December 17, 2007 at 8:59 pm ·
Hopefully I’ll be able to see this exhibit before it closes and write a review. Gordon Matta-Clark is one of my top five favorite artists. I’m a big fan of his films documenting his cut buildings, as well as, the cut building performances themselves. He first captured my heart fifteen years ago at Sci-Arc and during a city-wide retrospective with lectures and screenings at MOCA and UCLA.
The NY Times has background on Matta-Clark:
Few artists could match his ability to extract raw beauty from the dark, decrepit corners of a crumbling city. Fewer still haunt the architectural imagination with such force.
Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark/Artist’s Rights Society
An image from Gordon Matta-Clark’s “Splitting” (1974). H
ouses that the artist carved with a power saw commented on the American city’s decay.
A trained architect and the son of the Surrealist artist Roberto Matta, Matta-Clark occupied the uneasy territory between the two professions when architecture was searching for a way out of its late Modernist doldrums. His best-known works of the ’70s, including abandoned warehouses and empty suburban houses that he carved up with a power saw, offered potent commentary on both the decay of the American city and the growing sense that the American dream was evaporating. The fleeting and temporal nature of that work — many projects were demolished weeks after completion — only added to his cult status after an early death in 1978, from cancer, at 35.
The show brings home just how cleverly he challenged the high priests of architecture who, in Matta-Clark’s mind, inhabited a world of lofty abstractions divorced from the physical reality of everyday life. That critique is newly resonant, when even the most radical architectural ideas are quickly gobbled up by the cultural mainstream, and takes on the slickness of advertising slogans.
This is from the MOCA press release:
Gordon Matta-Clark: You Are the Measure is a full-scale retrospective of one of the key figures to emerge in the generation of artists that followed minimalism. During the brief but highly productive ten years that he worked as an artist, and even more so since his death at the age of 35, Gordon Matta-Clark (1943–78) has exerted a powerful fascination on artists and architects who know his work. The son of surrealist painter Roberto Echaurren Matta, Matta-Clark produced a body of work that incorporated spatial, social, and psychological experiences. Best known for the variety of his often spectacular, planned architectural interventions, Matta-Clark’s works transformed everyday experiences into extraordinary visual encounters. Among the major works featured in the exhibition are sculptures made from his acclaimed architectural building cuts, as well as drawings, films, photographs, and notebooks. A wealth of documentary material related to his interactions with architecture and space, community events, and collective activity is also shown.
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Installation views of Gordon Matta-Clark: “You Are the Measure” at MOCA Grand Avenue, 2007, photo by Brian Forrest:
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August 14, 2007 at 1:29 pm ·
Maurizio Cattelan’s La Nona Oralso (1999)
Venice Biennalle Installation
wax, clothing, polyester resin with metallic powder, volcanic rock, carpet, glass
This critique is only for this particular art installation and not Maurizio Cattelan’s body of work which I like. I don’t normally write public negative reviews and I will reexamine what I have written at a later date to see if I was fair in my initial assessment or to see if my opinion has matured or mellowed. This is that re-examination.
On the surface level, this piece is humorous. It speaks of science versus religion. Science 1 : Religion 0. The meteor serves as a deus ex machina that asks Catholics to probe their relationship to the divine through the vehicle of irony. For the rest of us, non-Catholics, it can be read as a joke at their expense, or more generously, it is just a reminder of how logic or physics flies against religion, literally in this case.
There is a quip that says, It’s only funny until someone gets hurt… then it’s hilarious! I was particularly offended by the fallout this art installation had on Anda Rottenberg, the Jewish gallery director who had to quit her job and probably go into temporary hiding as a consequence of all of the hate mail, angry phone calls, anti-semitism, the political turmoil and negative press that exhibiting this piece attracted. Modernity says that anything and everything is acceptable under the umbrella of free speech and artistic freedom, however, I question whether it is in good judgment to bash the icons of any of the world’s major religions, whether it be Muhammad or in this case the Pope. Strongly polarized feelings towards the Catholic church make it an easy target. It is with bated breath that the audience waits for the fallout. The art piece has come alive and anything can happen.
The use of the political effigy traditionally serves the purpose of a mob. And indeed, this piece successfully conjured up an ugly mob. Ugly mobs are only satisfied by a scapegoat; mobs want blood. In this case, it was Anda Rottenberg. The misery of one person pushed the joke a step further, to the point where it’s now hilarious. It was her bad luck for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Who cares what happens to one person.
Art still has tremendous power to move people. If you bring a negative element into the world, sometimes it will find its expression through an angry or retributive reaction. Was it worth it? When a work is auctioned off for $3 Million, the market answers with a resounding Yes! This is one level on which La Nona Oralso hits its mark.
-April 20, 2011
My original post:
Maurizio Cattelan’s “La Nona Oralso” (1999, translated as “The Ninth-Hour”), was auctioned off at Christie’s in May of 2001 for $886,000.
In 2006, it sold for $3 Million.
Also known as “Pope Struck by a Meteorite,” Cattelan defends his installation at the 2000 Venice Biennale with a glib statement,
“In the end it is only a piece of wax.”
Read the rest of this entry »
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October 9, 2006 at 9:54 pm ·
I though I would repost some art writing from my Echo in the Sense website here:
Much of 2004 was spent taking long walks along the Santa Monica pier and wallowing in a tide of inertia. I came upon this installation for the first time this January at a time when I very much needed a mental jog from the past.
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"Cycle Olympic Boulevard: No 18"
Painted Fabriano/Mixed Oil Color
27.5" x 24.5" framed, 2001
Entwer ein Museumsmonument, 1985
Palacio de Memoria, 2003
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The boat sculpture/permanent installation in these photos is Manfred Muller’s "Twilight and Yearning."
I had the opportunity to hear him lecture at Form Zero bookstore in 1994 and he mentioned the boats under the pier. He first proposed it to the Santa Monica City Council in 1992, but it still took several years for the city to greenlight his project.
I still remember the gallery pieces I saw ten years ago at Form Zero. Each was about a foot high made of cardboard or felted paper; they were gatefolded and scored, duplexed with a contrasting color on one side, and shapes were cut out. Each one was like a present or a large banana leaf folded over on itself. He was working on a series of not quite assemblage pieces, a visual pun on figure and ground and enclosure and these had an architectural feel or a very tangible sense of being a part of a larger dialogue. These very much reminded me of the maquettes of sculptor Betty Gold and her process of arriving at her monumental public sculpture pieces: reduction from a very basic shape; she usually starts from a rectangle. With some of Muller’s pieces, complexity is dependent on audience reference points; how personal and social memory weaves itself in relation to form.
Sculpture magazine has a meaty critique of where his work is in the present. The USC Fischer Gallery has a catalogue page with photos from his recent exhibit there.
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Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark/Artist’s Rights Society
