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Monica Bonvicini: Exhibition Gateshead BALTIC Visited 28/12 16

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Edited by Steve Bamlett, Wednesday, 28 Dec 2016, 17:57

Monica Bonvicini: Exhibition Gateshead BALTIC Visited 28/12 16. Below: Bonvicini (2014)Bonvicini (2014)

Geoff & I attended this exhibition (click here to open BALTIC website in a new window) with no prior knowledge of Monica Bonvicini and with little expectation that we would enjoy the experience. But what we found was better than enjoyment. It strikes me the best that can be achieved in viewing art is not enjoyment but the ability to ‘experience’ the ‘experience’ as an effect of the bodily senses, emotions and cognition – which is to find no difference between these categories whilst the experience remains that – just an experience.

Analysing experience is different but it happens simultaneously with ‘experiencing’ in the best art. This experience is not easy to put a name to –Freud called it a ‘sublimation’ and a defence against more primal ideas, but continuing to use the word is to expect the word ‘sublimation’ in a post Freudian context to do a lot more work that it is used to doing. The word is insanely elitist in association – a thing of high art.

What Bonvicini does is to take something basic, every day – in this sense alone ‘primal’ – and ask us to experience it anew – ‘queered’ by previously unexplored contexts. She links two senses of the ‘primal’ – what is basic – the ‘room’ or ‘space’ we live in throughout different phases of living – home, work, and leisure – and ties it to the ‘erotic’. The wall of the Baltic (an old flour mill – designed like ‘Mother’s Pride to satisfy) yells in large letters ‘SATISFY ME’, challenging the institution within or its temporary inhabitants – guests like ourselves – to begin to query on our intellect, senses and emotion what ‘satisfaction’ artistic institutions claim to give and the nature of the experience itself. We see those words again, printed on a dining table in a space mimicking a dining room / space. Who or what is satisfied here – by what? Spread out along a table the words call to be penetrated by experience but of what precisely would ‘satisfying experience’ consist.

Elsewhere hammock like swings mime the mechanism of sado-masochistic ‘pleasure’. The themes of ‘construction of space – architecture plus painful work – merge with those of deconstruction and pleasure. It is a complex disturbing experience. How better to see than by reading the completed questionnaire pro-formas adorning a whole wall in which construction workers answer questions about ‘how well do you get on with gay workers who work alongside you?’. Suddenly it seems a sensible question to ask: is traditional architecture and its probing tools inescapably heterosexist and ‘masculinist’ (if we look long enough we find a form completed by a woman who is a lesbian and a construction: ‘I only know me and I get on with myself just fine!’ she says. Plenty of those tools and chain-mail (‘male’) constructions and illusions of construction and disappearance get experienced as you pass them by in all their tarry or silvery/glittery hardness.

And then a repeated image of a pair of pincers embroidered differently in 200 different small frames show pincers (created in this most feminine (traditionally) mode such that gender, sex and sexuality all come to the fore. These hard pincers variably have to come to terms with the soft materials that construct them – woven images where mimesis of hard metal deconstructs into twine surrounding pincers – but in multiple ways. Twine that binds the pincers open (partially or wholly) or shut, twine that merely decorates and softens, twine that hardens and rigidifies a tool meant to be flexible.

And a hard wall – huge – called ‘Weaving’ (masculine / feminine in contrast even here) made of a collage / bricolage of regularly cut (but of varying sizes) rectangles containing pictures of soft body parts – legs especially. This is a work that literally absorbs the gaze in a very embodied manner.

There is too much of great wonder here. We bought two books on her and left in a daze to glance through at our ease and hopefully – perhaps – to return.

Did the artist demand the signs for the exhibits – ‘Do not Touch’ with the insistence that these sets of leather, chain and tar aggregations of construction materials and tools are vulnerable (easy to sustain damage) from our tentative touch. In this sense the ‘exhibition’ queries itself and its artists through the construction of a notion of art itself as ‘untouchable’ – as separate from the body, while miming it. Coming back from a visit to the toilet I passed the entrance door again where a young woman, a custodian of the Baltic, stood near the ‘Do Not TOUCH sign. AS I passed her towards the exit staircase a man heading to the toilet I had exited passed by both of us. He said very loudly to the woman and to an audience, of which I constituted a part: ‘Does that mean you’ in as cheeky a Geordie accent as I have heard. Nothing in that was meant to be threatening. But art makes us see and perhaps absorbs contingent experiences like this, into its orbit of reflection so that we are reflexively compromised by the meanings of the art itself.

Or at least that is what I thought. As we left and walked back along the Tyne, I had to hold Geoff’s hand.

All the best

Steve

Bonvicini, M. (2014) Self-portrait from 'Monica Bonvicini: Bio' on Bonvicini website. Available from: http://monicabonvicini.net/bio/ (Accessed 28/12/16).

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