西斯特·盖茨：黑人社区里的艺术家

ON A LEAFY, OVERLOOKED BLOCK in south Chicago, amid a patchwork of weedy lots and fixer-upper bungalows, Theaster Gates is redefining what it means to make art.

在芝加哥南部一个绿树掩映、无人关注的街区，39岁的雕塑家、表演艺术家和城市规划师西斯特?盖茨(Theaster Gates)置身于一块块杂草丛生的土地和年久失修的平房之间，重新定义着艺术创作的意义。

When the recession hit a few years ago, this 39-year-old sculptor, performer and urban planner began buying boarded-up houses on the street where he lives in Grand Crossing - a hardscrabble, mostly black neighborhood that sits eight miles south of downtown Chicago. Gates started gutting the forlorn interiors of these spaces and using the domestic detritus to create haunting objects - from throne-like chairs made of clapboard siding to porch swings made from reconfigured door frames.

盖茨居住的街区位于格兰区(Grand Crossing)，这个社区在芝加哥市中心以南八英里处，非常贫穷，主要居民是黑人，几年前出现经济衰退时，盖茨开始在这条街上购买木板房。随后，盖茨着手对建筑物残破的内部进行拆除，并利用里面的废弃物创作震撼人心的作品──有用墙板制成的像宝座一样的椅子，还有用门框改造而成的秋千椅。

Then, in a move that left the jaded art world slack-jawed, he began transforming these spaces into cultural anchors - libraries, bookstores, music archives, a pop- up cafe - using workers he hired from the area, some of whom were previously unemployed.

接下来，盖茨做出了令萎靡的艺术界大为震撼的举动，他着手将这些空间改造成文化港湾（有图书馆、书店、音乐档案馆，还有一个限时咖啡馆），他聘用来自该地区的工人，其中一些工人之前处于失业状态。

Artists don't attempt altruism this extreme: Plenty make pieces that pinpoint social ills or serve as political gestures, but arguably, no one - until Gates - found a way to leverage an artistic practice to make a realtime, bottom-line difference in the lives and spaces next door. Gates says he's trying to invent 'the Main Street I want to hang out on,' but he is also pushing art beyond the sphere of social commentary into the arena of nitty-gritty do-gooding.

艺术家一般不会把利他主义发挥到这样的极致：很多艺术家会创作针砭社会弊端的作品，或者做做政治姿态，但我们可以说，在盖茨之前，任何艺术家都未曾找到利用艺术实践来实时、根本地改变周围人生活和空间的方式。盖茨说自己试图创造出“我想要去逛的主街，但他同时也在推动艺术突破社会评论的范围，进入从实质上造福社会的舞台。

The gregarious son of a roofer and the youngest of nine children, Gates taught ceramics and studied urban planning before launching himself into the city's performance-art scene with his gospel choir-style group, the Black Monks of Mississippi. He's as well-known in a zoning-board meeting as a museum gala, and these days the art world can't get to know him fast enough.

盖茨生性喜爱交际，是一家九个孩子中最小的一个，父亲是一位屋顶修葺工。盖茨曾教授制陶工艺，并研究过城市规划，之后与他的福音音乐合唱团密西西比黑僧侣(Black Monks of Mississippi)一起进入芝加哥的表演艺术界。无论是在城市规划理事会会议还是在美术展上，盖茨都颇有名气，如今他在艺术界也是声名鹊起。

He's been in at least a dozen museum shows over the past four years - a veritable smothering of curatorial attention for an artist who's had only a pair of gallery shows to formally unveil his work. For the Whitney Biennial in 2010, he transformed the museum's courtyard into a temple furnished with Wrigley chewing-gum factory pallets and spindly wooden sculptures that evoked shoe-shine stands. Every so often, he popped by with his Monks to sing deep-throated songs about the legacies of labor unions and industrial workers. Some heavyweight collectors in Chicago, like Patric McCoy and Deone Jackman, once paid as little as $5,000 for his works; now, collectors world-wide spend as much as a million dollars apiece for his latest installations.

在过去四年里，盖茨至少参加了十二场美术展──作为一位作品只在两家画廊正式展出的艺术家，他在策展方面的确投入了极大的精力。在2010年的惠特尼双年展(Whitney Biennial)上，他把博物馆的庭院改造成为一个殿堂，饰有箭牌(Wrigley)口香糖工厂货盘和让人联想到擦鞋摊的细长木雕。他还时不时地与他的合唱团一道演唱低沉的歌曲，讲述工会和产业工人遗存下来的精神财富。麦科伊(Patric McCoy)和杰克曼(Deone Jackman)等一些芝加哥重量级收藏家曾以低至5,000美元的价格购买他的作品；而现在，全球收藏家会以每件高达100万美元的价格购买他最新的装置作品。

Earlier this year, Gates became the breakout hit of Documenta, a prestigious contemporary-art survey that's held in Kassel, Germany, once every five years. For his project, 12 Ballads for Huguenot House, Gates stripped the innards of an abandoned building on his block and shipped the salvage to Germany, where he and his team岸along with some additional German hires - used the materials to renovate an abandoned 1826 house in Kassel. All summer long, crowds filtered into Huguenot House to find wall-sized videos of the singing Monks projected across its peeling floral-flecked wallpaper. Gates had filmed the singers back in the Chicago house just hours before it was dismantled. (After Documenta ended in September, some of the materials stayed put, but the rest was shipped back to Chicago.)

今年早些时候，盖茨在卡塞尔文献展(Documenta)（在德国卡塞尔(Kassel)举办的著名现代艺术展，每五年举行一次）上大放异彩。为创作自己的项目“致胡格诺屋的12首民谣(12 Ballads for Huguenot House)，盖茨把他所在街区一座废弃建筑内的东西拆下来，并将它们运往德国。在德国，他和他的团队──还有一些在德国雇的人──用这些材料整修了卡塞尔一幢建于1826年的已被废弃的房屋。整个夏季，人们走进胡格诺屋时会看到布满整个 面的密西西比黑僧侣合唱团演唱视频投射在有些剥落的碎花 纸上。这些歌手的影像是盖茨在芝加哥的房子拆除前几个小时拍摄的。（文献展活动9月份结束之后，部分材料留在原处，但其余的材料被运回了芝加哥。）

The circular effect was transfixing, says Michael Darling, chief curator of Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art. 'He upended two houses to explore ideas about hope after trauma in a way that felt significant and central to the entire exhibit,' Darling says. 'That's amazing for an artist who didn't even have a big name a year ago.'

芝加哥现代美术馆(Museum of Contemporary Art )首席策展人达林(Michael Darling)称，这种循环往复播放的效果令人震惊。“他把两座房子颠倒过来，以探索有关创伤后的希望的理念，人们会感觉他的探索方式在整个展览中扮演着举足轻重的中心角色。对一位一年前还没什么名气的艺术家来说，这的确令人称奇。

Gates is also gaining an international reputation for the way his art redefines upcycling, that well-worn idea of turning found materials into something freshly prized - a notion he's started applying to discarded or obsolete bodies of knowledge. That's why his original home on Dorchester Avenue in Grand Crossing, which he bought in 2006, is now being converted into a library for a local collector's back issues of Ebony and Jet. It's why the Archive House he bought a couple years later on the same block is now rimmed with 14,000 architecture books from a defunct store alongside shelves of 60,000 glass slides from the University of Chicago's art history department. These leftover repositories helped spur him, in fact, to transition from thinking about Dorchester Avenue as his workaday home into considering the added buildings as works of art unto themselves. These days, he collectively calls these spaces his Dorchester Projects.

盖茨赢得国际声誉的另一个原因是，他的艺术重新定义了“升级再造概念。“升级再造是个老概念，意思是将人们发现的材料转化为某种可重新定价的东西──但盖茨开始将这一概念运用在被丢弃或者过时的知识载体上。正因为如此，目前他正在把最初在格兰区多切斯特大道(Dorchester Avenue)购买的居所（购于2006年）改造成一个图书馆，存放当地一个藏书者过期的《Ebony》和《Jet》杂志。也正因为如此，他两年后在同一街区买下的档案屋(Archive House)现在藏有来自一家破产书店的14,000本建筑书籍，架子上还放着来自芝加哥大学(University of Chicago)艺术史系的六万张玻璃幻灯片。这些收藏旧物的地方促使他转换了思维，他不再把多切斯特大道视为他的工作日居所，而是将这些增建的建筑物本身视为艺术品。如今，他把这些空间统称为他的“多切斯特项目(Dorchester Projects)。

His latest addition, the Black Cinema House, is a movie theater he created in the basement and first floor of his home so that the Chicago Film Archive could screen films featuring black actors - many of which local children have never seen. This winter, he starts converting an abandoned apartment complex around the corner into artist studios; he's also raising private funds to turn a former bank into a performance venue and exhibition hall.

他最新增建的建筑物黑人电影屋(Black Cinema House)是一个影院，建在他家的地下室和一楼，旨在让芝加哥电影档案馆(Chicago Film Archive)放映由黑人演员出演的电影──其中许多电影是当地的孩子从未看过的。今年冬季，他开始着手将街角一处废弃的公寓楼改造成为多个艺术工作室；他还在募集私人资金，将一座曾是银行的建筑改造成为表演场所和展览大厅。

All of these pop-culture elements, like the copies of Ebony, recirculate into Gates's artwork and performances as well. The resulting ecosystem feels intimate even as it sweeps in ideas about race, class and urbanization in America. Marva Jolly, a retired ceramics teacher from Chicago State University, has watched his rise and isn't surprised. He began as a potter, after all.

包括《Ebony》杂志在内的所有这些流行文化元素都经过再循环，进入盖茨的艺术作品和表演中。这一套生态系统让人感觉很亲近，与此同时，它带来了与种族、阶级和美国城市化相关的理念。芝加哥州立大学(Chicago State University)退休陶瓷工艺教师乔利(Marva Jolly)见证了盖茨走向成功的历程，她对此并不感到惊讶。盖茨毕竟是从陶艺师起家的。

'What kind of artist is attracted to clay?' Ms. Jolly asks. 'The kind who likes to get messy.'

乔利说，“什么样的艺术家会对陶土感兴趣呢？喜欢把东西弄乱的艺术家。

THEASTER GATES DIDN'T GROW UP pining to be an artist. Born in 1973 to a working-class family on the west side of Chicago, he was taught by his father to tar roofs for $75 a day and nudged by his mother to sing in the Baptist choir on Sundays - his bow tie straight and Florsheim shoes shiny.

盖茨并非自幼渴望成为艺术家。1973年，他出生在芝加哥西部一个工人家庭，父亲教他如何为屋顶铺沥青，一天能赚得75美元的工钱，母亲则让他在周日去浸礼会合唱团唱歌──他的领结系得端端正正，富乐绅(Florsheim)皮鞋擦得口亮。

While crisscrossing the city to attend middle school in the city's wealthy north, he first noticed the inequity of Chicago's classes, how the white families he saw up there weren't any better than his own and yet their sanitation trucks seemed to trundle by more regularly. Plus, they lived near museums with pieces by Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. He felt slighted. When he went away to college in Iowa, he quickly settled on urban planning as a major. 'I was going to save cities,' he says.

盖茨是在芝加哥富裕的北区念的中学，当他往返于城市的两头时，他第一次注意到芝加哥各阶层之间的不平等，他发现那里的白人家庭丝毫不比他家人好，但垃圾车似乎到那儿去得更勤。此外，他们的住所离藏有劳森伯格(Robert Rauschenberg)和约翰(Jasper Johns)等艺术家作品的美术馆更近。他有种被轻视的感觉。盖茨离家去艾奥瓦州上大学后很快就选择了城市规划作为主修专业。他说，“我要拯救城市。

Everything changed in the spring of his junior year, when on a lark he took a class about clay. He was shocked by how much he enjoyed seeing 'structure in a lump,' and watching a form change entirely through heat and the whims of his imagination. After a trip to Los Angeles the following summer, he came back with a nose ring. 'My parents thought the devil got me,' he says.

一切变化都是在大三那年的春天发生的，当时盖茨随便选修了一门有关陶土的课程。他看到了“陶土块中的结构，观察到一种形状在热和奇思妙想的作用下发生了完全的改变，他惊异地发现自己是多么享受这些东西。次年夏季，他到洛杉矶旅行了一趟，回来时戴上了一个鼻环。他说，“我父母觉得我魔鬼附身了。

He added a minor in ceramics and resolved to meet all those Japanese potters he'd read about in class and see all those Rauschenberg abstracts he now revered. He studied in Capetown, South Africa, focusing on the history of its sacred spaces. Ultimately, though, he felt his conscience swivel back to the Chicago streets he grew up on: 'I wanted the bow tie and the potter's wheel.'

他把陶瓷工艺作为自己的辅修专业，决心与课堂上读到过的所有日本陶艺师会面，还要去看他所崇敬的劳森伯格的所有抽象作品。他在南非开普敦(Capetown)学习过一段时间，主要研究南非神圣空间的历史。然而最终他感到自己的内心指引他回归了他成长的芝加哥街道，他说，“我渴望领结和陶轮。

In 1999, he moved back to Chicago and took a job as an arts planner for the Chicago Transit Authority. There, he got to know the myriad city entities angling for ideas to combat social dilemmas like poverty and unemployment. He also noticed how rarely artists were invited into these conversations, except when asked for suggestions on d谷cor. He wondered if the results would be different if artists got a power seat sooner.

1999年，盖茨回到了芝加哥，为芝加哥交通管理局(Chicago Transit Authority)担任艺术规划师。在这里，他了解到这座城市有无数机构在寻求解决贫困和失业等社会难题的方案。他还注意到，艺术家极少受邀参与这类对话，他们只会受邀就装饰问题提出建议。他在想，如果艺术家能更快获得话语权，结果是否会有所不同。

Over the following four years, things began to click. First, Gates took a job in the humanities division of the University of Chicago with the mandate to help the school better connect to its surrounding neighborhoods, whose residents resented its perceived aloofness and perpetual expansions into their blocks. That's largely why he moved across town in late 2006 from west Chicago to a former candy store on Dorchester Avenue. It was also there, while seeking fresh ideas, that Gates came up with an alter ego: Yamaguchi.

在接下来的四年里，局面豁然开朗起来。盖茨先是在芝加哥大学人文学院找到了一份工作，他的任务是帮助学校改善与周边社区的关系（这些社区的居民讨厌学校高高在上的姿态以及对他们所在街区的不断侵吞）。这在很大程度上促使盖茨于2006年底从芝加哥西部搬到了多切斯特大道上一个曾经是糖果店的地方。也就是在这里，盖茨在寻找新灵感的过程中创造出了另一个自我：山口(Yamaguchi)。

Gates says Yamaguchi started out as an experiment in the politics of art and race: What would happen to his pots and bowls, which weren't selling so well, if he told people they were made by the mixed-race son of a Japanese master potter who had taught his methods to the neighbors of his black Mississippi bride? The answer, which he gleaned over the course of several rollicking soul-food dinners at his new place, didn't surprise him - people wanted to buy those bowls.

盖茨说，山口这个虚构的人物最初是用来做艺术和种族政治实验的：如果他告诉人们，他那些陶罐和陶碗（卖得并不太好）出自一位日本陶艺大师（这位大师向自己的密西西比黑人新娘的街坊邻居传授制陶技术）的混血儿子之手的话，会有什么情况发生呢？他在自己的新居里举办了几次热闹的黑人料理餐会，并在举行餐会的过程中得到了答案，答案不出他所料──人们愿意购买这些陶碗。

A moment like that could turn some artists cynical, but Gates learned something that changed him. In sketching out Yamaguchi's tall-tale virtues, many of which hinged on the artist as change agent, Gates says, 'I realized I believed in him, too. All that fiction was a way for me to work out my best self.'

这样的局面或许会让一些艺术家感到悲观，但盖茨领悟到了一些足以改变他的东西。盖茨说，在刻画山口传奇般美德（侧重于描述这位艺术家作为变革推动者的角色）的过程中，“我认识到自己也相信山口。我虚构的这一切都是完善自我的方式。

Michelle Boone, now the commissioner of the city's Department of Cultural Affairs, was among the snookered, but she says she didn't mind. 'All the time he was creating this whole lore, he was also making dinners and comfortable spaces for people to have sometimes painful conversations,' she says. 'It turned out to be genius.'

现任芝加哥文化事务部(Department of Cultural Affairs)专员的布恩(Michelle Boone)当时也听信了盖茨的故事，但她说她并不介意。她表示，“他总是在编这种传奇故事，他也会为大家提供美食和舒适的空间，让人们进行有时未免有些痛苦的对话。这其实是种天才创意。

Gates still adopts personas, but they're more often modeled after historic black characters like South Carolina slave potter Dave Drake, who famously wrote poems on the shoulders of his pots at a time when black people were forbidden to read. Two years ago at the Milwaukee Art Museum, he enlisted a 150-person gospel choir to help him pay homage to Drake in a performance that lasted 40 minutes and left audiences crying and whooping all at once.

盖茨现在仍会扮演一些角色，但它们通常以南卡罗来纳州的黑奴陶工德雷克(Dave Drake)（在黑人被禁止读书的时代，他以在陶罐肩部写诗而闻名）等黑人历史人物为原型。两年前，他在密尔沃基艺术馆(Milwaukee Art Museum)召集了一个150人的福音歌曲合唱团，通过一场持续40分钟的演出向德雷克致敬，这场演出令观众们为之哭泣和欢呼。

At home, he now has a nonprofit of his own, Rebuild Foundation, with a staff of 20 and a rotating program of day camps and on-the-job training specifically targeted to others on his block. When the doors of his buildings aren't locked, his neighbors filter through to borrow books and records or eat occasional communal meals. It's known that anything in his backyard garden is free for the taking; one neighbor says thanks by leaving plates of fried green tomatoes on his front step.

在芝加哥，盖茨现在拥有一个自己的非营利机构重建基金会(Rebuild Foundation)，该基金会有20名雇员，运营一个轮岗项目，针对该街区居民举办日间营地活动并提供在职培训。当他那些建筑的大门不锁的时候，街坊邻居们会走进去借书和唱片，偶尔还会参加聚餐。大家都知道，他后院花园里的任何东西都可以随便拿；一个邻居将一盘盘油炸青番茄放在他家前门的台阶上以示感谢。

'Whenever people here do better, they move,' he says, 'but that just means they don't want to be around poverty. I'm interested in the politics of staying.'

他说，“这里的居民只要生活好一点了就会搬走，但这仅仅意味着他们不愿与贫困为伍。而我感兴趣的是留守的政治。

All of it he pays for by cobbling together grants, gifts and selling his artwork. The latter particularly took off in 2010 with a series of wooden shoe-shine stands he modeled after the kind that line the Shine King, a community hub in west Chicago.

这一切都是他通过捐款、赠物和出售自己艺术作品所得来买单的。他的作品从2010年开始火起来，当时他以芝加哥西部社区枢纽Shine King沿街擦鞋店的擦鞋座椅为原型，制作了一系列木质擦鞋座椅。

Amid his heavy thinking about sacred spaces, he says it finally dawned on him that his family's go-to shoe-shine shop 'mattered as much to me as any museum.' If he made art that showed how much he valued it, maybe outsiders would value the place differently.

他说，他对神圣空间进行了深思，最终悟出家人去的擦鞋店“对我来说重要性不亚于任何美术馆。如果他能在艺术创作中体现他对某种东西有多么珍视，也许旁观者也会以不同的视角珍视这个地方。

It worked: Chicago dealer Kavi Gupta took one look at the towering wooden 'thrones' that Gates started building and agreed to take a group to the country's pre-eminent art fair, Art Basel Miami Beach, in 2010. Chicago collector Larry Fields paid around $15,000 for one upholstered in glittery red and yellow fabric; nowadays, he thinks his throne could resell for at least $60,000.

这种方法奏效了：2010年，芝加哥艺术经纪人古普塔(Kavi Gupta)注意到盖茨着手打造的高耸的木质“宝座，他同意带一批去参加美国著名艺术展巴塞尔迈阿密艺术博览会(Art Basel Miami Beach)。芝加哥收藏家菲尔兹(Larry Fields)以约15,000美元购买了一个套着闪闪发光的红黄相间织物的“宝座；现在，他认为自己能以至少六万美元的价格将“宝座转手卖出。

Nowadays, as Gates rolls out his ever-expanding ideas for Dorchester, he's also ping-ponging to museum shows, art fairs and collector dinners the world over - as befits an emerging artist on the cusp of superstardom. This fall, he helped his father get a passport because Gates wanted to take him to the opening of his debut show at White Cube gallery in London; his father had helped him dip some pieces in tar for the show.

如今，盖茨在多切斯特大道不断推进创意项目的同时，也活跃在世界各地的美术馆展览、艺术节和收藏家宴会上──他是一颗冉冉升起的艺术新星，正在成为超级巨星。今年秋季，盖茨帮他父亲申请了护照，因为他希望带父亲一起参加自己在伦敦白立方画廊(White Cube)举办的作品处女展开幕式；他父亲曾帮他把一些参展作品浸上了沥青。

Gates says he's still figuring out how wide his palette will get, since he has the whole sweep of Grand Crossing - and his own experiences - to draw from. In moments, the pace already seems to be taking its toll. Gupta, the Chicago dealer who still works with him, says Gates rarely sleeps more than five hours a night; he knows because he will sometimes leave meetings with the artist at 2 a.m. only to get e-mails from him a few hours later.

盖茨说，他仍在探索自己手中的调色板能够拓展到多广，因为整个格兰区──以及他自己的经历──都是他的创作源泉。有时候，这种生活节奏似乎已经让他付出了艰辛的代价。仍在与盖茨展开合作的芝加哥艺术经纪人古普塔说，盖茨晚上睡眠时间很少超过五个小时；他了解这一情况是因为有时他凌晨两点结束与这位艺术家的会面，但几个小时之后就会收到他发来的电子邮件。

One night earlier this summer, Gates paid a visit to the cultural nonprofit, Little Black Pearl, where he had volunteered a decade earlier teaching ceramics. It was throwing a farewell party for a few local boys getting ready for their first trip abroad. Their first stop was Germany, specifically Gates's Huguenot House in Kassel. The artist made the rounds, exuberantly clapping shoulders.

今年夏初的一天夜晚，盖茨造访了一家非营利文化组织小小黑珍珠(Little Black Pearl)，十年前他曾在这里做志愿者，教授陶瓷工艺。该组织正在为当地一些即将首次出国旅行的男孩举办告别派对。他们的首站将是德国，会专门参观盖茨在卡塞尔创作的胡格诺屋。盖茨与他们一一交谈，兴奋地拍着他们的肩膀。

At one point, the nonprofit's founder, Monica Haslip, pulled him aside to ask if he could spend even more time with some of the teens in a school she also runs. 'I realize you've got the whole world waiting,' she told him, 'but these kids need to see you and hear you, so you stay real for them.'

在活动中，这家非营利组织的创始人哈斯里普(Monica Haslip)把盖茨拉到一边，问他能否再花些时间，与她运营的一所学校的一些孩子见面。哈斯里普对盖茨说，“我知道全世界都在等你，但这些孩子需要见到你，听到你的声音，这样你在他们眼中才是生动鲜活的。

He listened, nodded hard. His travel plans were packed for the next few weeks, he admitted, but he wasn't going anywhere for keeps. Everything about his art is rooted here, at home. 'I'll be back,' he promised.

盖茨一边听，一边使劲点头。他承认，未来几周他的旅行计划安排得很满，但他不会在任何地方久留。他的艺术全都植根于这里，植根于他的家。他许诺道，“我会回来的。

（WSJ. Magazine 2012年创新人物奖获奖者包括设计师、建筑师、艺术家和科技奇才──他们都对合作以及与广大观众互动满怀热情。本文介绍的是WSJ. Magazine 2012年创新人物奖艺术类获奖人：西斯特?盖茨。）