An Extruded Performance
Anton Alvarez working with a ceramic press as part of his 2021 Roman Toothpaste MMXXI exhibition (Image: Isak Berglund Mattsson-Mårn).
When Disegno last interviewed Anton Alvarez, back in the cold and snow of a Stockholm winter in early 2014, he was clear about what kind of arts practice he wished to operate. “I’m very much a craftsperson,” he told Disegno’s interviewer. “Sometimes I see very nice projects that are about creating a process, but the designers just don’t pursue them. They come up with their next project too quickly and leave the process before they’ve fully resolved it.”
Having graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2012, Alvarez had made his name through extended experimentation with a tool developed for his graduation project: the Thread Wrapping Machine. This machine bound together disparate pieces of materials with complex lashings of PVA-soaked thread. As the wrapping built up, strange objects and furniture pieces began to emerge, with the thread acting as a form of joint, as well as providing complex upholstery and ornamentation. Alvarez was committed to learning the intricacies of his machine and process, gradually progressing from simple objects and furniture through to ever more ambitious forms. “Architecture is something that has been with me for a long time,” he noted in 2014. “I’ve just been waiting for a good opportunity to try it.”
Alvarez accomplished this goal soon afterwards with an exhibition of thread-wrapped architecture hosted at Stockholm’s Gustavsbergs Konsthall later that year, but he also expressed early reservations about his technique. “I think I’m starting to get too precise and too controlling of the machine and maybe I’m not being so honest to the technique,” he said. In 2015, he began to build a new machine.
Alvarez working with the Thread Wrapping machine in 2014 (image: Märta Thisner).
For the past seven years, Alvarez’s work has focused upon clay, facilitated by a suite of custom-built ceramic presses. The latest of these machines, dubbed the Extruder, is a 10-tonne-strong device, capable of squeezing out clay into strange sculptural forms. Since debuting his clay work in 2016, Alvarez has created small-scale, expressive objects; more controlled tubular sections; and explicitly architectural columns. Like the Thread Wrapping Machine, the Extruder is an example of Alvarez designing a process, and a mechanism to support that process, rather than precisely creating individual pieces. Yet there are, Alvarez notes, important differences between the two families of projects.
“The reason why I started make the clay extruder is that the Thread Wrapping Machine was very hands on,” he says. “There was a craft where I had to be 100 per cent involved all the time, taking all the decisions and manoeuvring the pieces by hand according to how I wanted it to happen.” The clay work, by contrast, allows for the removal of the human hand to a far greater extent, allowing Alvarez to trial a craft process that still allows for texture and expression, but which minimises his autonomy in the making. “The machine is squeezing out clay like toothpaste, which was a natural direction in terms of taking one step back from the process,” he says. “How can this be more self-generating?”
One of the Roman Toothpaste MMXXI columns (Image: Isak Berglund Mattsson-Mårn).
The idea of generation is essential to Alvarez, whose work within design and art typically contains an element of performance. In February, Alvarez is to bring the Extruder to 100 Bishopsgate in Central London as part of a commission from Brookfield Properties. Over the course of the month, Alvarez will grind down a series of clay columns he created in 2021 for his Roman Toothpaste MMXXI exhibition, before re-extruding the material to form six new columns that will subsequently be exhibited alongside earlier work. Throughout the making process, the public will be invited into 100 Bishopsgate to see Alvarez in action, with the artist noting that the exhibition represents an opportunity to develop this performative aspect of his work to a greater extent than before.
“I'm pretty practical in my practice,” Alvarez notes. “If I want to make something larger than my studio, then the easiest way to do so is to make it in the exhibition space – so why not invite the audience in to see that happening? Since I launched my career, it’s been process-based and about the machines that I create. Even if I want the objects I create to have their own lives and be strong enough by themselves, it’s still about the process.” Performance, Alvarez believes, represents a key way in which people can engage with this making. “It’s a way of including people and not making it too much of a secret,” he says. “And it’s not as complicated as you might think. I push a button and something comes out, but it's more about what I then do with that tool and how I tweak it to become something strong or expressive or beautiful or ugly.”
Clay used for Roman Toothpaste MMXXI will be ground and re-extruded for Alvarez’s new exhibition at 100 Bishopsgate (image: Isak Berglund Mattsson-Mårn).
This spirit of learning through making extends to the artist himself. The Extruder that will be used for the Bishopsgate performance has a wider diameter than that used in Roman Toothpaste MMXXI, allowing for columns of a different, more monumental proportion to the tall, slender shapes of the earlier exhibition. “If we dare, we could try to bend them a little, or we may keep them straight – it depends upon how brave we feel,” notes Alvarez. Regardless of how the performance unfurls, however, there is a safety net provided by the material itself. “If we come to a point where I don't feel like the pieces are successful enough, we can always put them back in the machine and remake them,” Alvarez says. “That's that's the beauty of the material. It never, never dies.”
It promises to be a performance worth catching. While Alvarez’s work with extrusion is different to his earlier experiments with thread-wrapping, the two processes have followed a similar trajectory within his oeuvre. What began with small-scale objects has gradually progressed towards architectural elements. “If I feel too confident with how the result of a process will look, I try to add something new to make it more technically difficult to operate,” Alvarez says. “Scale is one way of doing that.”
Image: Isak Berglund Mattsson-Mårn.
While there remains clear scope for further experimentation within clay and the Extruder, it is notable that the shift to the architectural scale represented something of a finale to Alvarez’s initial work with the Thread Wrapping Machine (“It’s in storage at the moment,” Alvarez notes of the earlier device, “because clay and threads don't mix very well in a studio space – the fibres become a bit dirty”). As the experiments with the Extruder ramp up, it is natural to wonder what Alvarez’s next move may be.
“I'm working on a new machine, although I'm not done yet,” he acknowledges. “Even if I don't know what materials or process that will use, I’m thinking about how I can take another step further away from from the making. With the Extruder I use a remote control, but could something be even more self generating? That’s the next step, and then maybe it all makes sense – this move from the Thread Wrapping Machine, to the Extruder, and onto to this third [device].”
Anton Alvarez’s performance at 100 Bishopsgate will run from 7 to 25 February 2022. The subsequent exhibition opens on 28 February and will remain open until 25 November 2022.