Nicolás Bacal
Born in 1985 in Buenos Aires, Argentina / Lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina
Jens Hoffmann (JH): What does the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres mean to an artist born in the 1980s who grew up in Argentina?
Nicolás Bacal (NB): I first encountered Gonzalez-Torres’s work around 2003 or 2004. He had been dead for 10 years and I was 20 years old. I was transitioning from my initial intentions of being a musician to becoming an artist. I was interested in minimalism, and how minimalism could be profoundly complex and infinitely poetic. The small details were everything. Gonzalez-Torres’s work became really meaningful to me when I saw “Untitled” (Perfect Lovers) (1991).
JH: Your work for the Istanbul Biennial is a play on that exact work.
NB: For me it is one of GonzalezTorres’s most fascinating pieces. It talks about relationships in a very profound way by examining time as an ontological question. My work is more about the idealization of love, with a perhaps more adolescent approach in regards to existentialist aspects of time. I first removed the hands that show the hours and minutes, leaving only the second hand, to show the passing of time but not the exact time. Then I wrote the word vos (“you” in Spanish, used only in Argentina for the most part) around the edge of the clock’s face.
JH: You mentioned that you were considering a career as a musician before you decided to become an artist. There are interesting connections between music and time.
NB: Karlheinz Stockhausen once said something interesting about music: that one could think about music as the activity of making a listener perceive time at different speeds. So composition is the design of the curve of acceleration and deceleration of our perception of time. Musical structures with lots of change will be perceived as accelerations. More static ones will be perceived as decelerations. The repetitions will then be freezing points. I want to create a relationship between the idea of freezing time and the idea of love. I think falling in love is the closest experience that we can have, as humans, to the feeling of time stopping. I thought that the best way of representing that idea was a repetition in Stockhausen’s terms. The work can be read as something ridiculously romantic, or as the representation of the epic action of repeating the word “you” once per second forever, or even the attempt of concentrating and withholding time in the boundaries of a domestic object.
JH: What is the title of the work, and how are you planning to display it in Istanbul?
NB: When I first showed the work at the end of 2010 it did not have a title. A month ago, after we spoke about including it in the biennial, I decided to call it La geometría del espacio tiempo después de vos (The Geometry of Space-Time After You). The idea is to present several clocks in different locations around the entire exhibition. I will reinforce the concept of repetition and make them look like institutional clocks.