Monica Bonvicini

On one of the six sketches that comprise drawings for Anxiety Attack, 2003, from which the title of this show was taken, Monica Bonvicini has written: I GET FURIOUS AT STAIRWAYS, FURIOUS AT DOORS, AT WALLS, FURIOUS AT EVERYDAY LIFE WHICH INTERFERES WITH THE CONTINUITY OF ECSTASY. Does this quote from Anaïs Nin’s House of Incest (1936) reflect the desire for a transparent architecture that does not constrict or obstruct behavior in any way? It’s a pretty dream, but not one that much concerns Bonvicini. Rather, she is preoccupied with the way in which built forms shape our ability to be ourselves. Bonvicini provokes her audience to question the implications of design decisions—what historical precedents they rely on, what attitudes they assume or reinforce, what actions they encourage or suppress—and to reflect on how they manifest themselves in the quality of our personal experience of buildings.

The huge steel girder and toughened glass screen of A Romance, 2003, divided MAO’s largest space. Cracks in some panes provided conscious reference to the modernist canon and to our continued questioning of it—Duchamp and Matta-Clark laid over Le Corbusier and Mies. Written on the glass in black paint were the words IT SEEMS TO DEPEND ON A ROMANCE OF PROSTITUTION. Subject yourself gladly to the world and its dominant values or, perhaps, step through one of the gaps in the glass and look at things from the other side. To reach A Romance you had to pass through Black, 2002, which, with more black paint on walls and ceiling, turned the lobby space it occupied into an s/m chamber. You could climb into the leather sling suspended there if you wanted, but even if you didn’t, the pools of light cast onto the vacant areas of floor meant that you couldn’t escape becoming implicated in the power play no matter where you chose to place yourself.

In the two-screen DVD projection Shotgun, 2003, a camera tracks a row of dilapidated LA storefronts past which a silver car, intermittently visible as a reflection in their windows, is driving. You can see in this run-down parade both what was once hoped for the place and what it might, with application, once more become. The adjacent screen concentrates on more open spaces in the same area, be they vacant or used for parking and storage, and there are smaller inset images turning the overall screen space into an advertisement for the area’s own potential. The slow, doleful music sample on the sound track is periodically overlaid with a recording taken from a phone-in DIY show on an LA radio station. While all of the callers are women, the expert is a middle-aged male who at one point apologizes to the inquirer before telling her that the product she needs to solve her problem is called “Shotgun.” Here, as with the snippets of song lyrics disjointedly printed among images of snarled chains in the multipart wall work Kill Your Father, 2001, which ran up the stairwell, everyday language reveals the violence and brutality of our environment every bit as much as any impact-resistant building material. As Bonvicini recognizes, the women asking the questions in Shotgun aren’t trying to sweep away their palpably inadequate domestic spaces in order to substitute for them some perfectly functioning ideal but are simply struggling to fix cracked walls, plug leaks, and remove fungal growths—to slightly improve and prolong the life of something that, however inadequately, might almost work.

—Michael Archer