This page contains a Flash digital edition of a book.
reviews estratos”
abraham Poincheval & Laurent tixador, Horizon Moins Vingt,
estrAtos”
2006, 1:5 scale model, mixed media, 60 x 60 x 180 cm.
colection claude Berri, Paris. courtesy estratos”, murcia
Proyecto de arte contem Por aneo, murcia
31 January – 31 m arch
Considering the enterprises of contemporary artists into notions of time, Jones-style adventuring – or for that matter, TV stunt magician David
memory and how history functions, the analogy of the artist as a kind of Blaine. At the time of writing the duo will have embarked upon their 20-day
free-ranging archaeologist was used by Nicolas Bourriaud in his curatorial performance, buried beneath a motorway flyover in a metal container, from
project Estratos”, which, as he writes in his notes, was ‘intended to be a which they will dig themselves out at a rate of a metre a day. Deprived of
reflection of the past as terra incognita’. Conceived under the auspices of natural light and stimuli – they will have torches, a supply of oxygen pumped
Proyecto de Arte Contemporáneo (PAC), a new Spanish contemporary from above, and each other, but no reading material and no proper toilet
art initiative, and spread over 11 venues – ranging historically from the white facilities – it’s hard to imagine a more psychologically paining proposition
cube to a Renaissance church – in the city of Murcia in southern Spain, this to upend notions of how we experience space and time.
concept brought the work of some 20 artists into focus. Across town, Lara Almarcegui’s big pile of building debris The
Bourriaud’s selection of work, notably in two group shows Rubble Mountain, was a kind of OCD anti-monument: both a formal and
at contemporary gallery spaces, presented witty connections and conceptual counterpoint to Poincheval & Tixador’s big hole, matching their
juxtapositions. The tight approach of Bernd and Hilla Becher’s Typologies, Boy’s Own spirit with fastidious list-making and measuring. Almarcegui’s
for example, black-and-white photographs documenting and carefully rubble mountains involve working with a construction company to ensure
framing industrial architecture, were adjacent to the scatological chaos of that their physical volume matches that of the original building as exactly
a work from Paul Noble’s Nobson, his series of large-scale drawings of a as possible – a Mephistophelean task if ever there was one – and function
minutely realised industrial Sodom. Demonstrating not only how artists as a reminder of its past form (and by association the passing of time
can take similar paths to very different effect – here obsessive attention to and its capacity for destruction) amidst new buildings in the surrounding
detail and repetition – the comparison also reveals the slippery nature of neighbourhood. Personal histories were unearthed at the archaeological
cultural signage: one person’s unsung monument is another’s tower of shit. museum, where Mark Dion presented a recreation of a cell from a former
It was an idea backed up by Cyprien Gaillard’s Romantic vision of nature local prison, replete with graffiti (‘If you cry because you can’t see the sun,
overtaking decaying modernist architectural aspirations in his emotive you will never see the stars’, was a poignantly cheesy line amidst bawdy
video piece The Smithsons (2005). drawings) and display cabinets full of homemade weaponry – a literal
Of the commissioned projects, Abraham Poincheval & Laurent manifestation of the tensions between the controlling voice of social
Tixador’s Horizon Moins Vingt (H20) was an enterprise worthy of Indiana authority and the individual’s. Skye Sherwin
Artreview 144
REVIEWS_April_P2.indd 144 3/3/08 12:44:11
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