Salto del Agua, a collaborative undertaking by conceptual artist
Anton Vidokle and sound engineer Cristian Manzutto, is a super
8 film of an urban structure in Mexico City exhibited as a 16
mm projection with sound. The building, a highly figured, modular,
late modernist structure erected in 1969, is one of several constructed
by subway union workers and located at the Salto del Agua metro
stop. Prior to the production of the film,
Vidokle appropriated a detail from a photograph of the façade
of the building for another work. This detail was scanned, digitally
altered, multiplied and abstracted into a hyper-grid and finally
printed as a continuous field onto canvas.
Salto del Aqua depicts a highly abstract graphic/structural architectural
system in the context of prosaic urban conditions. It focuses
on the structure’s reductive façade, flattening the
sinewy edifice into pure surface as sign. The building’s
language recalls the work of American graphic designer Lance Wyman,
whose op-art inspired MEXICO 68 Olympic logo became an iconic,
innovative gesture that animated the Mexican and global popular
imaginary. Like other corporate identity and logo designers of
the fifties and sixties, Wyman efficiently transformed the revolutionary
aesthetic devices and principles of the early 20th century (Bauhaus,
agit-prop, Russian Constructivism) into populist, consumerist
identity systems. Wyman, whose primary works have included urban
way-finding systems, public transportation graphics and signage
for the Mexico City metro de-radicalized revolutionary graphical
and iconographic schemes for popular use. Vidokle's interest in
Salto del Aqua rests in this “building [as] virtually a logo
itself,” and the emptying out of architectural function and
signification towards sheer adornment. The building-type, now
abandoned, further stresses Vidokle’s focus on modernist
architecture as ornament, decoration, design – in opposition
to popularly held
conceptions of modernist design as direct expressions of functional
and mechanical imperatives.
Vidokle’s and Manzutto’s film engages with the polemics
of abstraction, the dissolution of radical revolutionary aesthetics
and the moment at which utopian aesthetic principles and political
ideals encountered globalization. Within the film, the ectopic
structure now ironically becomes a device that literally mirrors
the dystopia of the city. The structure’s scrim frames the
urban tumult reflected upon it, revealing the excesses, anxieties
and failures of the city.
A publication titled Salto del Agua by Revolver Press is available
including essays by Peter Zellner, Lauri Firstenberg, Gabriel
Kuri and Gilbert Vicario.
Part II of the exhibition at The Project Gallery – 962 B
East 4th Street, LA 90013
T.213.620.0692 T-S 11-6pm
Notes on Renewed Appropriationisms
Curated by Lauri Firstenberg including the work of Anton Vidokle,
Wade Guyton, Seth Price, Ellen Harvey, Mathieu Mercier, Kelley
Walker and Siemon Allen With Projects by Ruben Ochoa and Michael
Queenland
March 13- April 24, 2004
>Back to Program
|
