|
Indepth Arts News:
"Rita McBride, Secession Tower"
2000-08-03 until 2000-09-24
Wiener Secession, Vereinigung Bildender Künstler
Vienna, ,
AT
The interest of the American artist Rita McBride centers around the question whether and how the relationship between an object and its
materiality is determined by perceptual patterns. Her objects and installations avoid both formalism of design and the aesthetics of the
ready-made. Rita McBride is developing a project for the Secession, in which the building will be transformed paradigmatically into an
island: surrounded by palm trees and heightened to become a high-rise, the Secession will turn into a holiday paradise that contrasts
ironically with the starkness of the white cube and the superficiality of the tourist attraction.
McBride's technique can best be compared to transformation and alienation. She assumes that the material of an object is in itself a
carrier of meaning. Ignoring the seemingly obvious coupling of form, function and material, Rita McBride works with iconographic
overlapping both on a formal level and on the level of the material. In 1990 she constructed a life-size scale model of a Toyota in rattan
cane and merged the associations of the material, which is normally used in a handicrafts context to construct cozily squeaky furniture,
with a form from high-tech mass production. Both automobile and piece of furniture - albeit transferred from everyday life into an art
context - Toyota remains as a quotation and/or interpretation-cum-meaning in balanced inequilibrium, in which material and form each
refer to what is missing.
The utopian content of such interacting reference structures is inherent in Rita McBride's project of the Secession, where she evokes
visions of a paradisiacal existence on four conceptual levels and at the same time unmasks these as unrealistic pipe dreams: the cryptic
intimation at the portal will be accompanied by a model and an edition of posters.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue in German and English with a text by Jan Mendoza.
Rita McBride was born in 1960 and now lives and works in New York City. Her exhibitions include: Rita McBride and Piggybackback (in
collaboration with Catherine Opie and Lawrence Weiner), Galerie Bela Jarzyk, Cologne (1996); Hyperinclusion, OSMOS, Berlin (1997);
Travel and Leisure, Paula Cooper Gallery, New York (1998); Construction in Process VI: The Bridge, Melbourne (1998); Rita McBride &
To Be Announced, Kunstverein Munich (1999).
IMAGE:
Rita McBride,
Secession Tower,
Secession 2000
Related Links:
Quick Arts
Access:
Vienna (54)
| | 
|
