Bad at Sports Episode 225: Monica Bonvicini - a podcast by Bad at Sports

This week Duncan and Richard interview Monica Bonvicini about her work and her show Light Me Black which is the current Focus show at the Art Institute of Chicago. Well, it was largely Richard as he would not shut up and Duncan had to be wheeled into the interview on a gurney due to his case of swine/bird/monkey flu/pox, and therefore did not have the strength to lift the stun gun of containment which is typically used in these situations.

The following text was shamelessly lifted from the Art Institute's web site.

November 20, 2009–January 24, 2010

Gallery 182

Overview:
Equal parts beautiful and menacing, Monica Bonvicini’s sculptures,
installations, videos, and drawings provoke an acute awareness of the
physical and psychological effects of institutional, particularly
museum, architecture. Favoring industrial materials that reference the
modernist canon, such as metal and glass, often combined with the
trappings of sexual fetishism—leather, chains, and rubber—Bonvicini
confronts the power structures and contradictions inherent in built
environments. Text quoted from a variety of sources, including
literature, psychoanalytic theory, popular music, and architects’ own
words, adds yet another layer to her wry commentary. More than any
other artist working today, her projects aim to expose the disparity
between the sexy, utopian, and avant-gardist claims of certain—largely
male—“starchitects” and the realities of the spaces they create.

The first Focus exhibition in the museum’s new Modern Wing, Bonvicini’s
project brings together three works that directly engage the Renzo
Piano–designed building both formally and conceptually. Created
specifically for the Art Institute, Light Me Black, an
immense sculpture comprising 144 custom-made fluorescent lighting
fixtures suspended from the ceiling, recalls the emphasis on light
throughout the Modern Wing. In the now-iconic 1998 installation Plastered,
re-created at the Art Institute, the entire gallery floor is
constructed out of unfinished drywall panels that progressively crack
and fragment as visitors move through the space. The third part of the
exhibition consists of three glass panels depicting altered renderings
of earlier sculptural projects by Bonvicini and invoking the building’s
glass-curtain façade—replicated in a smaller scale in Gallery 182. The
three discrete elements work together to acknowledge the aesthetic
achievements of the building while hinting at its potential
vulnerabilities.

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