Take one stark, white wall; add black spray paint text and outline of a picket fence. Artist Monica Bonvicini obviously had a message in mind when in 2002 she created the work “Add Elegance to your poverty”.
The image size is variable due to the nature of the design. The artist can transfer the work only by re-painting the image in a new viewing space. This allows for a different visual affect each time the piece moves galleries possibly suggesting the transient nature of poverty in and out of people’s lives and the different ways poverty is seen in people’s lives. Bonvicini’s piece in the Midway Contemporary Gallery stands roughly 7 feet high and 14 feet wide. The text is written in plain text and all capital letters. There are 12 long, thin and pointed rectangles below the text that I assume to be a portion of a picket fence. The overall appearance is impressive with an in-your-face message.
Monica Bonvicini is an artist who always likes to make a statement with her work, which includes everything from 3-D constructions of toilets to flat installments of text or photographs. Bonvicini comments on a variety of social inequalities and perceptual sexual discrepancies. One piece displays large photographs of construction workers engaging in homosexual, pornographic acts. The fuel for this racy installment came from a trip that she took to Italy that she ended abruptly because of the harassment she received from the construction workers there. Bonvicini takes the idea of hard-bodied construction workers as being the ideal portrayal of masculinity and then asks the question “why are construction workers so appealing?” The work is ongoing and accompanied by a series of questionnaires that she hands out to Construction workers, including questions such as “what does your wife think of your dry cracked hands?” Bonvicini is obsessed with the relationship between building and sexuality. Another of Monica Bonvicini’s favorite topics is the inequality that women architects are subject to in “boys club” of building. She created “Stairway to Hell” seemingly to mock the male architects of the past. With her staircase Bonvicni comments on her inability to move in a desirable direction on social “staircase” among her male counterparts. The staircase has the dimensions of up and down but the chain-link that surrounds the structure suggests that either way one goes hell is the future.
It seems that Monica Bonvicini always has something to say. In “Poverty” the only visual clue to what is being said, is the white picket fence below the text. Perhaps Bonvicini is saying something about the old American Dream of having a nice house with a yard and a white fence. It seems she alludes to this dream becoming a standard for living, a necessity today instead of a nicety. The appearance of someone or something has become much more important than the internal stability of these things. Bonvicini could be commenting on the poverty of the soul that many people try to fill with material things. Following her trend of commenting on the sick nature if building, Bonvicini could be commenting on the poverty of ingenuity in the field of construction and architecture.
This is a good and thoughtful post. I like that you did some research into the artist's other works, though I feel there is a lack of citation here - where did the information come from? Maybe you could embed hyper-links in portions of the text to the sources of the information? I feel you could have expanded a bit on the descriptive portion, even though I know it is a fairly straightforward image, maybe adding a bit more discussion of the line quality, or brashness of the graffiti-style on a white gallery wall, and how it affected you as a viewer to see it there.
ReplyDelete