Monica Bonvicini: Modern Art Oxford - Oxford

upon one of the six sketches that comprise drawings for Anxiety Attack, 2003 from which the title of this display was taken, Monica Bonvicini has written: I realize FURIOUS AT STAIRWAYS, FURIOUS AT DOORS, AT WALLS, FURIOUS AT EVERYDAY LIFE WHICH INTERFERES WITH THE CONTINUITY OF ECSTASY. Does this name from Anais Nin's House of Incest (1936) mirror the desire for a transparent architecture that does not constrict or choke behavior in any way? It's a pleasing without being striking dream, but not one that a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of concerns Bonvicini. Rather, she is preoccupied with the way in which built forms shape our ability to be ourselves. Bonvicini moves her audience to question the implications of design decisions--what historical antecedents they rely on, what attitudes they assume or reinforce, what actions they encourage or suppress--and to mirror on how they manifest themselves in the quality of our personal experience of buildings.

The gigantic steel girder and toughened glass protection of A Romance, 2003, divided MAO's largest space. Cracks in more [i]or[/i] less panes provided conscious reference to the modernist canon and to our continued questioning of it--Duchamp and Matta-Clark laid above Le Corbusier and Mies. Written upon the glass in black paint were the words IT have the appearances TO DEPEND ON A ROMANCE OF PROSTITUTION. subdue yourself gladly to the world and its dominant values or, perhaps, pace through one of the gaps in the glass and gaze at things from the other side. To reach A Romance you had to pass end Black, 2002, which, with more black paint upon 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, on the other hand even if you didn't, the lochs of light cast onto the vacant areas of floor meant that you couldn't escape becoming implicated ill the power play no matter where you chose to place yourself.

In the two-screen DVD projection Shotgun 2003 a camera tracks a line of dilapidated LA store/Toms past which a silver car, intermittently visible as a reflection in their windows, is driving. You can diocese in this run-down parade the pair what was once hoped for the place and what it might, with application, one time more become. The adjacent defence concentrates on more upon spaces in the same area, be they vacant or used for parking and storage, and there are smaller inset in)ages turning the overall defence space into an advertisement for the area's hold potential. The slow, doleful music sample upon the sound track is periodically overlaid with a recording taken from a phone-in DIY present to view on an LA radio station. While all of the callers are women the adroit is a middle-aged male who at single point apologizes to the inquirer before telling her that the produce she needs to solve her moot point is called "Shotgun." Here, as with the snippets of ditty 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 each 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 a certain number of perfectly functioning ideal but are simply struggling to fix cracked walls, stopper leaks, and remove fungal growths--In slightly improve and lengthen the life of something that, however inadequately, might almost work.

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