Museum opens at 11:00
Cinema is closed now
Museum opens at 11:00
Cinema is closed now
Magazyn MSN
VASCULAR DIARY BY JUNE CRESPO
JUNE CRESPO, DIARY
The excerpts below are taken from June Crespo’s diary, which appeared in full in Vascular, jointly published by Caniche Editorial and Museo Guggenheim Bilbao in 2024.
March 23
Rearranging. I move one of the module-parts. Moving a body.
It gains some spatiality on the sides. It turns from a branch into a bridge.
Decentering the center. There’s not one sole base.
March 28
I add extra wax to lengthen or join together some parts. Perhaps due to time constraints, I’d never worked with wax before on an already-cast piece. I like the change in materiality and color that the wax brings, in contrast with the bronze. I might keep it like this.
March 30
I show K. a photo of a fragment of the sculpture with the added wax parts. K. says it looks really lickable.
I arrange the fragments that make up the stem. We decide to burn them.
Casting them without a mold.
April 12
I’ve decided to add a third body, in an inverted position. We attach it by heating part of it and applying pressure.
All the bodies need to have steel bars going through them, to strengthen them, and paste wax has to be added so that they don’t buckle under the weight.
Rearranging. I move one of the module-parts. Moving a body.
It gains some spatiality on the sides. It turns from a branch into a bridge.
Decentering the center. There’s not one sole base.
March 28
I add extra wax to lengthen or join together some parts. Perhaps due to time constraints, I’d never worked with wax before on an already-cast piece. I like the change in materiality and color that the wax brings, in contrast with the bronze. I might keep it like this.
March 30
I show K. a photo of a fragment of the sculpture with the added wax parts. K. says it looks really lickable.
I arrange the fragments that make up the stem. We decide to burn them.
Casting them without a mold.
April 12
I’ve decided to add a third body, in an inverted position. We attach it by heating part of it and applying pressure.
All the bodies need to have steel bars going through them, to strengthen them, and paste wax has to be added so that they don’t buckle under the weight.
JUNE CRESPO
No Osso (Occipital)
2023 (detail). Photo: Roberto Ruiz
Blue hortensias
April 24–25
First phase of the (lost-wax) casting in plaster. It’s so striking to see the texture, the physical effort entailed in working with plaster on that scale. The hand leaves literal traces. They reinforce it by adding corrugated rods, all around.
I think about some pieces by Barbara Hepworth.
I repeat, in wax, the three-body module. If I cast it in metal it can be more detailed, like the flower’s spikes, all sharp and pointed.
May 15
They’ve added wire netting to reinforce the mold, from which the wax has now been removed.
From the top of a ladder, I look at the mold’s openings, where the framework goes in. I stare deep inside it, as far as I can see. Light goes in, subtly, in a part near the bottom.
The very fine plaster walls translate the negative space that there used to be between the bodies.
They have organic edges.
It reminds me of the inside view of a mold I made years ago. That time, the empty space between the legs and hip of a mannequin looked like an architectural space.
May 16
MOVING FORWARD BY GOING BACK
I’m interested in the little models I made by joining together modules of two and three bodies. They look like joints. Legs. Knees.
But when I make them life-size, they look a bit monstrous to me.
The three-body module, in a horizontal position, suggests an image of speed, of aerodynamics.
Do not lose sight of: pieces that contain process. Making-of. Comings and goings. Cuts and reassemblies. The challenge lies in maintaining this character when the work is scaled up.
A desire for process. For things to be happening. Overcoming the inertia of seeking immediate results.
Not solving. Putting off the solution.
Over the last few weeks there’ve been loads of interruptions, and other projects have taken up my time (as well as emotional ups and downs, and fits of passion). It puts my mind at rest knowing that far away, in the foundry, they’re busy getting on with my things.
Clearing. Learning to say no.
May 17
When thinking about the asphalt and concrete pieces I want to make, I go back to the idea of bodies joined to the wall by means of tension and gravity. A system of strings on the wall.
Slats
Lag screws
Clay
Plaster and esparto
6 mm corrugated rods
Silicone
Acrylic resin and quadriaxial fiber
Vaseline
Thick acetates
Plan for early June:
modeling and looking for a second flower.
May 22
On my most recent visits to Room 105 at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, I’ve been very conscious of the fact that my work will be living alongside Maman by Louise Bourgeois, which stands outside the museum. Since 2020, I’ve been visiting this room from time to time to get a physical feeling for the space in a way that involves the whole body. I looked through. Or rather, I projected. I’ve been unable to focus on the works in the successive exhibitions. So I turned the works of Xabier Salaberria, Doris Salcedo, Cristina Iglesias, Richard Artschwager... into my own tools for measuring heights, and for studying the relationships between the masses and the room’s empty space.
Louise Bourgeois, I am observing you. I want something of yours for myself. The realness.
Torsos and busts covered in domestic fabrics, towels, tapestries. Bodily bulges with weight and density, but with an inner tension that lifts them up. The textile: patched-up skin, full of scars. Just like the musculature of Maman’s legs, which too is full of welded joints that merge sections of concave and convex tubes.
After seeing the exhibition The Woven Child (Gropius Bau, Berlin) last summer, I wanted to revisit a certain quality and way of working with textiles that would be less meticulous, less sophisticated.
I wanted to move on from draping and transparencies, and go back to clothes, dirty and used, shoved in between objects. My favorite pants, worn away by the rubbing of my inner thighs.
Even clothes I’m wearing have ended up inside my work, as a matter of sheer urgency, in a direct gesture. Without getting round to washing them.
I’m interested in clothes because they already have a structure, seams and openings that reflect the form of the body. I choose them for their color or texture. Whether they’re elastic or padded, warm or shiny, transparent or with some psychedelic pattern.
This also includes blankets, rugs, and bedsheets.
Using textiles is my way of bringing in color and getting across certain affects. The gesture’s characteristics are added onto the material’s characteristics.
Whenever I make something from existing objects, it never works first time around. I have to make, then unmake. I add clasps, so it can then be reassembled in a different way. In these cases, I’m interested in distension and a certain pleasant kind of drooping. The play between masses and gaps too.
I remember, when I was little, that I would sew and invent clothes for my cuddly toys, using the bits of lace, rags, or patches that my mum had at home. Even before then, I used to make little assemblages with cherry pits, toothpicks, scraps of wool . . .
The kind of thing you do when no one’s watching.
I’d like, in the present, to combine two equally vital qualities: intimacy and power—different temperatures, scales, and implications.
First phase of the (lost-wax) casting in plaster. It’s so striking to see the texture, the physical effort entailed in working with plaster on that scale. The hand leaves literal traces. They reinforce it by adding corrugated rods, all around.
I think about some pieces by Barbara Hepworth.
I repeat, in wax, the three-body module. If I cast it in metal it can be more detailed, like the flower’s spikes, all sharp and pointed.
May 15
They’ve added wire netting to reinforce the mold, from which the wax has now been removed.
From the top of a ladder, I look at the mold’s openings, where the framework goes in. I stare deep inside it, as far as I can see. Light goes in, subtly, in a part near the bottom.
The very fine plaster walls translate the negative space that there used to be between the bodies.
They have organic edges.
It reminds me of the inside view of a mold I made years ago. That time, the empty space between the legs and hip of a mannequin looked like an architectural space.
May 16
MOVING FORWARD BY GOING BACK
I’m interested in the little models I made by joining together modules of two and three bodies. They look like joints. Legs. Knees.
But when I make them life-size, they look a bit monstrous to me.
The three-body module, in a horizontal position, suggests an image of speed, of aerodynamics.
Do not lose sight of: pieces that contain process. Making-of. Comings and goings. Cuts and reassemblies. The challenge lies in maintaining this character when the work is scaled up.
A desire for process. For things to be happening. Overcoming the inertia of seeking immediate results.
Not solving. Putting off the solution.
Over the last few weeks there’ve been loads of interruptions, and other projects have taken up my time (as well as emotional ups and downs, and fits of passion). It puts my mind at rest knowing that far away, in the foundry, they’re busy getting on with my things.
Clearing. Learning to say no.
May 17
When thinking about the asphalt and concrete pieces I want to make, I go back to the idea of bodies joined to the wall by means of tension and gravity. A system of strings on the wall.
Slats
Lag screws
Clay
Plaster and esparto
6 mm corrugated rods
Silicone
Acrylic resin and quadriaxial fiber
Vaseline
Thick acetates
Plan for early June:
modeling and looking for a second flower.
May 22
On my most recent visits to Room 105 at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, I’ve been very conscious of the fact that my work will be living alongside Maman by Louise Bourgeois, which stands outside the museum. Since 2020, I’ve been visiting this room from time to time to get a physical feeling for the space in a way that involves the whole body. I looked through. Or rather, I projected. I’ve been unable to focus on the works in the successive exhibitions. So I turned the works of Xabier Salaberria, Doris Salcedo, Cristina Iglesias, Richard Artschwager... into my own tools for measuring heights, and for studying the relationships between the masses and the room’s empty space.
Louise Bourgeois, I am observing you. I want something of yours for myself. The realness.
Torsos and busts covered in domestic fabrics, towels, tapestries. Bodily bulges with weight and density, but with an inner tension that lifts them up. The textile: patched-up skin, full of scars. Just like the musculature of Maman’s legs, which too is full of welded joints that merge sections of concave and convex tubes.
After seeing the exhibition The Woven Child (Gropius Bau, Berlin) last summer, I wanted to revisit a certain quality and way of working with textiles that would be less meticulous, less sophisticated.
I wanted to move on from draping and transparencies, and go back to clothes, dirty and used, shoved in between objects. My favorite pants, worn away by the rubbing of my inner thighs.
Even clothes I’m wearing have ended up inside my work, as a matter of sheer urgency, in a direct gesture. Without getting round to washing them.
I’m interested in clothes because they already have a structure, seams and openings that reflect the form of the body. I choose them for their color or texture. Whether they’re elastic or padded, warm or shiny, transparent or with some psychedelic pattern.
This also includes blankets, rugs, and bedsheets.
Using textiles is my way of bringing in color and getting across certain affects. The gesture’s characteristics are added onto the material’s characteristics.
Whenever I make something from existing objects, it never works first time around. I have to make, then unmake. I add clasps, so it can then be reassembled in a different way. In these cases, I’m interested in distension and a certain pleasant kind of drooping. The play between masses and gaps too.
I remember, when I was little, that I would sew and invent clothes for my cuddly toys, using the bits of lace, rags, or patches that my mum had at home. Even before then, I used to make little assemblages with cherry pits, toothpicks, scraps of wool . . .
The kind of thing you do when no one’s watching.
I’d like, in the present, to combine two equally vital qualities: intimacy and power—different temperatures, scales, and implications.
JUNE CRESPO
Cheek to Cheek
2015. Photo: Daniel Mera
June Crespo
[drawing]
June 12
… hands slowly moving across on an old wooden table. The camera alternates between the left and right hand, each of which draws one and the same mark on the tabletop. The apparently endlessly repeating gesture remains the same, forming an X over and over again.[*]
June 13 (Barcelona)
I get a quote for a machined polystyrene piece, and I decide to go for it.
I work out of URGENCY-IMPULSE.
I take the chance, despite the fact it doesn’t seem very logical. I wonder whether dealing with pressure and time constraints makes me repeat myself. I just trust it’ll lead me somewhere else.
Working with what I have. I try to generate new forms using some of the flowers that I’ve been 3D-scanning over the last two years. The program randomly joins them all together: amaryllis, freesia, hyacinth, iris, calla, anthurium . . .
crossing through each other.
June 15
I visit the Sorigué materials lab. Confirmation that asphalt is so tricky to work with, due to its ductility and because it needs to be compacted.
I think about working with hot asphalt, pouring it and containing it in a kind of skin of translucent resin.
I see samples of concrete with river pebbles. Sections that let you see the composition and morphology of the material.
June 16
Composite of recycled foam rubber.
June 20 (Eibar)
Bridge, assemblage of two wax pieces that we put together and place opposite the concrete piece. A complete but open form.
They do not quite touch each other. There’s an echo.
June 26
Blue hortensias
June 28
Asphalt tongues
June 30
Four of us manage to lift up the piece as if it were a processional Virgin, one person at each end.
That’s how we’ll carry it around, in wax, probably red, across Los Monegros and the Ebro Delta.[5]
I’m interested in how the wax might get marked along the way; carrying it through a lush green rice field, into the river . . .
Letting water go in and out of the tubes/stems.
We cut the piece in two, so it fits in the van.
July 6 (Bilbao)
I think the inverted piece could become a fountain.
July 11
We start the process of making the mold for the porex piece. There are several of us working in the studio. I calculate that it will take us the rest of this month and part of August.
It’s tiring and heavy due to its scale, but some nice images emerge and it gives me the chance to try out some different positions.
Partition lines. The dismembered pieces, now on the horizontal plane of the table, look like figures lying down or raising a single leg over the table.
I really like the line drawn by the curved rod that reinforces the casing.
July 12
We take the pieces out to the car park so we can walk around them and look at them from a distance.
One car, next to the piece, is of roughly the same volume as the piece with crossed-over tubes.
A misunderstanding about the diameter of the metal sheeting helps me work it out: I need to produce a tube with a smaller diameter, raised up, to go between the stem and the 150 cm tubes.
I start pondering what the pieces’ supports should be like: hydraulic cart? Worn-down workshop tables? New tables?
Metal sheets placed on all kinds of desks and tables?
I recall the installation The Happy End of Franz Kafka’s Amerika (1994), by Martin Kippenberger.
July 17–18–19–20
We carry on with the mold.
It’s a repetitive and physical task.
July 26
Manicure
Hairdresser’s
Laundry
Suitcase
July 28 (Florence)
Church of Santa Felicita → The Deposition from the Cross, by Pontormo.
Bargello Museum → sword hilts, wavy-blade daggers, armor, and helmets.
July 29–30 (Bologna)
Museo di Palazzo Poggi → anatomical wax models. A room devoted to obstetrics. Models of all possible complications in childbirth.
Muscular structure that reminds me of the rib vaults in the roof of the Basilica of San Petronio, in Bologna’s Piazza Maggiore.
Direction, thrust.
Hurtling forward and holding back.
The frozen expression looks so vacant.
This anguish is transferred onto the robes and creases.
August 2 (Arpino)
Trip to the countryside. I see the stem of a blackberry bush and I think about the possibility of recording other types of stems. Horizontal ducts, expanded and elevated.
Marta reads to us Marcela’s protofeminist speech from the first volume of Don Quixote.
August 15 (Bilbao)
Do I have to find an internal logic for the textile scans and pin drawings?
When I repeat them, do they lose meaning? Or do they gain meaning by accumulation?
The sequential logic or translation of a musical score (for example) would be, in my case, somewhat forced.
My system is closer to what I think. Repeating, insisting, boring myself until I find a variation that brings out the meaning again.
August 16
I want to join together the thorns of the blackberry bush at their sharp tips. Thorns and a continuous tube.
I look for the photo of the blackberry bush so I can draw it, but instead I find the photos of the sword hilts that look like vegetable motifs.
August 21–22
We finish the mold in the studio.
It’s huge, and heavy. On the inside it looks like a cavern, or an osseous area with sutures like in a skull.
I rearrange the porex parts that are covered in clay, and with broken fragments. When paired up, they look like knees, elbows, or other joints. Also the back or thigh of some large mammal.
A warm, lived surface.
August 30
I think about the possibility of moving all the vertical elements.
Going from a column to a horizontal tube.
September 5–6
Trying to give myself enough time to overhaul the work. Adding some extra material to create further contrast.
Pigmented wax (or even porex) as the final material?
The importance of seeing the pieces NEXT TO ONE ANOTHER/doing different tasks that force me to WALK AROUND THEM/moving away, going out, opening the door and coming back, forgetting about them and encountering the pieces again.
Keeping what’s essential.
Dropping.
Process of trimming/editing/cleaning: of sprues + structures, scaffolds, supports and struts.
“More air.”[20]
September 17
For a few days now, I’ve been worrying about the works I have to finish. Inside, a part of me feels dejected and resigned, as if everything has already been decided, and I can’t change anything. Even though I feel incapable, I still think there’s time to act and make the work mine.
The clear image of a light-colored die-cut shirt, folded up.
October 4–5
We put together the last wax piece, pierced by a metal structure. Although there is some risk, I insist that we turn it over to look at it upside-down, next to the other pieces. I need to work out whether the mistake and subsequent increase in scale makes the pieces compatible.
It looks like it’s resting on two, three, four legs. A cut in the hip, by where the iliac crests are.
The torso hollowed-out.
I think about how I could get water running inside it, so that it would come out through the cracks that have emerged where the different parts are joined. I like to think of the work pissing out of its different holes.
October 15
How permanent dissatisfaction can be a driving force to keep working? It’s part of it.
The difference is whether you cling onto that dissatisfaction. I’ve identified with this feeling for many years, and it’s prevented me from being happy and being able to celebrate any successes.
Going to an exhibition alone, with plenty of time and in a certain internal state, enables real connection.
Going to the same exhibition several times. Awareness about the different perceptions.
Showing the same work on different occasions allows others to enter into it, to be able to say something about it.
October 17
Physical exhaustion.
I stop several times, because my body needs a break.
I work, in detail, on the surface of a wax piece measuring 2.26 × 2.90 m.
I feel rushed, but I decide to take my time and work slowly, just as the task at hand requires.
(While I was washing up, I thought of something important, but I’ve forgotten what it was.)
… hands slowly moving across on an old wooden table. The camera alternates between the left and right hand, each of which draws one and the same mark on the tabletop. The apparently endlessly repeating gesture remains the same, forming an X over and over again.[*]
June 13 (Barcelona)
I get a quote for a machined polystyrene piece, and I decide to go for it.
I work out of URGENCY-IMPULSE.
I take the chance, despite the fact it doesn’t seem very logical. I wonder whether dealing with pressure and time constraints makes me repeat myself. I just trust it’ll lead me somewhere else.
Working with what I have. I try to generate new forms using some of the flowers that I’ve been 3D-scanning over the last two years. The program randomly joins them all together: amaryllis, freesia, hyacinth, iris, calla, anthurium . . .
crossing through each other.
June 15
I visit the Sorigué materials lab. Confirmation that asphalt is so tricky to work with, due to its ductility and because it needs to be compacted.
I think about working with hot asphalt, pouring it and containing it in a kind of skin of translucent resin.
I see samples of concrete with river pebbles. Sections that let you see the composition and morphology of the material.
June 16
Composite of recycled foam rubber.
June 20 (Eibar)
Bridge, assemblage of two wax pieces that we put together and place opposite the concrete piece. A complete but open form.
They do not quite touch each other. There’s an echo.
June 26
Blue hortensias
June 28
Asphalt tongues
June 30
Four of us manage to lift up the piece as if it were a processional Virgin, one person at each end.
That’s how we’ll carry it around, in wax, probably red, across Los Monegros and the Ebro Delta.[5]
I’m interested in how the wax might get marked along the way; carrying it through a lush green rice field, into the river . . .
Letting water go in and out of the tubes/stems.
We cut the piece in two, so it fits in the van.
July 6 (Bilbao)
I think the inverted piece could become a fountain.
July 11
We start the process of making the mold for the porex piece. There are several of us working in the studio. I calculate that it will take us the rest of this month and part of August.
It’s tiring and heavy due to its scale, but some nice images emerge and it gives me the chance to try out some different positions.
Partition lines. The dismembered pieces, now on the horizontal plane of the table, look like figures lying down or raising a single leg over the table.
I really like the line drawn by the curved rod that reinforces the casing.
July 12
We take the pieces out to the car park so we can walk around them and look at them from a distance.
One car, next to the piece, is of roughly the same volume as the piece with crossed-over tubes.
A misunderstanding about the diameter of the metal sheeting helps me work it out: I need to produce a tube with a smaller diameter, raised up, to go between the stem and the 150 cm tubes.
I start pondering what the pieces’ supports should be like: hydraulic cart? Worn-down workshop tables? New tables?
Metal sheets placed on all kinds of desks and tables?
I recall the installation The Happy End of Franz Kafka’s Amerika (1994), by Martin Kippenberger.
July 17–18–19–20
We carry on with the mold.
It’s a repetitive and physical task.
July 26
Manicure
Hairdresser’s
Laundry
Suitcase
July 28 (Florence)
Church of Santa Felicita → The Deposition from the Cross, by Pontormo.
Bargello Museum → sword hilts, wavy-blade daggers, armor, and helmets.
July 29–30 (Bologna)
Museo di Palazzo Poggi → anatomical wax models. A room devoted to obstetrics. Models of all possible complications in childbirth.
Muscular structure that reminds me of the rib vaults in the roof of the Basilica of San Petronio, in Bologna’s Piazza Maggiore.
Direction, thrust.
Hurtling forward and holding back.
The frozen expression looks so vacant.
This anguish is transferred onto the robes and creases.
August 2 (Arpino)
Trip to the countryside. I see the stem of a blackberry bush and I think about the possibility of recording other types of stems. Horizontal ducts, expanded and elevated.
Marta reads to us Marcela’s protofeminist speech from the first volume of Don Quixote.
August 15 (Bilbao)
Do I have to find an internal logic for the textile scans and pin drawings?
When I repeat them, do they lose meaning? Or do they gain meaning by accumulation?
The sequential logic or translation of a musical score (for example) would be, in my case, somewhat forced.
My system is closer to what I think. Repeating, insisting, boring myself until I find a variation that brings out the meaning again.
August 16
I want to join together the thorns of the blackberry bush at their sharp tips. Thorns and a continuous tube.
I look for the photo of the blackberry bush so I can draw it, but instead I find the photos of the sword hilts that look like vegetable motifs.
August 21–22
We finish the mold in the studio.
It’s huge, and heavy. On the inside it looks like a cavern, or an osseous area with sutures like in a skull.
I rearrange the porex parts that are covered in clay, and with broken fragments. When paired up, they look like knees, elbows, or other joints. Also the back or thigh of some large mammal.
A warm, lived surface.
August 30
I think about the possibility of moving all the vertical elements.
Going from a column to a horizontal tube.
September 5–6
Trying to give myself enough time to overhaul the work. Adding some extra material to create further contrast.
Pigmented wax (or even porex) as the final material?
The importance of seeing the pieces NEXT TO ONE ANOTHER/doing different tasks that force me to WALK AROUND THEM/moving away, going out, opening the door and coming back, forgetting about them and encountering the pieces again.
Keeping what’s essential.
Dropping.
Process of trimming/editing/cleaning: of sprues + structures, scaffolds, supports and struts.
“More air.”[20]
September 17
For a few days now, I’ve been worrying about the works I have to finish. Inside, a part of me feels dejected and resigned, as if everything has already been decided, and I can’t change anything. Even though I feel incapable, I still think there’s time to act and make the work mine.
The clear image of a light-colored die-cut shirt, folded up.
October 4–5
We put together the last wax piece, pierced by a metal structure. Although there is some risk, I insist that we turn it over to look at it upside-down, next to the other pieces. I need to work out whether the mistake and subsequent increase in scale makes the pieces compatible.
It looks like it’s resting on two, three, four legs. A cut in the hip, by where the iliac crests are.
The torso hollowed-out.
I think about how I could get water running inside it, so that it would come out through the cracks that have emerged where the different parts are joined. I like to think of the work pissing out of its different holes.
October 15
How permanent dissatisfaction can be a driving force to keep working? It’s part of it.
The difference is whether you cling onto that dissatisfaction. I’ve identified with this feeling for many years, and it’s prevented me from being happy and being able to celebrate any successes.
Going to an exhibition alone, with plenty of time and in a certain internal state, enables real connection.
Going to the same exhibition several times. Awareness about the different perceptions.
Showing the same work on different occasions allows others to enter into it, to be able to say something about it.
October 17
Physical exhaustion.
I stop several times, because my body needs a break.
I work, in detail, on the surface of a wax piece measuring 2.26 × 2.90 m.
I feel rushed, but I decide to take my time and work slowly, just as the task at hand requires.
(While I was washing up, I thought of something important, but I’ve forgotten what it was.)
Bruce Nauman
Practice 1
2021
Bruce Nauman
Practice
2021
JUNE CRESPO
Back of the tongue
2022, fabric, steel