Mariana Castillo Deball
Reliefpfeiler
September 17–November 14, 2015
While in Atzompa, Mariana Castillo Deball worked in a pottery workshop with Martínez Alarzón’s family (”Taller Coatlicue”) to produce an ensemble of crafted columns. Who will measure the space, who will tell me the time ? was first shown in the Museo de arte contemporáneo de Oaxaca (Mexico)(1), then in France, at Musée Régional d’Art Contemporain Languedoc-Roussillon (Sérignan).(2)
The presence of the columns is developed further in the Berlin exhibition Reliefpfeiler, benefitting from the selection and composition of the other objects on display. Accompanied by a series of drawings and the fourth issue of the artist’s collaborative research journal Ixiptla (here dedicated to poetry and published in November 2015 by Wiens Verlag and Bom Dia Boa Tarde Noite in Berlin), the exhibition and its monumental set of sculptures enjoy a complex re-reading.
As is her habit, Mariana Castillo Deball prefers to pose questions rather than offer answers, generating a space for collaboration. Indeed, each of the columns constitutes a material response, as representations of family members’ answers to two questions asked by the artist:
–How to tell the story of the universe in a hundred years?
–How to tell the story of the universe in one day?
Thus, we are facing elevated rebuses. Several patterns can be identified among the different ceramic modules: pre-Hispanic figures (from Rufino Tamayo’s museum collection in Oaxaca), nuts, screws, toys or even Brancusi’s famous rhomboids (from the Endless Column). Pottery is the central trade among the population of Atzompa, and the columns play with this ancient tradition to question authenticity, displacing the craft within contemporary art contexts. Somehow, archeological fantasies fix the evolution of ceramic craft. Mingling the traditional and the contemporary in a grotesque hybridization, Who will measure the space, who will tell me the time? re-appropriates and releases a repertoire of patterns. These expressions defy a simulated or merely intellectual encounter between craft and contemporary art. Here, indeed, the two realms do not collide, but are instead produced within each other.
As an alphabetic tic, we compulsively attempt to decipher meaning within the patterns, reading them as words that constitute a coherent sentence. However, the columns are not comprehensive puzzles, but instead propose an alternative system. Even as the columns embody “grand narratives” (here the “story of the universe”), subjectivity renders the answers arbitrary. Who will measure the space, who will tell me the time? could be seen as a playful re-appropriation of “universal history” through local and individual imaginaries. Thus, the artist challenges linear coherence to allow for a discontinuous narrative where ancient and contemporary, history and myth, true and false, authentic and replica meet. The trope of verticality (which appears throughout the exhibition, notably in the drawings) is significant here. It offers an interesting alternative to horizontal linearity, which is privileged in Western spheres as representative of time and history (for example, the chronological frieze to be read from the left to the right). Palindromic, the vertical column works both ways, defining neither beginning nor end.
In Reliefpfeiler, Castillo Deball does not comment on “grand narratives” themselves but rather reflects on the different systems that generate their representations. Thereby, she draws from several modes of language and their histories, creating a tension where images, relief, matter, colors, words and composition become interrelated.
Luca Frei, ATTEMPTS 1–10, project for abc – art berlin contemporary
September 17–20, 2015
Luca Frei became know by designing spaces that encourage free learning and emancipatory action. In sculptures, installations, drawings and texts he refers to the space and the actions that could be made possible. What he offers is an alternative thought in space. Everyday objects are the material for his sculptures—often they are furniture, tables or chairs, with which Frei also refers to the history of the form, the design. In his latest installation Attempts 1–10 (2015), Luca Frei deconstructs the prototype of the Cantilever chair, the original model of the famous design object, which was developed in 1926 by Mart Stam.
Made using simple materials such as standard gas pipes and joints, Stam’s chair prototype relied on the idea of a continuous line that would be both supporting and decorative. Shortly afterwards, variations of the chair were successfully developed by Marcel Breuer and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and a long series of lawsuits and claims for the invention of the original design followed—on the one hand (Anton Lorenz vs Thonet, 1929), and for the technical aspects on the other (Mauser KG vs Mies van der Rohe, 1936). However, by the 1930s the Cantilever chair had reached such a popularity that new models were manufactured in Denmark, Sweden, Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, Czechoslovakia, and Japan.The sheer volume of production of replicas and variants, their widespread use, as well as the different views on patenting by judges elsewhere, made any further attempts to claim control of the Cantilever chair designs a hopeless effort.
Texts by Gauthier Lesturgie
(1) Quién me dirá el espacio, quién me dirá el momento?, Museo de arte contemporáneo de Oaxaca maco, Oaxaca, Mexico, 24 January–20 April 2015.
(2) Cronotopo, Musée Régional d’Art Contemporain Languedoc-Roussillon, Sérignan, France, 28 June–30 August 2015.
