Oscar Tuazon

American artist Oscar Tuazon is a hands-on producer and his artworks often use materials conventionally found in construction, such as steel, concrete and wood. His practice draws upon influences of minimalism, Arte Povera and radically utopian DIY architecture to reconsider the assumed uselessness of the artwork, embracing the idea of functionality. The artist is adamant that his sculptures are used in some way – without necessarily defining what that usage or experience should be. In particular, he has been drawn to the potentiality of chair sculptures which are impossible to look at as artworks when sat on but equally cease to be chairs when looked at as an artwork, thereby collapsing the distinction between representation and function.

Tuazon’s practice explores humanity’s relationship to buildings and civic systems, creating works that invite occupation and bodily engagement. His sculptures produce experiences that are at once internal and external, private and public. The act of construction itself has a performative element, drawing on the legacies of land art and minimalism, and often realised in collaboration with engineers, technicians, and builders. In recent years, Tuazon has expanded this inquiry into alternative social infrastructures, most notably through Water School, a permanent public project in Cedar Spring Valley, Nevada. At once an educational facility and a site of ecological resistance, the school addresses issues of water scarcity and land rights in a fragile ecosystem threatened by large-scale pipeline development.

For this new commission and the larger body of works from which it comes, Tuazon has worked with recycled thermoplastic pipes to present an architecture of water made visible – a horizontal monument. Inside the sculpture a tree trunk, sourced from Sarvisalo, cut for the paper industry but extracted from that supply chain, is welded into the specially configured pipe, which has a diameter of 2.5 metres. This scale allows a human to enter, walk through, dwell in and leave the sculpture. Different timeframes converge: the fleeting moment of the viewer’s experience; the tree’s growth and slow, but inevitable, decay, which will become more evident over the years; and the thermoplastic pipe, the lifespan of which is guaranteed not to be less than 100 years (but it will probably never degrade entirely). Being faced with the scale of the pipe allows for an experience of the civic planning required for sustained drought, floods and hurricanes, and extreme weather events brought on by climate change, and the scale of the redirection and extraction of natural water supplies worldwide. For Tuazon, sculpture provides “a simple model of a complex space,” a way of giving direct experience of futures we hope to delay or avoid. As he describes:

“Sculpture is a hole in the world. Not an object but its absence, a void. A sculpture lacks life, needs you, it’s an emptiness you occupy. Our world is water; make a sculpture for water, then. A pipe, a hole moving water through the earth, a passage from one place to another. Water is public space underground us. We need to go there, move through it ourselves, go inside the pipeline and live there… A tree is a biological indicator of the health of an ecosystem, a record of the water we all depend on. Trees are solid water, live water. In the interior of the pipeline we are brought face to face with a tree, a non-human person.”