“Destructive” Art

NEW YORK—A recent visit to Urs Fischer’s latest exhibition, at Gavin Brown’s enterprise in New York, got us thinking about works present and past that have involved damaging or destroying the space in which they are installed. (In some cases, the works are the spaces they encompass.) Here are five of our favorites.

1. Urs Fischer, you (2007), at Gavin Brown's enterprise, 620 Greenwich Street, through November 24.

On October 25, Gavin Brown's enterprise opened Urs Fischer’s “you,” an exhibition and work heralded on the gallery’s Web site with a single enigmatic image: a dreamy, unidentified rendering of a butterfly floating through an indeterminate, sun-speckled, mostly bubblegum-pink space. How the image would relate to the exhibition was beyond us, but we were intrigued.

Onsite, our curiosity was further piqued by an ominous notice warning that “the installation is physically dangerous and inherently involves the risk of serious injury or death.” Undaunted, we stepped through a low doorway into a small, low-ceilinged room where the concrete floor has been torn up and its remains left behind in jagged, uneven chunks. Venturing further, we came to a larger, more open space, again with its floor torn up, though here the dirt-and-debris-filled ditch was deeper—eight feet deep, cemetery deep—and some brave gallerygoers (but not us! we were wearing heels!) descended into it. Around the edges of the room, a lip of floor was just wide enough to walk on, making it possible for a viewer to alternately feel at the top of a precipice or at the bottom of a grave. It was simply a question of where you chose to stand.

And that’s the thing: “you” was all about perspective, putting a twist on the age-old dilemma: If a tree falls in the woods, and there’s no one there to hear it, does it make a sound? Or rather, if you dig a hole in a gallery and no one comes to see it, is it art? It’s a good question, but one we cannot answer. After all, we were there.

We admit, though, anywhere else, “you” wouldn’t be art—it would be a demolition job.  

2. Doris Salcedo, Shibboleth (2007), at Tate Modern, through April 6, 2008.

Fondly known around the ARTINFO offices as “Doris’s Crack,” Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth at Tate Modern is “the first work to intervene directly in the fabric of the Turbine Hall,” according to the museum. Presented with an opportunity to do whatever she pleased in the mammoth gallery, Salcedo opted not to fill the space with art, but rather to create a giant, meandering crack in its concrete floor. (One visitor, convinced it was a trompe l’oeil, took a brave step and landed, so to speak, a foot deep in Doris’s crack.)

The work is stark, beautiful, and unnerving. Salcedo cites as her inspiration “the history of racism,” which “runs parallel to the history of modernity and is its untold dark side.” But the implications seem broader. Being confronted with a needling sign of deterioration in such a grand, monumental space suggests the foundations of modern society being pulled apart, its iconic concrete structures—towers, autobahns, train stations, parliaments—proven fallible, impermanent. With only the crack to occupy them in the cavernous hall, visitors confront their own ideas about permanence, stability, and underlying weaknesses.

3. Felix Schramm, This is not a wall (2007), at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, June 29 – September 30, 2007.

The highlight of Felix Schramm’s show of new work at SFMOMA this summer, This is not a wall is consistent with the German artist’s series of works presenting architecture gone awry.

But unlike Fischer’s and Salcedo’s destructive works, Schramm’s installation only appears to have torn the gallery to bits: His precariously positioned structural elements, made from drywall, steel frames, wood, and paint, are actually introduced to the gallery rather than culled from them.

The impression is of debris that has landed in the museum from somewhere else, as after a tornado or hurricane. And, like the aftermath of such natural disasters, there is a sense of violence, with the work seeming to pierce the gallery’s existing walls. And yet even these structures were created and installed by the artist. Despite appearance, no harm was actually done to the gallery in the making of the work. Perhaps not all destruction is as destructive as it seems.

4. Chris Burden, Samson (1985)

From the art-history files comes Chris Burden’s Samson. The 1985 work, first installed at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, comprised a 100-ton jack connected to a gearbox and a turnstile. For this destructive creation the artist didn’t lift a finger to the gallery space himself, though. Rather he employed his viewers as (potential) obliterators.

To enter the exhibition, visitors had to go through the turnstile, which set off a reaction that ultimately exerted force on two giant wooden beams pressing against the gallery’s supporting walls. The impact of each visit was tiny, but theoretically anyone could have been the straw that broke the camel’s back—and sent the gallery walls tumbling down.

5. Gordon Matta-Clark

None of the above-mentioned could exist, of course, without the godfather of destruction, the late Gordon Matta-Clark, whose work was featured in a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in spring 2007. Influenced by the French deconstructionist philosophers, Matta-Clark undertook projects that divided, destroyed, or otherwise disturbed existing structures, most famously the “building cuts,” which involved literally slicing large habitable structures in two. A friend of ours, a Matta-Clark nut, says she loves his work because instead of engaging in the “wankerish” talk of space common in the art world (“Oh, it’s a great space,” “I’m reconceiving my space,” “I just love the character of the space”) Matta-Clark “actually, literally dealt with space.” Indeed.