The aim and objectives of the gallery research visits are to look at and discuss artists conceptualize and make work, and crucially how that work is displayed. To think about how context, location and histories affect meaning and influence our responses.
Marisa Merz – Untitled (Little Shoes) 1968
Arte Povera
Arte Povera – the Italian phrase for “poor art” or “impoverished art” – was one of the most significant and influential avant-garde movements to emerge in Southern Europe in the late 1960s. It included the work of around a dozen Italian artists whose most distinctly recognizable trait was their use of commonplace materials that evoked a pre-industrial age, such as earth, rocks, clothing, paper and rope: literally ‘poor’ or cheap materials that they repurposed for their practice. These practices presented a challenge to established notions of value and propriety, as well as subtly critiquing the industrialization and mechanization of Italy at the time.
Material: Nylon and Paraffin
“Marisa presented “Scarpette (little shoes)” a striking, yet delicate intervention on the exhibition’s beach site. A pair of ballerina-like slippers that resemble the structure of natural sea sponges, but are made of synthetic nylon and copper wire. Recalling a fairy-tale-like spirit, referencing Cinderella’s glass slipper, Merz’s pair is placed dangerously closed to the sea, waiting to be swept away at any moment.”
Doris Salcedo – Untitled 1987
Much of Salcedo’s work was made in response to the long-running conflicts and cycles of violence that have affected her homeland, Colombia, for many decades. She spends time with victims of violence, listening to their first-hand experiences. Her sculptures are often composed of found objects such as furniture and everyday domestic items, manipulated to evoke a sense of trauma and loss.
This room includes some of her earliest sculptures. They were made in 1986-7, specifically for the XXXI National Salon of Colombian Artists in Medellín. At the time, Medellín was the centre of Pablo Escobar’s drug cartel. Economic hardship and the constant threat of violence led many young men to take up work as drug runners and hired assassins. Salcedo used discarded hospital furniture as a focus for a meditation about the tragic cycle of life and death. Various bed frames, a crib, and a gynaecologist’s foot stool have been cut and reassembled to produce unnerving standing structures, each deliberately discoloured and covered with dust.
Materials: Steel Cut, Steel Shelving, Rubber, 10 Plastic Dolls and Pig Intestine.
`Dolls become shadows of human lives, a reminder of those lost to the drug trade in Salcedo’s native Colombia.
Doris Salcedo – Untitled 1987
Koshimizu investigates the substance of wood by sawing planks into different shapes, exposing their surface qualities through different kinds of repetitive cuts. Koshimizu was part of Mono Ha (‘School of Things’), which reacted against the embrace of technology and visual trickery in mid-1960s Japanese art. They sought to understand ‘the world as it is’ by exploring the essential properties of materials, often combining organic and industrial objects and processes.
Material: Wood
References:
Marisa Merz: The woman in arte povera. Cardi Gallery. (2021, January 27). Retrieved February 13, 2022, from https://cardigallery.com/magazine/marisa-merz-the-woman-in-arte-povera/
Tate. (n.d.). ‘from surface to surface’, Susumu Koshimizu, 1971, remade 1986. Tate. Retrieved February 14, 2022, from https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/koshimizu-from-surface-to-surface-t12822
Tate. (n.d.). Doris Salcedo – display at tate modern. Tate. Retrieved February 14, 2022, from https://www.tate.org.uk/visit/tate-modern/display/materials-and-objects/doris-salcedo