the prefabricated joints.

SLG: And the frame will be covered with vinyl?

EA: Yes, the same used in the stalls. But covered very loosely.  The project is still very much in progress.  It is planned for a show in the nearby city of Puebla.

SLG: Are the variations on the cube referring to Sol LeWitt?

EA: Well, maybe. Sol LeWitt always seems to emerge somewhere in my work. Yeah, like I made a cube before out of Q-Tips and people said it looked like a nasty Sol LeWitt. The glue that held the Q-Tips together was yellow and looked like dirty earwax. I have continued to be interested in making variations on geometric structures.

SLG: Do you always make models first?

EA: No. It depends on the project and its scale. I do it for large public pieces.

SLG: Is the model of Stonehenge Sanitario (Sanitary Stonehenge, 2006) a piece on its own now?

EA: Yes, because you can’t exhibit it in a gallery, it was huge and temporary. Only up for one day. I didn’t want to do a public art piece in a gallery space so I proposed to do it somewhere else. We rented porta-potty toilet units to install on the roof level of a public structure. But the installers forgot dollies to get them to the roof, so we had to push the toilets all the way up – very Flintstones-like and primitive with brute force. We hired someone to make a video documentation, but it didn’t workout well, so I prefer the model and drawings as documentation. I don’t usually do much research in preparing for my pieces, but this was one of the first pieces that I did a lot of research for on Stonehenge and I don’t draw that much but this was one of the few times that I did a lot of drawings.

SLG: Do you have assistants?

EA: Yes, two. They are both young artists and very skilled technically in our studio; Sofia and I share our assistants. You know when I was younger here in Mexico it did not seem economically viable to become an artist, but now more people are able to survive as artists, and get part-time work, like being an assistant in the field.  My assistants only work two days a week.I used to be an art critic when I was a younger artist and it doesn’t pay well at all.  It would have been better to be an assistant.

SLG: Can you give an example of the role your assistants play in your studio production?

EA: I’ve been doing some works with worlds or globes over the past ten years.  My interest is in pursuing some kind of aberrant representation. There are two globe pieces currently in progress in my studio. One is covered in a hyper-Baroque way with clothing. The other one is covered in newspaper and cutouts of different countries from colored maps that are stuck with long pins into the ball. Both of these globes were conceived to be big to fill a large exhibition space in Guadalajara, a new space that I will have a show in soon. I made a couple drawings of the globes’ frames and gave them to my assistants to start making them. But I solder the metal frames myself because I don’t want to worry about insurance or having my assistants injure themselves or anything like that. It’s not that dangerous and it is really fun for me to do. After I soldered it, my assistant started putting newspaper papier-mâché over the armature. It’s all local newspaper and all the country cutouts are from Spanish language maps. I buy most of my materials from street vendors in the city, like in Tepito or other cheap markets. I’ve used complicated methods in the past and sometimes you risk too much with that; it’s expensive. I like doing things in the studio. So like with this cutout, papier-mâché globe, it’s some sort of kindergarten thing. It’s more of a challenge for me to make something really cheap look like art than if the globe were cast in stainless steel.

SLG: You recently had work in last year’s group show of Latin American artists at Los Angeles’ MOCA called “Poetics of the Handmade.” That work was more intricate, intimate, decorative, and studio-oriented than your public projects we’ve talked about. Is your practice generally more aligned with a handmade mode of working, and is that a way for your work to address a politics of the local, democratic, and accessible?

EA: Yes. Those more decorative pieces are made with the cheapest materials, begun at a time when I had nothing but time. I had a very tiny space to work in and the pieces were very manual, not requiring constant thought but instead a lot of concentration. I made many out of really small pieces of straw, which accumulated look like foam.

SLG: Have you inherited anything from Mexican traditional arts, or from the history of art that has come before you in this country? Or do you identify more with a Western art tradition? …you already mentioned an identification with Sol LeWitt.

EA: Well, I feel like my tendency to look to the streets, for materials and sometimes subject matter and sites, in my work comes from a local Mexican socialist-influenced approach to production. I probably don’t copy the form of Mexican art precedents, but I follow the attitude and interest in the specific social and political concerns, similar socialist concerns to the muralists’. You can see that in a lot of other artists here.I am interested in reflecting on the sedimentation of society, some relationship to a very materialist way of seeing things.  I don’t know if that’s political.

SLG: Sure, that comes out of a political position and attitude, a consideration of commerce, material culture, and labor.

EA:  Right, but most people wouldn’t read my work that way.