Model for ‘Sculpture’
Development and Production: KWY.studio (Ricardo Gomes with Ruggero Agnolutto, Daniel López and Luise Marter)
1 December 2017 - 26 February 2018
Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, U.S.
Kevin Reinhardt on Model for ‘Sculpture’ by Margaret Honda
Mousse #61
Margaret Honda’s Model for ‘Sculpture’ (2017) seems to just jam a lot of walls together. It’s big—taller than I am—and seems to have almost a linear mile of metal construction studs holding everything up. Honda told me about Model for ‘Sculpture’ only after she had received the initial CAD files from Ricardo Gomes of KWY.studio, an architecture office that recently worked on the Tate’s Turbine Hall project with SUPERFLEX. I saw from the file that the work itself is the convergence of sixteen studio spaces, all used by Honda at various points in the past, compressed into a single twelve-by-nine-foot footprint. The established parameters of the project were simple: everything needed to fit, and no architectural information from each individual studio could be left out. The sixteen simplified volumes, which were constructed from metal studs and drywall at one-half scale, combined to become a dense collection of spatial boundaries—walls covering up walls, posts blocking other posts. There is an excess of infrastructure and a dearth of volumetric space. The effect compresses space rather than delineating it. Dense orthogonal crossings and overlapping studs become a metastasizing force, resulting in redundancy and insensibility, as if earlier studios proliferate into later ones. The exposed, unfinished side and the finished drywall side of each wall run up against one another. When two walls overlap, the vertical-horizontal stud structure is maintained. Simultaneously, when two walls cross, the interior crease is finished and the two walls are merged at the corner.
The decision to leave one side of every wall unfinished intimates an interior and exterior, a gesture that works to blur individual purpose and, instead, emphasizes each wall’s contribution to the larger piece. To me, this represents the “interiority” of the piece where all of these spaces, a dreamlike condensation of year after year of work, an entire career, is hypostasized in a single convoluted structure. The overlapping and crossing of the walls in the real, physical space of the gallery echoes the confusion of design-based computer software as it struggles to render multiple objects in the same location. The work has no distinctive fealty to what should be read justifiably as external and internal. This attempt to “render” the significance of each wall by the observer is required; it should be a process that is immediately approachable, yet demands deeper interest upon further investigation. The sixteen studio spaces combine to form a piece with presence and weight that is greater than the gestalt apprehension of its form.
Condensing diachronic type-specific institutional sites (the school, the gallery, the museum) into a single physical structure has become a ready-to-hand strategy for artists working in Los Angeles in recent years—think Mike Kelley’s high school as Foucauldian dream-work, or Michael Asher’s Santa Monica Museum “retrospective” that seems to remove the exhibition design to reveal the ideology behind exhibiting in the first place. In these cases, for all of their confusing collapsing of chronology, the artists’ motives were clear, and clearly corroborated by their explicit installations. Honda’s structure is more like a folly, an exercise in distance, futility, or amnesia, where the condensed space attests to the inability to account for all of the time spent in the studio, or studios, year in and year out, thinking, dreaming, resting, making, avoiding work, as if to say, “Where was I all those years, and what was I doing in there?”
Development and Production: KWY.studio (Ricardo Gomes with Ruggero Agnolutto, Daniel López and Luise Marter)
1 December 2017 - 26 February 2018
Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, U.S.
Kevin Reinhardt on Model for ‘Sculpture’ by Margaret Honda
Mousse #61
Margaret Honda’s Model for ‘Sculpture’ (2017) seems to just jam a lot of walls together. It’s big—taller than I am—and seems to have almost a linear mile of metal construction studs holding everything up. Honda told me about Model for ‘Sculpture’ only after she had received the initial CAD files from Ricardo Gomes of KWY.studio, an architecture office that recently worked on the Tate’s Turbine Hall project with SUPERFLEX. I saw from the file that the work itself is the convergence of sixteen studio spaces, all used by Honda at various points in the past, compressed into a single twelve-by-nine-foot footprint. The established parameters of the project were simple: everything needed to fit, and no architectural information from each individual studio could be left out. The sixteen simplified volumes, which were constructed from metal studs and drywall at one-half scale, combined to become a dense collection of spatial boundaries—walls covering up walls, posts blocking other posts. There is an excess of infrastructure and a dearth of volumetric space. The effect compresses space rather than delineating it. Dense orthogonal crossings and overlapping studs become a metastasizing force, resulting in redundancy and insensibility, as if earlier studios proliferate into later ones. The exposed, unfinished side and the finished drywall side of each wall run up against one another. When two walls overlap, the vertical-horizontal stud structure is maintained. Simultaneously, when two walls cross, the interior crease is finished and the two walls are merged at the corner.
The decision to leave one side of every wall unfinished intimates an interior and exterior, a gesture that works to blur individual purpose and, instead, emphasizes each wall’s contribution to the larger piece. To me, this represents the “interiority” of the piece where all of these spaces, a dreamlike condensation of year after year of work, an entire career, is hypostasized in a single convoluted structure. The overlapping and crossing of the walls in the real, physical space of the gallery echoes the confusion of design-based computer software as it struggles to render multiple objects in the same location. The work has no distinctive fealty to what should be read justifiably as external and internal. This attempt to “render” the significance of each wall by the observer is required; it should be a process that is immediately approachable, yet demands deeper interest upon further investigation. The sixteen studio spaces combine to form a piece with presence and weight that is greater than the gestalt apprehension of its form.
Condensing diachronic type-specific institutional sites (the school, the gallery, the museum) into a single physical structure has become a ready-to-hand strategy for artists working in Los Angeles in recent years—think Mike Kelley’s high school as Foucauldian dream-work, or Michael Asher’s Santa Monica Museum “retrospective” that seems to remove the exhibition design to reveal the ideology behind exhibiting in the first place. In these cases, for all of their confusing collapsing of chronology, the artists’ motives were clear, and clearly corroborated by their explicit installations. Honda’s structure is more like a folly, an exercise in distance, futility, or amnesia, where the condensed space attests to the inability to account for all of the time spent in the studio, or studios, year in and year out, thinking, dreaming, resting, making, avoiding work, as if to say, “Where was I all those years, and what was I doing in there?”
