Kate Pollasch
Illusions of History
Museums have become an iconic element of society where those in the present can reflect and connect with the past. An environment that ranges from the educationally driven exploration of ancient cultures and lands, to the mournfully reflective places of historical moments past, museums have become places where time seems to fold back on itself and the present and past can create a relationship with one another. Furthermore, the visual layout of museums and monuments have become an institutionalized element of society. The presentation of artifacts, lighting, and mood that these environments create could be identified and described by most who have been to a museum. So, what happens when the visual components that make up a museum/monument space become the elements of artistic creation? How does that special environment transform for the audience when it is used in artwork, or does it transform at all? Christian Boltanski creates sculptural based spaces that mournfully display objects and images with a museum style presentation(1). Working with images, light, space, found objects, and other elements, Boltanski creates space, and alters existing space, that at times produces an illusionistic atmosphere which emotionally commands mournful reflection from his audience(3). Looking at two specific works, The Store House and Inventory, this deceptive play with emotions through the visual application of museum-like qualities will become evident, and the question of audience manipulation for the sake of art will be addressed.
Born in Paris in 1944, as a child, Boltanski ended his formal education at age 12. Since the 1960’s he has been working as an artist, concentrating on the ephemera of the human experience(1). His created spaces have a reputation for flirting with mockery through the illusions of historical accuracy and specific imagery that entices that audience to engage in a mournful connection with the work. Yet when further investigated, his imagery and artifacts are nothing more then random materials complied and arranged into a space of synthetic historical accuracy(3). This is not to say that the sensations his spaces create for the audience is not to be valued, and does not provide an atmosphere for reflections on mortality, memory, and individuality, but what will be explored is how Boltanski uses deceptiveness to create those sensations for the audience. Illusion is the best means to approach his work, and an understanding that his spaces are alluringly historically accurate but are really mournfully ambivalent is nessesary.
It has been reported that Boltanski’s work stems from stories of his life, yet like all elements of his work, where there is truth there is a mirage. While some of his art stems from true life stories, Boltanski has created an alter ego who steps into the picture when his real life does not match up to the work that he is creating. This altar ego has been reported as engaging in interviews and explanations where his real life would not so cohesively fit into the work(3). So, while Boltanski may have never experienced all that his work represents, his altar ego can fill in the historical gaps and always personally connect himself to his work.
The first work which will be digested is The Storehouse, 1988, which is a created space consisting of seven photographs with seven electric lamps and one hundred ninety two tin biscuit boxes each containing cloth fragments. The boxes have been treated and weathered so that they looked marked by time and artifacts of old, and the cloth fragments appear to be archival preserves. The seven faces of young girls are spotted with electric lights, and the girls faces are blurred into semi-anonymous figures. The lighting resembles a technologically advanced devotional candle. The seven girls with their lights are arranged on the wall of the space in a horizontal line, while the tins are mounted directly below them in a grid-like compilation(4). It has been reported on many occasions that this space is an orchestration of signifiers that indicates loss and remembrance(3). The artist is using the institutionalized museum layout of space and mirroring that into a created space of anonymous images and items. The reality of the work is that the girls depicted are not victims of a genocide or holocaust victims, as is has been described as appearing, but they are random photos that Boltanski plucked from magazines, news papers, and other literary sources. Furthermore, the tin boxes and clothing are not relics but simply treated materials from contemporary society that serve as visual aids for the amplification of the memorial-like space(4).
What is so interesting within this work is the duality that Boltanski has created between encouraging personal connections to the seven girls through the emotions sense of loss that the space creates, and creating a completely false space because these girls are anonymously chosen and place in this space with no real investigation into their lives or their experiences. He is using the institutional structure of museums and monuments, specifically Holocaust memorials, to play into the audiences normative emotional response(4). So, on the one hand he had exposed our need to connect with autonomous images and artifacts in ordered to feel a small sense of closure about historic events. But on the other hand, he has devalued the need for that connection and the lives of the people he is using by turning their images into the punch-line of his “got-cha” joke.
Another means for examining this work is that he has translated the individual person into a symbolic representation within a space that facilitated the viewer’s projection of his or her own mortality(4). So while one can sympathize with the seven girls, due to the assumption that each one has suffered a tragic experience worth being memorialized based on the space created, they also can empathize with their own existence and its eminent end. The artist has been quoted as saying “what drives me as an artists is that I think everyone is unique yet everyone disappears so quickly”(4). This is interesting to consider when examining his work, because in a sense he has deemed himself worthy enough to decide who out of history should not disappear but decorate the stage for a synthetically mournful audience. His work flirts with being a practical joke about the gullible sympathy of others and then uses that sympathy to educate the audience about their need to connect with anonymous objects and images in order to have a better grasp on their own mortality. Like his own altar ego, this work creates a fake façade; a space of illusion for audience deception.
Another artwork that has an illusory relationship with museum/monument space is the artwork titled Inventory of Objects that Belonged to a Woman of New York. Within this specific sculptural space Boltanski presented furniture in what has been described as an archival mode. The archival mode consisted of name plates and glass separating the audience from the furniture of a woman who has just died. However, much like the last artwork, this space deceives the audience, because in actuality the furniture is randomly borrowed from personal acquaintances, and has no connection to the woman he has chosen(5). Again through the manipulation of the museum-like created space Boltanski creates a place where personal remembrance and connection is encouraged yet the space is a mirage of reality.
One could argue that the actuality of the objects within the space is not important for an audience connection, and that Boltanski is simply creating a space that encourages an audience reaction just like any other artist. But then the question arises why would he feel the need to pull back the curtain and expose the truth behind his artwork? If his space gets the audience reaction that he so craves, if his ability to manipulate museum-like environments allows the audience to engage with the objects and reflect on their own mortality, then why bother exposing the synthetic qualities of the work, other then to prove his intellectual ability to manipulate and trick people. His work seems to always stem back to his ability to trick the audience, and for that, it creates an undeniable question about if his work is anything more then a large scale place for him to prove his intellectual superiority over the emotional gullibility of his audience.
Bertoski is undeniably successful at creating engaging and compelling space. His ability to trap the audience into an emotional connection with the space is skillfully achieved. However, his work is built on deception, illusions, and manipulation. Perhaps what truly drives Bertoski as an artist is his undeniable ability to create illusions, both through his work and even within his own alter ego. The truth seems to be that Bertoski is nothing more then an illusionist who creates jokes at the expense of others.
Home Wrecker
Artists are chameleons. Ever shifting and molding into the role of laborer, thinker, organizer, designer, and commentator, the role of an artist within society is one of perpetual change and transition. Their ability to both reflect and alter the world around them is something that remains a steady variable within the problematic world of art and art history. The artist Gordon Matta-Clark has a distinct place within contemporary art history, specifically pertaining to the shift in the role that artists can have within society. Working within existing environments Gordon Matta-Clark sought after the forgotten side streets and houses within our industrial society and transformed them into unexpected shapes and spaces. The means to produce his work, the act that creates the art, is one that has been defined by its destructive technique, but what is so enigmatic about the work of Matta-Clark, is that through violent destruction he alters decaying isolated architecture into spaces filled with light, depth, and energy. His best known work involved cutting and chopping away at condemned buildings. Flipping our sense of architectural space on its back, he creates altered space where the skeletons of architecture are exposed and light seeps into the severed buildings(4). Through examining his work, as well as other components of Clark’s life, his ability to re-ignite forgotten spaces, and create conversations about social issues, will demonstrate how destructive acts of violence can be the best producers of positive environments that encourage cultural change.
Clark’s father was a surrealist artist, and so from birth he was raised in an artistic environment. Trained as an architect at Cornell University, Clark took root with art making in New York’s Soho in the early 1960’s. Working with an architectural background, Clark had a heavy hand in fertilizing New York’s Soho for artistic production and life(1). When commenting on architecture, Clark once said that “Far from addressing Humanities problems, most architects were not solving anything except how to make a living.(4)” With that perspective his use of architectural knowledge as a tool within his professional career can be better understood. Along with destructive building splicing, Clark has worked with film, photography, social projects, and restaurants, and the ever present theme of commenting on the forgotten elements of society can be threaded throughout each medium choice. Clarks artistic career ended abruptly when he died at a very young age of cancer, but his influential hand in transforming New York’s Soho into an artistic playground, and his renegade art style, are just two of the ever present imprints that Clark left on the art scene(3).
The artwork titled Conical Intersect consists of a series of carved circles that penetrated through the abandoned structure of a town house in the working class section of Paris. Along with the carvings, two 17th century building, both intended for demolishment, were connected with a spiraling cone. This space has been recorded as creating a physical and visual instability for the viewer that opens unexpected angles and cuts space into the houses(2). What is so interesting about Clarks work is that he is choosing buildings meant for demolishment, un-used spaces within society, and reactivating them as living objects by cutting and chopping. What is even more interesting in that while Clark is re-activating these works their eminent destruction and demise goes unaltered. All of Clarks carved houses have been demolished, which adds the component of time, documentation, and impermanence to his work(5). It is as if he gives these houses one last breath, one last chance for those around them to reconnect with the space, before they are ultimately destroyed.
Another work of Clarks, Splitting, consists of a house in Englewood New Jersey that Clark literally split in two, and the house corners are now in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. This house was not only split down the middle but it was tilted back, so as to create a thin gap for light and space to separate the two sides of each house. This produced a line of natural light that seeps through the house and into each cut room, creating an illumination within the previously shut building(6).
Clark’s cutting and slicing of buildings has been described as creating a dialogue with three elements of “cutting” society; cutting the middle class American dream, cutting the safety of shelter, and cutting his own family history of divorce(2). To approach the split house in New Jersey would be to approach a visual representation of destruction and invasion. As a symbol within society, the house represents safety, family, and love, and I think where the intense sensation that Clarks work creates comes from the ability to take that symbol and break it down so easily. He is taking a space that most Americans associate with safety, warmth, and shelter and cutting right through it. On the other side of things, these buildings are abandoned, they represent the lost spaces within our society, the forgotten deposits of production and consumption, and by giving them use and life again Clark seems to be creating a dialogue about what society discards and yet values at the same time(1).
Some of the other projects that Clark has created further demonstrate his dialogue with forgotten spaces of society. One social project consisted of Clark and other artists moving into the arches under the Brooklyn Bridge and living with the homeless and discarded people of New York. Clark specifically created makeshift shelters out of wrecked cars for sleeping under the arches of the Brooklyn Bridge. The project ended with a pig roast and free sandwiches for everyone(3). Also, Clark, along with others, created a restaurant for artists within New York’s SOho, known as Food, the free restaurant was run and staffed by artists, for artists, as a place for creative energy and engagement to occur(4).
Another element that add dimension to Clarks work is the thought of presentation. The spaces that Clark creates can be very visibility limiting. While he opens space and brings in energy to previously closed buildings, the majority of his work can only be seen from the outside(2). The viewers experience is limited because not all, or many, people can safely enter the cut up buildings to experience how the space has been altered. So, while Clark is opening space he is also closing it by creating environments that are only visible for some people. What this means is that to fully comprehend the spaces that Clark has created photography and video recording becomes a crucial element within his work. What is interesting, when viewing the photography that Clark has used to document the work, is that the photographs are presented in a compositional manner so that the instability and unexpected angles are incorporated into the presentation(6). The photographs are not displayed in a horizontal or vertical manner, but just like how the rooms are cut and sliced into each other, the photographs are displayed at unexpected angels and positioning. This element of presentation is quite intriguing because it is trying to translate a space into two dimensions, ether through video or photograph, Clarks taking the sight specific space of a building and providing a means for a broader range of people to engage(6). The question is can a space like the ones Clark created be effectively translated into two dimensions, or does the beauty of the space get lost in translation.
Perpetually working outside the institutions of society, Clark re-claimed the orphaned products of society’s suburban ejaculations. By working with such a strong American symbol, the house, Clark was able to create an environment whose physical instability reflects its conceptual intention. The cuts that Clark had made into houses, the pig sandwiches he had served to homeless people, the car shelters that he had slept under all make the underbelly of society a place for creativity, exploration, and growth. Clark was a founding influence in transforming Soho into an art environment, and while it would be interesting to hear what he thinks of Soho now, his influence within the community is still evident by its remaining artistic energy. Clark’s unique means for engaging with space transforms architecture into a vehicle for social commentary and the product allows for a conversation about abandonment, usefulness, and suburban life to be initiated.
Bibliography for Christian Boltanski
1.) http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=80857. Accessed March 28th, 2009
2.)Semin, Didier. Christian Boltanski. London: Phainun Publishing, 1997
3.)Godeau-Solomon, Abigail. “Mourning or Melancholia: Christian Boltanski’s “Missing House” in Oxford Art Journal. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
4.)Marcoci, Roxana. “Counter Monuments and Memory” in MOMA. Published by MOMA, 2009.
Biography for Gordon Matta-Clark
1.) Ouroussoff, Nicolai. “Timely Lessons From a Rebel who Often Created by Destroying” New York Times, March 3, 2007.
2.) Lee, Pamela M. “On the Holes of History: Gordon Matta-Clark’s Work in Paris” in October, The MIT Press, 1998.
3.) Rosenberg, Karen. “Disappearing Act- Revisiting Gordon Matta-Clark” New York Times, February 2007.
4.) Attlee, James. Towards Anarchitecture: Gordon Matta Clark and Le Corbusier. www.tate.org, Accessed March 29th.
5.) Krauss, Rosalind. “Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America” in October, 1972.
6.) McDonough, Tom. “How to do things with Buildings” in Art in America, November 2007.
