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| DO HO SUH, Apt. A, Corridor and Staircase, 348 West 22nd Street, New York NY 10011, |
By its very nature, Do-Ho Suh’s Rubbing/Loving Project at 348 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011 is
proving a monumental enterprise. Suh, who is internationally recognized for his
diaphanous architectural installations that recreate personal spaces on a 1:1
scale, has just completed the first part of the work: making paper rubbings of all
interior walls, including fixtures and fittings, of a four-story brownstone in
New York, where he used to live.
Already three years in the making, Suh has now started the
project’s second phase, working on how to reconstruct the spaces and is not
sure how long this will take. The London-based Korean artist says he started
the project without worrying how long it would take or where it might
eventually be shown, and describes the scale of his pieces as a necessity: “One
of the meanings of 'monumental' could be large scale, but other connotations of
the word have never registered in my mind with regard to my practice. What I
have been interested in is the notion of personal space in the way that it
surrounds, protects, imposes and oppresses, and often it is an architectural
space.”
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| Suh's apartment rubbed in yellow. The pink-rubbed door leads to the staircase and up to the townhouse. |
Eventually, Suh plans to recreate the house interior in
its entirety allowing visitors to walk through it, as they currently can do in one
of his other projects, Hubs — a fabric installation comprising a series of 1:1 scale
recreations of transitional spaces (such as corridors) from various houses Suh
has lived in around the world — that occupies the 25-meter length of Victoria
Miro Gallery’s Wharf Road space in London.
Even though monumental projects have existed throughout
art history, it was only in the second half of the 20th century that artists
mastered the challenges of the scale, aided by technological changes and new
materials, such as Plexiglas and weathering steel (also called COR-TEN).
“It was really contemporary artists who embraced works on
large scale that were not traditionally and necessarily for indoor use or for
patrons who wanted large likenesses of themselves,” explains Katharine Arnold,
the head of Evening Sale for Post-War and Contemporary Art at Christie’s in
London. She adds many of these artists often questioned how people interact
with their space; “thinking about the relational impact on the human being.
Some artist would even say that it’s the viewers that actually complete the
work, and sometimes the negative space — the space that is left around the
sculpture, which is carved out by the object — is as much the sculpture as the
physical object itself.”
Arnold cites the pioneering works of American minimalist
artist Carl Andre, whose large floor artworks invite viewers to become part of
the works as they walk on them, along with pieces by Basque sculptor Eduardo Chillida, who carves out
beautiful negative spaces with his huge COR-TEN steel sculptures, and Richard
Serra, whose towering sheets of shaped oxidized steel engage viewers to
renegotiate their relationship with the artwork and its surroundings. In the
1980s, Serra’s 20-foot-long Tilted Arc sculpture provoked an outcry because it
prevented easy passage across Federal Plaza in New York, but the artist refused
to reposition the work, declaring it would be akin to destroying it — it was eventually
removed eight years later. Today, his sculptures are some of the most sought
after at auction, with a world record $4.27 million achieved at Christie’s in
2013 for L.A. Cone (1986), a nearly 15ft-tall sheet of steel.
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Richard Serra b.1939, Tilted Arc 1981, Steel, Destroyed |
Monumental artworks sited outdoors can be quite
aw-inspiring. Christo and his late wife Jeanne-Claude, have created some of the
most extraordinary large scale installations using fabrics that have in turn wrapped
Paris’ oldest bridge, enveloped Berlin’s Reichstag, and draped 2.4kms (1.5
miles) of high cliffs on an Australian coastline. Last summer, Christo unveiled
The Floating Piers, a bright orange
geometric intervention on Lake Iseo in Italy that allowed more than 1.2 million
visitors to “walk on water,” as the 81-year old artist put it, via 220,000
high-density polyethylene cubes covered in saffron-colored nylon.
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| The Floating Piers, Christo |
French artist Daniel Buren was one of the pioneers of installations
that directly respond to the space for which they are created — his first
larger scale work in 1971, a 66ft. x 32ft. canvas banner with his now signature
vertical stripes, bisected the famed rotunda of the Guggenheim Museum and was
controversially removed before the opening of a show (after other artists
complained it was hiding their works). Buren went on to become one of the most
celebrated large scale installation artists, with permanent installations in
the courtyard of the Palais Royal in Paris and London’s newly refurbished
Tottenham Court Road station, amongst many others. His most recent ephemeral
installation, Observatory of Light,
on view until April, transforms the 12 glass ‘sails’ of the Fondation Louis
Vuitton’s roof in Paris creating a riot of color that cast a new light on the
iconic building designed by Frank Gehry.
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| Observatory of Light, Daniel Buren |
But while many artists aim to influence the environment
with their sculptures, French conceptual artist Bernar Venet says he doesn’t
seek to do that, “except maybe to ultimately create a cultural environment.”
Instead, he sees his large steel sculptures as “neutral and auto-referential”
and points out that “even when they are created for a particular site, they
keep their own identity and independence.”
In 2011, Venet became the fourth contemporary artist
invited to display artworks at the Château de Versailles. One of the highlights
was 85.8°, two 22-meter-high arcs
that, from a distance, perfectly embraced the statue of Louis XIV at the front
gate of the palace. Venet explains he usually conceives his large scale work as
small maquettes in metal and works on several variations of the same idea
before finally choosing the most appropriate for the proposed site. “Up to now
there’s never been any bad surprise or unexpected results,” he says, adding,
“Still, the unveiling of the scaled final work is also a moment of great
emotion.”
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| Bernar Venet, 85.8° Arc x 16, (2011) on the Place d'Armes, at the Château de Versailles, France, 2011 |
Nowadays, art lovers can appreciate monumental art in large
hangar-like buildings at art fairs and some art galleries around the world have
especially large spaces to present them, with the same large scale work
sometimes taking on different connotations depending on the building or outdoor
setting. “Interior space and exterior landscape can have equally impressive
results. It all depends on the characteristics of both the work and the space
it inhabits. The geometry of architecture can complement the composition of a
sculpture; likewise the contours of a landscape. An enclosed space can
emphasize the power and prowess of a large scale piece, and yet can equally
create a sense of intimacy,” points out Neil Wenman, Senior Director, Hauser
& Wirth, which is currently organizing an outdoor exhibition of Alexander Calder’s
monumental works in Gstaad.
One great pilgrimage to make each year to celebrate large
scale artworks is the Unlimited section of Art Basel, which showcases the wide
variety of media being used and places rising stars alongside established
artists. Last year’s edition displayed 88 monumental projects including Frank
Stella’s 15-meter-long painting Damascus
Gate, Stretch Variation I (1970), which according to The New York Times
sold for $14 million; Gretchen Bender’s 24-monitor multi-projection screen
installation, Total Recall (1987);
Chiharu Shiota’s Accumulation: Searching
for Destination (2014), an installation of over a hundred vintage suitcases
suspended from the ceiling at different heights; and Ai Weiwei’s White House (2015), a traditional Qing
Dynasty-style house created from white painted reclaimed wood set almost
precariously on glass orbs.
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| Hans Op de Beeck, The Collectors House, 2016. |
One of the most critically-lauded pieces was Belgian
artist Hans Op de Beeck’s The Collector’s
House (2016). The immersive installation (priced around $820,000) invited
visitors to enter the home of an aesthete where time appears to have been
frozen and everything is gray as though covered by volcanic ash in a modern
Pompeii-like scene that was at once disturbing and serenely meditative.
When the Unlimited section was first started in 2000,
buyers of those large pieces were essentially museums and large public
institutions, but in recent years, private collectors have increasingly
acquired such pieces, sometimes building suitably large private museums to
display them.
The cost and time commitment associated with them means
patronage remains extremely important for emerging artists wanting to realize
work on a monumental scale.
“The majority of artists that create these large pieces,
like Jeff Koons or Damien Hirst, are already very established names, because to
be able to afford to go through the various expensive processes of realizing (work)
on a large scale is really a luxury,” notes Arnold, pointing out help is
available through for example, the not-for-profit Cass Sculpture Foundation,
whose mission is to help artists “to achieve new levels of ambition.”
The foundation, with which Christie’s has collaborated,
introduced the hugely successful Fourth Plinth project at Trafalgar Square in
1999, bringing outdoor sculpture to the public with a succession of exceptional
commissioned works, and most recently the foundation presented a major
exhibition of newly commissioned outdoor sculptures by contemporary Chinese
artists including Cui Jie, Wang Yuyang and Rania Ho.
Busy public spaces can also offer the artists fresh
insights to their works. Burren says that even today more than 30 years after
he first created his iconic columns at the Palais Royal, he loves to revisit
and listen to what people are saying: “When the work is in a museum, you don’t
really have this connection [with the viewers], which is why, and for many
other reasons, I find it so interesting to work in the city itself, even if
it’s something not permanent.”
So if you stand by one of his columns, express your
feelings, the artist might very well be next to you.