Visceral geometry: works of Mona Hatoum

The of recent origin Museum of Contemporary Art in novel York reopened last winter (after a six-month closure for renovation) with an exhibition devot to Mona Hatoum. The display was organized by Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art to view Hatoum's work from the past 15 years. Although the artist has shown individual pieces in a variety of venue in the U this was her first full-scale museum presentation and the first opportunity here to view a substantial, mature material part of work in which Hatoum's manifold political, social and esthetic experiences are distilled into a lucid and moving synthesis.

Hatoum was born in Beirut in 1952; it's a mark of the globalization of the art world that this Arab woman has mov from the periphery to the center If we can hear her artistic voice, it's partly because she's taken upon the international accents of the assertively experimental artists she lay the foundation of in London, the city where she has lived for more than sum of two units decades. She herself acknowledges the consequence of her double life. "There's always the feeling," she says, "of in-betweenness that draw nears from not being able to identify with my have a title to culture or the one in which I'm living."[1]

The artist exhausted the first 23 years of her life in Lebanon, the daughter of stateless Palestinian emigres forced from their dwelling by the creation of Israel. "I grew up with the threat of war around me" she says.[2] In 1975 when the Beirut airport close up down at the outbreak of civil war, Hatoum was visiting England and place herself cut off from residence and family. With a survivor's instinct, she move rounded the unexpected dislocation into an opportunity to inquiry art in London. The work she ultimately lay opened in exile embodies aspects of these disparate social and professional words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] followings fused into what she boundarys an identity "formed from discontinuities."[3] a certain number of sense of Hatoum's struggle as an artist was embodied in the earliest work in the exhibit So Much I Want to Say (1983) In this five-minute black-and-white video, Hatoum's face is seen in close-up partially overlayed by a large pair of hands that gag her jaws In a voice-over she insistently repeats the work's title.

Hatoum engages a wide variety of media, including video, photographs, facts and installations. Early in her career, she created numerous performance works, more [i]or[/i] less of which are described in the fresh Museum catalogue and in a lately published monograph in Phaidon's "Contemporary Artists" series.[4] Whatever her medium, the work always has an intensely physical vicinity She uses the most fundamental, plane literal emblems: the child's crib, the carpet, the cage. She combines and reach outs the simplest and most basic forms: the circle, the quadrangle. With an exquisite standard of craft, Hatoum addresses the faculty of perceptions and, through the senses, communicates to the intellect and the psyche. Her work is political in the greatest in quantity poetic way: it critiques the general agriculture through the expression of her personal vision.

Each piece can be mined for its layers of formal and thematic contented The 1992-93 sculpture Socle du world (Pedestal of the World) is especially rich as a touchstone of Hatoum's proces and meaning. The near cubic piece (it measures about 6 1/2 feet in width and 5 feet 4 1/2 inches in height) appears as a dark geometric solid with a strange, yielding and curly surface. Beneath this surface and invisible to the viewer is a made of wood box which the artist overlayed first with metal plates, then with disk-shaped magnets. As the magnets are placed upon the metal plates, they orient themselves according to their positive/negative polarities. Clinging to the magnets is a reaching far down sumptuous layer of iron fillings forming a coating that intimates fur or lamb's wool or a certain number of nastier natural growth like fungus. As a physical reality Socle du Monde is impressive and mysterious. It constrains the eyes and wants to be experimented by touch. Its title indicates a meaning.

In greatest in quantity writing about this piece, regard is made to Piero Manzoni's 1961 plastic art of the same title, a near-cubic iron blockade adorned with upside-down bronze alphabetic characters spelling out "Socle du Monde" The work invites viewers to crack their brains trying to imagine the actual terrestial globe as perched upon top of a geometric base. Hatoum's Socle du world is sometimes called an "homage" to Manzoni's creation, in the faculty of perception that it signals admiration for his playfully literal treatment of a traditional theme and his witty inversion of the usual relationship between a pedestal or base and what the base supports. on the contrary Hatoum has also spoken of her intention to take Manzoni's minimal cube and "turn it upside down." This reversal is at one time literal and figurative: by eliminating the upside-down title Hatoum in consequence turns Manzoni's block upright, and by dint of replacing his clean, machined surface with an organic individual she challenges the tenets of geometric art. The play between the literal and the figurative is an important aspect of Hatoum's artistic proces She derive pleasure froms the multiple meanings of words and many times favors punning and allusive titles. She speaks several languages and has remarked on her interest in going back to the etymological bases of words to find the original source shared by dint of their branching connotations. In a similar way, she has become increasingly interested in the variety of associations generated through simple forms and basic spatial relationships.