Theaster Gates’ Sanctum, Bristol, UK: ‘A bricolage of the city’s archaeology’

“Art,” Theaster Gates tells me, “is about as close as the secular world can get to the sacred.”

“The question” — and the Chicago-based American stops and does a little hop forward on the pavement — “is at what point does it tip over, make the jump and become sacred?”

It’s a good question to ask here, in Bristol, amid the bombed-out, burnt-out ruins of the 14th-century Temple church, where the Social Practice installation artist has completed his first public art work in the UK, “Sanctum”. His ambition was to make a shelter contained within the shell of the church (which is not usually publicly accessible) as a semi-sacred space and, as he says, “to introduce a new layer of history to the site”.

Gates has built a shack, a steep-roofed ad hoc structure of recycled elements in which the particular history of the city is inscribed. “The boards come from a sugar factory,” he points out, “still stained by molasses.” Not only stained by those molasses, but tainted by a history in which slavery made Bristol a wealthy city. “Bristol built boats,” Gates says, “and those boats went out into the world. There is layer upon layer here of trade and enslavement.” Other bits of the structure come from a chocolate factory — an industry with its own contested, colonial history — and there are bricks from a Salvation Army building and doors from demolished houses. It is a building made of bits of dead buildings each with their own stories, a bricolage of the city’s archaeology.

The space inside is being used as an intimate venue to accommodate a nonstop series of musical events, readings and recitals, 24 hours a day over 24 days. “It is about reintroducing this as a place of congregation,” Gates says.

Gates is one of a small number of artists who has managed to engage with the city at the scale of architecture, rather than installation or object. In Chicago’s deprived South Side he has just opened his Stony Island Arts Bank, a former bank building which once formed part of a dense, bustling main street and now stands alone in a marshland of empty lots. I suggest that its form, that of a white marble Greek temple, might be related to the bombed-out church.

“They are both temples,” he says. “Architecture used to be so smart. It understood that it had the ability to locate emotion, to make you experience wonder and awe. Architecture had a meta-physical power. The bank made you feel this is permanent. Safe. Yet in 2008 we saw the banks collapse. Our bank was literally under water.”

He rescued that building to turn it into a remarkable community institution, a mix of library, social centre, archive and museum. But why is he working at this architectural scale? “I feel like my best work happens at the scale of the city block,” he replies. “It goes beyond the gallery and wants to make its own institutions. Both at the bank and here, the buildings function as platforms for people to experience each other.”

What Gates has done so brilliantly and consistently is to conscript the resources of the art world towards social use. He sold off bricks from the bank, signed as artworks, to fund its construction. He has used “Sanctum” as an event to open up an inaccessible space in the city — although English Heritage, which owns the church, must also be given much credit for its openness in accommodating the idea. Certainly he has his more conventional gallery art as well — his tar paintings, for instance, which refer to his father’s trade as a roofer — but even these seem to feed into the construction of his buildings. At “Sanctum” there is a delightful confusion in the old, stained boards between those stained with tar and those impregnated with dark molasses.

There is something almost post-apocalyptic about Gates’ architectural interventions. The skeletal church, the architecturally and socially flattened landscape of Chicago’s South Side, places that have been discarded because the are too dangerous or too far gone — yet they remain in the city as reminders of what it was once. It isn’t an exaggeration to say that what Gates calls “resacralisation” brings them back into the consciousness of the city, recognising and resurrecting them as places of potential. He is doing with art what architects and city authorities should be doing.

“When something is done for Dorchester [the street on which Stony Island Arts Bank stands] it is always incomplete, half-done, its budget cut at the end. That’s what people have come to expect. So when we build there we want to make something in marble — not cardboard, but the most luxurious materials, in art or architecture. It isn’t about expense but expectation. We have the potential to awaken something.”

To November 21, sanctumbristol.com