Have City, Will Travel the Earth

In a world where people are continually on the move--seeking work, a better life or new challenges--we might dream of a city that travels with us wherever we go. If we could only pack up our schools, our churches, our hospitals and even our factories, perhaps we could plop down on any terrain and feel right at home again. “Ciudad Transportable” (Transportable City), an art installation that will is scheduled to be unveiled Thursday on the green between LACMA’s two buildings on Wilshire Boulevard, addresses just such a dream.

Designed by Alexandre Arrechea, Marco Castillo and Dagoberto Rodriguez, three Cuban artists who work collectively under the name Los Carpinteros, “Transportable City” consists of 10 “buildings” made in the manner of camping tents--tough nylon stretched over frames of aluminum tubing. Each building is shaped to represent a key institution in every community.

“They reflect the artists’ notion that there are essential aspects to a contemporary city,” says Carol Eliel, LACMA’s curator of modern and contemporary art, and they are meant to prompt us to consider the prerequisites of life in the midst of change. “The whole work has to do with the notion of migration and the perpetual migratory state of contemporary existence.”

The three collaborators, all around 30, met while they were students at art school in Havana in the early 1990s. “First of all we were friends,” says Arrechea, who, with Rodriguez, spoke by telephone from Cuba. “Then we decided to work together.”

They roomed together and, in 1992, had their first show as a threesome. Soon their schoolmates had dubbed them “Los Carpinteros”--the carpenters--because their work was often based on hand tools and woodworking.

“In time we took up the name,” Arrechea says. “A carpenter is not a real artist, and from our artistic position, we liked that idea--it was like a subterfuge, a kind of joke.”

The name stuck, and since 1994 they have signed their works collectively as “Los Carpinteros,” declining to identify who does what.

In 1994, they were included in the Havana Biennial, which launched them internationally. Since then, they have participated in art fairs from Latin America to Europe, with solo shows in Antwerp, Berlin, New York (at the New Museum of Contemporary Art) and Los Angeles (at Iturralde Gallery and Grant Selwyn Fine Arts).

Although they’re no longer roommates, they share a studio in Havana and work exclusively as a collective. “We continue like a community, we see each other every day,” Arrechea says.

Drawings facilitate their communication. “Every drawing that we do is part of our discussion,” he says. “It’s like having a bank of ideas, and then we pick the ones we like and develop them.”

“Our art comes out of a certain form of group therapy,” Rodriguez once noted.

When asked about their underlying philosophy of creation, Arrechea begins, “I don’t think we have a main philosophy.”

In the background, Rodriguez speaks up in Spanish, and Arrechea translates for him. “Basically our ideas are based on design and architecture, and, just like Dago says, the design contains the moment--we try to get the idea of this time, this moment that we live in. For example, the [‘Transportable City’] structures contain more than the idea of a tent, but the idea of a city, what a city means to its citizens.”

The team concentrates on sculpture and drawings, and often the drawings are related to the sculptures. LACMA, for example, owns a large 1997 drawing of “Estuche” (Jewel Box), a bureau of drawers that takes the threatening form of a giant hand grenade. Two years later, this was made into a 9-foot-high wooden sculpture, now in a private New York collection.

“Transportable City” also began as a series of sketches. Then, in 1997, Los Carpinteros presented two tent buildings--a church and a lighthouse--at an art show in Mexico. The next step was a natural. For the seventh Havana Biennial, they decided to complete the idea. “We decided to create a whole city,” Arrechea says. “When you see only two tents, you don’t feel the same reaction.”

With income from the sales of some of the drawings, they were able to start the process, which involved outside help--computer experts, engineers and fabricators.

“We did the drawings, but when you start work like that you need engineers,” Arrechea says, “so we had a big team.” In Havana, they found those skilled in computer-aided design; in Los Angeles, they found a fabricator for the aluminum tubing. Sewing the fabric for the tents began here and was finished in Havana.

The two original structures were brightly colored, but for the Havana Biennial, the artists decided on neutral beige for the fabric. The buildings range in height from 6 to 15 feet, not life-size but big enough to invite exploration, via zippered doors and mesh windows, inside and out.

In addition to the church and the lighthouse, there is a capitol building, university, factory, hospital, apartment building, warehouse, prison and a sort of fortress. Curiously enough, there are no art institutions here, no theater or museum, although the trio is at work on other “cities,” including one, entirely of lighthouses, for the Sao Paulo Biennial next year.

In December, Eliel saw “Transportable City” at its debut at the Havana Biennial. “It was just an incredibly dramatic installation overlooking the skyline of Havana,” she recalls while flipping through photos of the lighted tents against a nighttime city in the background. Eliel looked into bringing the work to Los Angeles. With the help of Beverly Hills’ Grant Selwyn Fine Art, which represents Los Carpinteros, and Rosa Lowinger, an art conservator, the work has been brought here after a stop at New York’s P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center. It is being presented under LACMA’s ongoing series, Contemporary Projects.

Los Carpinteros has created structures from other materials in the past. A wooden lighthouse, octagonal and about 12 feet high, was shown at Iturralde Gallery in L.A. in 1998 and prompted Leah Ollman to write in The Times that the three “offer a Conceptual art simultaneously sweetened with humor and spiced with social critique. Their beacon of darkness makes an easy but nonetheless potent metaphor for popular disillusionment with the Cuban revolution.”

The artists themselves tend to skirt political issues. Rodriguez, in an interview with Lowinger for Sculpture magazine, acknowledges that Cuba’s revolution colors “the recent history of the country.” At the same time, he says, “maybe this will sound odd, but the idea was maybe to forget the past, to put it aside.”

Still, the shapes of the structures are meant to conjure actual civic life and times. “They’re really iconic buildings,” Eliel says.

“The capitol basically has that shape--the one in Washington, the one in Havana,” Arrechea says. “We looked at the basic shapes that define those buildings--of course it’s more related to Western culture, the Western city.”

And sometimes to specific Cuban landmarks. The prison is in a round shape, with rows and rows of windows, but it “would be instantly recognizable to a Cuban. That’s the traditional prison shape there,” Eliel says.

The military building, which looks like a pyramid with the top lopped off, is based on La Fortaleza de la Cabana, the largest Spanish fort in the Western hemisphere. Meanwhile, the Catholic church has been reduced to one feature--the Gothic arch.

“Beauty is contained [in these buildings] of course,” Arrechea says, “but necessity is more on the first level--the things that are necessary for a human being [to live]. Every time that you travel, in the case of people that leave their country, you can’t bring those structures with you. In this case you can.” *

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“Contemporary Projects 6: Los Carpinteros’ Transportable City,” Wilshire Boulevard, between LACMA East and West. Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, noon-8 p.m.; Fridays, noon-9 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 11 a.m.-8 p.m. Adults, $7; seniors and students with ID, $5; children 5 and younger, free. (323) 857-6000.