Theaster Gates: Min | Mon

Known for his expansive approach to space theory, sculpture, painting, film, and sound, Gates transforms the seemingly commonplace with a spirit of inquiry and imagination that defies limits and conventions. His work reorients and amplifies objects of historical importance, tackling a broad range of questions, such as the production of subjectivity, religion, identity, form, and materiality.

Min I Mon marks the beginning of a longer engagement between Gates and LUMA, during which multiple forms central to his ongoing explorations will manifest in LUMA’s spaces in Arles over a period of years. 民 (Min), meaning “people” in Japanese, and 門 (Mon), meaning “gate,” define the conviviality and cultural hybridity that are often at the heart of Gates’ historic projects.

At the center of the Grande Halle, Temple harnesses materials from Gates’ earliest exhibitions, transporting visitors to a site informed by what Gates terms “Afro-Mingei.” “Afro-Mingei” is the embodiment of an ongoing question that Gates examines regarding his own adjacency to non-American cultural legacies. For Gates, the Mingei movement extols the importance of excellent handmade craftsmanship made by and for everyday people. Espoused as propaganda fighting Western assimilation, Gates considers the legacies of Mingei alongside the Black is Beautiful movement, which challenged Eurocentric beauty standards in celebration of Black music, bodies, hair, and consciousness.

Temple, a sake bar and DJ booth, holds Gates’ personal archive of vinyl containing more than 2,500 albums of soul, funk, and R&B records. Uniting two key strands of his artistic interests, the structure houses an intimate yet public space that blends preexisting cultural conventions. MON—a new brand of sake produced by Gates in partnership with the Hakurou company—is crafted in Tokoname, Japan, the town where Gates studied ceramics. Offered publicly for the first time at LUMA, MON sake exemplifies Gates’ ongoing exploration of ritual and ceremony distinctive in Eastern culture and philosophy.

Lining the walls are prints with graphic interventions, such as Summer Tones for a Fall Situation and Kitsch Italian Design on the Backs of Blacks, highlighting the beauty and significance of the Black image. These studies are extracted from thousands of photographic prints from the image archive of Johnson Publishing Company, publisher of Ebony and Jet magazines, and aspire to keep alive one of the most important collections of Black culture of the twentieth century. Seeking to connect what might be at times distant realities, Gates supersedes the limitations of media working towards a redefinition of a spatial concept of art.

Gates’ sculptural practice and the ways in which he gives form to complex truths about labor, value, origin, and material, are made manifest in Sweet Chariot, Madonna in Pink, and The Grind. Min I Mon leads into what Theaster Gates expresses as a pathway where doors are voluntarily left open, where visitors might enter, stay, or leave. His intervention becomes passage in a space where the wind seems to sing and the objects to live.