Suspended: If we were to imagine an ecosystem as a shifting body of water, then your CF3 chairs are carefully designed pebbles, dropped in the waters of Forsyth Plaza, and the ripple carefully documented. Does this seem fair? 

Cristóbal: I think the documentation certainly has that angle to it. But there’s a political dimension to it, where no one else is dropping pebbles. There’s a stable body of water, this ecosystem that has been the way it is for years, and people are mysteriously dropping pebbles, and no one knows who. There are phantoms dropping pebbles, and people just live with the ripples. No one intervenes in an exploratory fashion.

Suspended: Are you the phantom?

Cristóbal: No, just the forces that dictate the way things are. Be it laws that dictate where buses need to stop. Parks & Recreation funding. Whether or not a police officer enforces a rule in a certain park. All of these mechanisms dictate public life. It’s not a stable, closed-off system of water that I’m dropping a pebble into. It’s a highly alive and dynamic one.

Suspended: Why Forsyth Plaza?

Cristóbal: I wanted it to be near where I was living, which is Grand and Allen. I was talking to a friend of mine, Chris Marino, about how in Chinatown, life is led in public. He has this bit he likes to go on, where if you need to take a phone call, you’d think you’d do that in the back of your home, where you have privacy. But in Chinatown, particularly the Chinese elderly population, you take it in the street. There’s this public dimension of life. Early mornings with people dancing and doing martial arts in the park. 

Suspended: In my neighborhood, on the border of Flatbush and Ditmas, there are a lot of families in the cul-de-sac that don’t have enough space. The adult kids live at home, there are multiple generations in an apartment, and no privacy. So they use their cars as phone booths, they go out to their Toyota Siennas.

Cristóbal: I mean, classic Midwest emo territory… You know Car Seat Headrest is named that because he’d record songs in his car. Anyway, Forsyth Plaza also has a fruit fair, which I’ve walked past hundreds of times and always thought was very lively, very close to my experience of São Paulo. It was a part of New York that felt as far from Gramercy Park—which is closed off—as you can get in Manhattan, at least south of 180th Street. And there’s something interesting about how the street is just kind of an absolute mess. You have fruit peels and stains from cars running over fruit. It’s very unmanicured. And you walk by on a Saturday morning and there’s two, three hundred people buying stuff. 

Suspended: Do you know how or when it’s cleaned?

Cristóbal: No idea. The way it works in Brazil, the São Paulo street fair which Forsyth Plaza reminds me of, has really rigorous cleaning afterwards. The fair sets  up shop at 5 in the morning and closes at 2. And then the government comes through with a big-ass truck and just blasts, almost like with a firefighting hose, the whole street with water. 

Suspended: Is your practice a form of street photography?

Cristóbal: I’m very influenced by street photography. I had informative classes in college, art history classes on the history of American photography, which is not entirely street photography, but the kind of core figures for me were the Robert Franks and Garry Winogrands. 

Suspended: Who taught the course?

Cristóbal: Alexander Nemerov. Very important professor for me, despite the fact I have no personal relationship with him. I didn’t go to office hours or anything, but going to class felt like going to church. It was Monday/Wednesday/Friday, 10:30 to 11:15 in a big auditorium, lights off, only a spotlight on him, and a PowerPoint. Maybe three or four photos over 45 minutes of what felt like extemporaneous speaking, but was actually extremely planned and meticulous lectures. This will make some sense with regards to the CF3 project, but he always took pictures of where the paintings were based on. He would do these pilgrimages to where Goya was, when he painted Third of May. Or where the first Robin Hood was filmed. He had a real ritualistic relationship to art. And when I was at a museum in Berlin, for no reason, I saw a painting that—it wasn’t a pilgrimage of my own, but I happened to see a painting we’d talked about in class, and I emailed him a picture of myself in front of the painting. A year later, I’m told, it showed up on the PowerPoint.

I think there’s a pilgrimage aspect to the chair project, which is that you place it, and then you need to come back to it—to develop a morning and afternoon ritual. It wasn’t rigorous or systematic at all, but I live four blocks away, so coming home from the gym. Or in the morning, instead of going eastward for coffee, I’d go westward for coffee, and just orient my life around cycling through the site. 

But the original question was, is it street photography? I think the difference, methodologically, between what I’m doing and what they’re doing is in the staging. I have no background whatsoever in theater, but it feels like there’s a dimension of setting up a stage and letting people act, and inducing behavior by changing the stage. Street photographers do this indirectly; they’re aware that if you go to 5th Avenue and 42nd Street, you can walk around Grand Central and Rockefeller Center and Times Square, and there’ll be tons of tourists and there’ll be tons of middle-to-elderly-aged men dressed in suits, and that juxtaposition is very peculiar. 

And so you go on Instagram and there are really amazing photos of these characters, and the whole street photography community of New York revolves around similar ritualistic practices—of taking a train up to the bottom of Central Park and walking down to Herald Square and then repeating it. And famous New York photographers, contemporary ones like Daniel Arnold, will sustain this practice for years. And my reluctance to do that—I’ve done that walk three or four times, it’s just that the photos… It’s all the same photo. You can get different characters, but the kind of staging is always the same.

I think Gregory Crewdson does this in a more Hollywood-esque capacity, where he’ll spend $150,000 on a set—will talk to the government to make sure no one’s going down the street, will wait for a good snow day, will have tons of lights set up, thirty-person crew, and he’ll take one picture. If Crewdson is the manicured version of this, this is the street version of Crewdson. 

Suspended: Do you have a favorite New York street photographer?

Cristóbal: Nothing that isn’t the cliché that most people like. I like Daniel Arnold—his book is over in the corner. But I’m too aware of what they do to detach myself from the object in a true kind of aesthetic taste. I think of them more as methodological inspiration. It’s a little neurotic, but I’m too close to their lived experience to appreciate their photography as art objects.

Suspended: Comparing your stuff to street work—your shots are taken from pretty far away. It’s more like surveillance photography. Often, subjects don’t seem to know they’re having their picture taken. In a few of the Forsyth photos, there’s lens-to-lens contact.

Cristóbal: Walking anywhere with a camera is like dropping a pebble in water. It ripples and people see you and people see other people seeing you, and hence they see you in second- and third-order. I was told many times “No photos, no photos.” Which is very normal in street photography. The ethical discourse around street photography is whether you’re stealing a picture or just documenting it. The usual quip is “Oh, I’m just trying things out,” “I just wanted to document the moment” or something.

With this project, it was always clear that I was photographing, first and foremost, the chair. It’s an odd enough artifact that it gives you an alibi. That’s the most honest way to say it. Saying that there’s no moral gray area is obviously false.

The chairs are maybe five steps further away than I would’ve liked. Usually the figure is at a slight angle, because I’m not quite in its line of sight. This is the weakest point of the work. In part because of a language barrier, it’s very hard to speak to the subjects of the photo, who are mostly elderly Chinese men. I do have a relationship with the fruit stall guy, and bantered and talked to him about it, and I’ve taken his picture and he’s been okay with it. 

Suspended: You felt like you needed a contact on the ground, someone to vouch for you?

Cristóbal: I’d previously installed objects across the street here [at Grand and Allen], but it was a much deader part of social life, which was chosen even more for practicality than Forsyth Plaza. Because it was outside my window, so I could always take pictures. I chose Forsyth because it was more full of life, but I was very aware that places like this fruit fair have rigorous social codes around who gets access to what spot. They have clearly better spots, and even though I wouldn’t know, internally the community certainly knows that, say, this area gets more traffic because of X, Y, and Z. So I didn’t want to place my object in a way that would overly disrupt the social order that was trying to be maintained.  

And so I sought out this one seller whose name is escaping me, kind of embarrassingly. I think his name is Luis, though I have his face in my mind’s eye. In part because he looked established—he had like three trucks. And in part because we spoke Spanish to each other, and there’s a kind of rapport to speaking not-English that allows you—it’s just the simple fact that you’re able to communicate with someone in more than one way that gives a certain intimacy. And I placed the chairs across from his stall because at least I had his OK.

It’s curious because with this, I’m extremely worried about the ethical dimension. But I’m not at all worried about it in photography. I’m quite skeptical of image privacy somehow. You’re being perceived always. 

Suspended: And then the chairs were moved. First to the opposite side of the sidewalk, the side where stalls are set up?

Cristóbal: But there was a fire hydrant, critically. So there aren’t stalls there, even though you’d want to put a stall there. 

The chairs started off in a really bad place to photograph, actually. This extremely conservative place, wanting to have Luis’s oversight, and wanting to intervene in the public space as minimally as possible. And then they immediately went to the maximally visible area, on the corner. It’s a very well-trafficked corner, in part because you have cars and bikes coming off Manhattan Bridge. And then it’s where one of the big south-bound buses waits, so people wait there for it in the evening. That same curving road [after the fruit fair] in the evening is a loading bay for buses to like, North Carolina. 

I don’t quite know why the chairs moved there at first. I had a clue in the morning that that was where one of the Chinatown commuter buses stopped. I have a couple of pictures of people getting off, and placing an object atop the chairs. I asked Luis if he had seen them being moved, and he said “No, I just woke up, I just arrived.” There were a couple kids sitting on them in the sun. That’s another important clue, that it’s probably, I’d guess, the spot where the sun would’ve risen first. They probably saw that—maybe the kids, maybe someone else, prior—just saw the chairs and went to sit on them, and it was six in the morning and the sun was peeking out. That’s the William Whyte, Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, number one insight. If your chairs aren’t fixed in place, they’ll move according to the sun. Much like crowds sit on the steps of a public library based on the sun. 

So I think the first movement of the chairs was sun-based. And then it became [a surface] for the commuter bus. And then I did a loop, walking around town, and came back and they were no longer there. I asked Luis, because he was there all day, and he said some elderly Chinese man had taken it. And I looked and looked and looked, and inside of the park, I saw him. 

You can see it in the sequence of photos, guys moving the chairs progressively further down towards a space where—regardless of whether the chairs are there or not—there are people gambling, playing cards. And they flipped it over [making a table for cards]. They use a lot of abandoned furniture around there, which I hadn’t realized until my furniture became the abandoned furniture they were using. 

If you walk around there now, parts of one chair are in the bushes. And the last time I was there, the second chair had been disassembled. 

Suspended: How long did they last?

Cristóbal: The photos are all from one week, Saturday to Sunday I think. Eight days. And then I left to Argentina to visit family. When I came back two weeks later, only one of them was still there. So one chair lasted one week, the second chair lasted three. But the day I came back and documented it again, the next morning it was already broken. It was happenstance, me catching its death.

Suspended: The Grand and Allen installation—CF1 and CF2—lasted a fair bit longer than that.

Cristóbal: Maybe two or three months? And that’s peculiar. They were a lot sturdier and heavier. A lot more difficult to move. They did move, but they danced inside a ten-foot by ten-foot radius. The chairs, I think there’s a happy medium that a third installation would require thought on… I have this belief—I probably read it somewhere, I don’t remember where, but it’s in the William Whyte sphere of knowledge—that old houses feel right, not because of the literal oldness of the materials or decay or degradation, but because enough people walk through the living room and stub their toes that, despite [residents] having no knowledge of ergonomics or layout design, things get shuffled to where they ought to be, at least some local maximum. Some man wakes up in the morning and sits down to drink coffee on his sofa, and he realizes that if it were one inch to the right, his toe would be in the sun.

Allen is a boulevard, and the center of it is plotted—it has plants—and then, it’s kind of weird—if you were to describe this non-imagistically, it’s a sandwich of bike lane, plants, sidewalk, plants, bike lane. I’d put the table on the sidewalk, where there’s an extrusion of space, and they’d move it under a tree, which I reckon is because I installed them in July, and it was just really fucking hot. People wanted shade, which is the obverse of installing the CF3 chairs in late fall, early winter, and people wanting sun.

I noticed simpler dynamics. The picnic table was used as a picnic table, and you could see remnants of the night past: beer bottles, food containers. The bench certainly became a bed, as cardboard was added to make it more comfortable, and then a pillow. 

Suspended: What was your social scene at Stanford?

Cristóbal: I studied computer science. I still work in tech, and I still quite adore tech, but computer science at Stanford is a monolithic culture. Everyone’s taking more or less the same classes, and even within that, there are segregations of taking the kinds of classes that lead to certain kinds of jobs. My dearest and closest friends are all people I lived with in my freshman dorm. That’s Chapman and Gonzalo. Chapman was very humanistic, very focused on literature and history. And Gonzalo more analytic, applied math and analytic philosophy. But with Gonzalo, we were Latino together and could talk about that.

And then Joel Reinecke, a dear friend of ours, and a couple more people I don’t want to leave out. We were off to the margin of the predominant social life. We weren’t really going to parties or events or stuff. I spent a lot of time just sitting at CoHo coffee house, the uglier of the two coffee shops on campus—the one with the kind of sofas you can fall into and become one with. In contradistinction to the really nice, lovely, airy one outside the library, where all the really wealthy kids sat and did nothing. 

Stanford was quarter-based, which has slightly different dynamics from semesters because you can be a little more experimental with classes, do more sampling. And my only real belief was that I had to take one class [each term] about making things—design, art practice, or project-based computer science classes. I had to take one class of mathematical intuitions, like linear algebra. And then one class was humanities. That structured my education, that I had disparate friends in each of these disciplines. 

Suspended: You’ve lived in the States, seven or eight years now?

Cristóbal: Since adulthood. I lived in Ohio ages 1 to 10. All of my adolescence was in São Paulo. I was socialized Brazilian.

Suspended: You’ve spent half of those eight years in San Francisco, and half in New York. What do you make of East vs West?

Cristóbal: For me, it’s Stanford technocratic tech versus New York media and imagistic fashion, art. That’s the split for me, more than true East Coast and West Coast culture. 

Suspended: Does the West reject aesthetics, or does it play different aesthetic games?

Cristóbal: All my favorite American sculptors are from the West. Or fled to the West. Judd just over the corner, by going to West Texas. And then the whole light-color-sound movement in L.A. post-World War II, Cold War, using plastics. I guess I like Richard Serra, who’s a really East Coast guy—Navy yards and steel and New York and being an asshole prick. I like asshole pricks. 

Suspended: You’ve walked around his sculptures at Dia?

Cristóbal: Yeah. My most formative Serra experience was at Stanford. SF MoMA had, I think, a Serra called Sequence, which is a big S-shape; it’s two cavities that you walk inside of, but they’re interlaced in each other, in an S-format. And I think that’s the one that eventually got moved to Stanford once SF MoMA wanted other stuff on display… When I took Intro to Art History, my section went to see a Serra. And I spent a lot of time, more than a handful of late evenings walking alone to the Serra, and sitting in the Serra for an hour, and then going home.

I also went to the Guggenheim in Bilbao four months ago; that’s the biggest Serra installation I think there is. Gehry designed a room for Serra to put Serras in; there’s maybe eight or nine of them?

Suspended: Who was your Intro to Art History professor?

Cristóbal: Alexander Nemerov. I took two classes with Nemerov—two and a half. I took Intro to Art History 1B—B because it was Western Art History and A was Classical and Medieval, and there was—I think C was Oriental. But 1B was famed because Nemerov had been a very popular professor at Yale, and had been poached by Stanford. He did his PhD in Yale in the 70s, which outside of New York was probably the best place to be for art in America—deconstruction, close reading kind of stuff. Then he went to Stanford to work as a professor, was poached by Yale, and [finally poached] back to Stanford. 

And then I took [Nemerov’s] American Photography Since 1960. That’s the Robert Frank onwards class, starting with Frank’s The Americans. Talked about Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, Ralph Meatyard. And there was one photographer in there who was excellent, and whose photos have been background photos on my phones for a long time, but his name always escapes me, it’s a very generic American name. He did a lot of black-and-white night photography in the Midwest. Lonely trees and carnival rides. 

And I sat in on a lot of [Nemerov’s] Abstract Expressionism lectures. That was his most famed class—a little more serious, more for seniors who actually knew New York history.

Suspended: What did you make of it? You’ve said that painting doesn’t quite do it for you, as a medium.

Cristóbal: Painting does not quite do it for me. I guess I’m still really taken by formalist aesthetic theory—Clement Greenberg stuff. So despite the art not doing it for me, the talk did. Nowadays I’m extremely aware that if the art isn’t doing it for me, I shouldn’t be taken in by the theory. That the theory shouldn’t justify the object. The object should enable the theory, and I think that’s what Clement Greenberg thought he was doing—I think he did have a relationship with these paintings that permitted the theory. So it’s not a critique of Greenberg per se, but a critique of myself, as a person aspiring to learn about the arts, to not fall prey to the wrong artifacts for the wrong reasons.

I’ve recently been thinking about the word “autonomy,” in terms of an object. We’ve discussed the way that a lot of art now is sustained by the text you read when you go in [the gallery], or by a magazine review—that the art doesn’t stand for itself. I think “autonomy” does encompass that, but “autonomy” had a very different meaning for me when the chairs started moving. Literally, they were these autonomous objects moving through the world. Sure, it was people moving them, but the object was asking to be moved somehow. It was affording movement, and the environment wanted it to move, and it was moving.

And I realized that there were a lot of theoretical underpinnings behind why I wanted to work on these objects. They were a kind of childish impulse, at first: I saw the wood; I had some influence in furniture, and I wanted to make furniture, and I wanted to put it in a public space, and I did. But there’s a lot of reading you do in life, where as you’re doing it, you’re aware of yourself reading, and you’re aware of yourself applying these theories. 

It’s hard for me to articulate a coherent theory of the [Convivial Forms] object, and in that sense the object is autonomous. Because you can look at it, and I can look at the object and think of some part of my life, some reading or influence, and I can see it in the object. But it’s a temporary refraction.

Suspended: You’ve talked about, with the chairs, everyone you talk to has a different interpretation. Rather than being a key that unlocks one line of approach, it’s instead a jewel with many facets. 

Cristóbal: I think that’s a lot what I mean by autonomy. But when it’s said in those words, I’m fearful of producing the kind of generic poetry line that everyone reads and thinks is about them and that has no real stakes.

Suspended: By meaning everything, it means nothing.

Cristóbal: It needs to mean a lot of things. It’s autonomous because it sustains a level of ambiguity; it’s not collapsing into one theory or another. It’s positioned ambiguously between. To be more literal: Is this a pro-public infrastructure piece, or an anti-police piece? Are these speculative imaginaries for a police department that—this is, you know, full bullshit art history talk, but—are these speculative imaginaries for a world in which police departments make public infrastructure? Or is it saying that we should move police funding into objects? There is a kernel of thought here about how artifacts situate social relations, and how documenting an object can index social relations.

Suspended: Besides convenience, why did you pick the Grand and Allen intersection for the first Convivial Forms install?

Cristóbal: Because it’s so barren. It’s such a fucking horrible part of town. It does have a surprising amount of seating, and the intersection of Broome and Allen is quite happening—in part because there’s four or five yellow tables where people can eat; in part because it’s a famous skate spot. A lot of skaters lounge there while one of their friends tries out a trick. One of the segments of land that’s designated for a tree doesn’t have a tree, so it’s just a bunch of dirt, but the skaters dug up the dirt so there’s a ledge off the sidewalk. If you watch any New York-based skate company video, you’ll see the spot. Limosine, Supreme.

Maybe an interesting way to say it is, just on the other side of Allen Street, it’s the kind of popping, Dimes Square—the core of the imagined social life, but at the very least there were lots of actual new shops opening, lots of stores opening, all the cool fashion brands trying to move there. And then you had this barrier, this barren landscape with no one on it. You walk on Allen Street after 9pm and it’s just homeless people trying to sleep on benches. And you walk one block over, to Orchard, and it’s full of bars.

Suspended: And then you started doing video documentation of the intersection, you realized that the lights…

Cristóbal: Yeah, granted, since I work and live here, I crossed that intersection eight, ten times a day. And it’s terribly designed, you’re almost always crossing against red. The pedestrian light is red for some reason even though the cars are also on red; I think they presume you’re going to cross the boulevard in a single go, as opposed to stopping halfway? And the bike paths are quite chaotic because the paths go straight, and right after closing cars are able to turn left onto them. So there’s a complicated dynamic there, with lots of honking.

Suspended: “Spontaneous order.”

Cristóbal: Grand and Allen is a peculiar intersection, because it’s the intersection of one very important street and one very important avenue in the Lower East Side. It has lots of traffic coming off of the bridges. And consequently you get lots of trucks trying to do U-turns. It has two bike lanes. It’s the main bike lane that connects the Williamsburg Bridge to the Manhattan Bridge, and down to Wall Street and the Brooklyn Bridge? So it’s a bike hub of sorts, and it’s close to lots of social life. 

The picnic table [I built], a lot of delivery guys would hang out there, because they didn’t have anywhere else to hang out. And I have some real fondness for those guys; I think they’re quite hated in New York. Everyone who drives in New York hates them, because they think they’re dangerous. Really, drivers are scared of killing them and being blamed. It’s anger at the possibility of blame. 

New York for me really is about plazas. There’s that one plaza, Lafayette Street, middle of SoHo—there’s a Duane Reade, a Jack’s Wife Freda? That plaza is full with delivery guys, always, because they’re picking stuff up from the stores around them. I asked one of them for a bottle opener, and started paying attention at that moment, maybe two and a half years ago, and realizing that was their hangout spot. Their clubhouse. They were using public space the way you’re supposed to, and no one else was. It made me happy that the table here became its own little clubhouse.

Suspended: When I was coming over here, the Q was down, so I had to take a car part of the way. And there was a friggin fleet of delivery guys—near Atlantic, there’s a corner with Chik-fil-A and Shake Shack and Insomnia Cookies. There were probably twenty guys, had a whole convention. As soon as an order came in, they were queuing. It was very much a social scene.

Cristóbal: I know a lot of them commute quite far on their way home. It must be weird to inhabit Manhattan almost entirely as… To know the city so well, because you’re constantly driving through it. Perhaps a lot of them don’t know the city well, and are relying on maps. 

Suspended: You say the project started from a childish impulse to just build something. But why did it take on the form it did? What were some of the influences?

Cristóbal: I was reading Enzo Mari and Ken Isaacs. Autoprogettazione? and How to Build Your Own Living Structures. I came across them because I’ve had an interest in DIY spaces for some time; it’s the sort of thing you’re tacitly aware of. I think I found out about them through Soft Surplus. The kind of thing that happens in the Internet age that you can’t quite trace perfectly—I probably clicked on one of the Soft Surplus founders’ Instagrams and saw something, and traced that somewhere else, and eventually found Ken Isaacs.

I had made a couple of Enzo Mari chairs and lounge chairs in my room. It’s probably important, though I wasn’t aware of it at the time—this is 2020, 2021 in New York, which is pandemic-era, so social life was very different. I’m not particularly health-cautious, but even so, you spend more time inside than outside. 

The police barrier happened because it’s really good fucking lumber. They’re like 2x12s and 2x10s that are… I think they’re 2x10s. 2x4s, but 10. It’s funny how 2x4s are a lexical unit; they’re not usually thought of as a 2-inch by 4-inch object. You can’t say “2×6” to a normal person and have them think of lumber. But 2×4 you can. Anyone who does carpentry knows this stuff but I’m just saying it because, until very recently, I did not know this stuff and it’s peculiar to me.

But I saw these 2x10s on the ground, and—I guess there are a couple factors here. One is, as a kid, knowing about Tom Sachs, the artist, who had done work with police barriers. I hadn’t seen many pictures of them, but I knew the story of my teenage idol, Casey Neistat, taking police barriers to Tom Sachs to make furniture. So there was some part of it which was explicitly about that. Me being aware that police barriers could be used in a transgressive way, that wasn’t really transgressive, because an artist I liked had already done it. 

And then the other part was just seeing that it was raw lumber, and living on Graham Avenue in East Williamsburg. And Graham Avenue is closed off many times a year for various ceremonies, parades, festivals up and down the avenue. Hundreds of these police barriers get littered across the avenue, and there’s some miscommunication between the Police Department, and I think the Parks and Rec Department? Where they just don’t get picked up, they get left behind for months. 

A confluence of things. As with all things, it happened for 95 different reasons. 

Suspended: When you talk with people about the work, do the police protests of 2020 and 2021 come up? 

Cristóbal: Yeah. That, in part, is why they’re fruitful objects now. It wasn’t my explicit intention, so I never articulate it as such. I am viscerally aware that that’s how they’re likely to be interpreted, first and foremost. And when I’m speaking about them, I’m tacitly aware of it. I think as all conversations happen, you’re negotiating what the terms of the conversation are. So if [the conversation] goes down that path, I’m happy to entertain it. 

Soon after the interview, Sciutto completed CF4.