Banks Violette: Untitled
May 27-October 2, 2005
Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street
1-800-WHITNEY
www.whitney.org
The Whitney has commissioned Banks Violette, whose work was featured in the 2004 Biennial, to create a new project for his first single-artist museum exhibition. The work, a multi-media sculptural installation with a sound component, re-imagines the romantic sublime via narratives drawn from popular culture. The sound component is a piece of music written by Snorre Ruch, part of an insular music subculture called Black Metal, whose ethos embraced nihilism, theatrical morbidity, aggression and violence. The central sculptural component evokes a minimalist representation of the ruined skeleton of a church, a reference to the romantic iconography of such painters as Caspar David Friedrich and to an image drawn from a Black Metal album cover. Cast in salt, the ghost-like church skeleton, a familiar image of romantic decay, is reinvested with meaning both through the formal seduction of the piece and the viewers interaction with it in the space.
