Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/417885
240 CULTURED In a meeting room in Thomas Houseago's East Los Angeles studio, the artist is making matcha tea. He carefully sifts green powder into generous ceramic bowls, pours over hot water and mixes it with a bamboo sieve. "Muna can make a much better one," he says, as he pushes the bowl of frothy pea-green tea toward me. "She's the samurai master." Muna El Fituri is Houseago's new partner, the love of his life, he says, whom he met in New York near the end of 2012. His Moun Room, a radical new installation that he has constructed over the past year, is named in her honor. When they met, Houseago was going through a turbulent time in his private life. His marriage was coming to an end, and he had recently lost a close friend. His relationship with El Fituri evolved as the couple spoke on the phone late at night, she in New York and he in L.A. "The moon was always there. It was a very creative time," he says. Houseago began making Moun Room as individual tall panels. The circle—a shape that has recurred throughout his previous plaster sculptures and drawings in the form of coins or eyes—is the primary form of these three- dimensional reliefs. Structured with iron rebar, the panels combine round- and crescent-shaped apertures and overlapping discs. When placed together, they evoke the rising and setting of the waxing and waning moon. When El Fituri moved to L.A. to be with Houseago, she became an even greater influence on this gradually evolving work. Houseago didn't know where the piece was going, and he didn't show it to many people. When he joined a number of panels together to make a chamber, it was a private space for the couple to hang out together, often with their children (Houseago has a daughter and a son from his first marriage, Bea, 8, and Abe, 5; El Fituri's daughter, Uchenna, is 14). "This work is very protective, very loving," he says. In its current form installed at Hauser & Wirth New York, Moun Room has three layers of walls, the 12-feet-high central chamber being taller than t he outer two. "Children instinctively understand Moun Room as a space for play," says Houseago. "Certain apertures are only accessible to small bodies, so kids quickly discover that they can make shortcuts, and can move through it in a way that adults can't. There is a porosity to the work; it is very nonhierarchical. It is a democratic space." Curator Paul Schimmel, director of Houseago's L.A. gallery Hauser Wirth & Schimmel, commented to the artist that he thought it was his first "truly Californian work." Houseago has lived in L.A. since 2003, but he has seldom overtly drawn on the region's history, favoring instead European Modernism and cultural references from the north of England, where he grew up. Moun Room was also inspired by the magnificent Buddhist temples of Cambodia and Japan, which he and El Fituri visited on a tour through Asia in the winter of 2013. The white plaster sculpture exhibited in New York will, he hopes, be only one of various iterations of the piece. It could be extended, or cast in different patinas of bronze. Houseago would like it to become a public sculpture; he has considered installing it deep in the desert in the manner of Land artists such as Michael Heizer, Nancy Holt or James Turrell. He can also picture it in a clearing in a lush forest, like one of those Cambodian temples. Equally, it could find a permanent home in an urban public space, like Richard Serra or Dan Graham's sculptures. Even so, he says he feels "enormously protective" of the piece in a way that he has not experienced before. Moun Room is Houseago's hugest work to date; and, as an artist famed for his large-scale work, it has plenty of competition. But he is not interested in taking up space, he says, but creating it. "Politicians and businessmen and warmongers—they take up space. I don't think artists do. Sure, we need to make room for ourselves, to fend for our space as artists, or thinkers, or poets, but we need to give it back. Art is provocation, which is a gift." "There is a porosity to the work; it is very nonhierarchical. It is a democratic space." —Thomas Houseago