ART-PRESENTATION: Monica Bonvicini-Lover’s Material
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Rehme, Kunsthalle Bielefeld Archive
Monica Bonvicini is known for her site-specific installations that deconstruct and question the architecture of art institutions in humorous ways. For the motif on the invitation to her solo exhibition “Lover’s Material”, she selected a 2020 drawing that refers to Philip Johnson, the architect of the Bielefeld Kunsthalle, who strove to create a clear setting for the modernist project with his International style building for the museum. The show’s title, “Lover’s Material”, is a reference to the author Franz Schulze’s characterization of the relationship between Johnson and his partner Jon Stroup. In Schulze’s biography of Johnson, Stroup is described as «comfortably passive». For Bonvicini, this opened up the notion that relationships can also be defined as something both objectifying and rationalizing. Starting with this idea, the whole exhibition delves into the relationships, economic, private, as well as political, that are linked to exhibition spaces. How can the artist’s relationship to the museum’s site, its works of art, its visitors, or its employees be defined, and what kind of dependencies are created? For her “Marlboro Man” series the artist says “I have been working with the cowboy figure, or with the Marlboro advertisement for a long time. In 1993, I made my diploma work using four large Marlboro posters. The Museum of Modern Art owns several collages which I created in 1995 with the Marlboro advertising, and in 2000, I integrated the Marlboro Man in the publication “EternMale”, a publication that dealt with the male domestication of Playboy magazine, and I think in 2003, I presented the Marlboro Man in a communist pose in a poster event at the Secession. Unfortunately, it is no longer funny when one looks at what is happening in the Plains of Texas”. Besides many new works of art, such as installations, sculptures, a video, and drawings made for the show, a glass sculpture titled “Up in Arms” (2019) is also be on display. As a visual wordplay, the artwork (a reproduction of the artist’s arms in pink cut-glass) symbolizes both tenderness and tension, as well as the call for resistance and protest proclaimed in its title. This connection characterizes many of the artist’s new works, which have been produced under the contrasting impressions of today’s worldwide protests and the isolation imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Here, private and public space, coercion and freedom exemplify the tensions of the current year. The suspended sculpture “Bent on Going” (2019), is an array of about two hundred LED light tubes connected by an intricate weave of electric cables. Dry-humored, direct, and imbued with historical, political and social references, Bonvicini’s art never refrains from establishing a critical connection with the sites where it is exhibited, the materials that comprise it, and the roles of spectator and creator. This approach, which has been at the core of her production since her first solo exhibition at the California Institute of the Arts in 1991, has formally evolved over the years without betraying its analytical force and inclination to challenge the viewer’s perspective while taking hefty sideswipes at socio-cultural conventions.
Info: Curator: Christina Végh, Curatorial Assistant: Laura Rehme, Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Artur-Ladebeck-Straße 5, Bielefeld, Duration: 10/10/20-17/1/21, Days & Hours: Tue, Thu-Fri & Sun 11:00-18:00, Wed 11:00-21:00, Sat 10:00-18:00, www.kunsthalle-bielefeld.de
