Piero Golia, ‘It takes a nation of millions to hold us back’ (2003)
The entire façade of a building removed from its original position in Amsterdam and installed in a gallery space in Paris. The work’s title is a reference to the mythical album by the rap band Public Enemy.
Simon Starling, ‘Inverted Retrograde Theme, USA (House for a Song bird)’ (2002)
This installation references a housing project in Puerto Rico which was designed by Austrian architect Simon Schmiderer (1911-2001) in the 1960s. Schmiderer developed a series of houses made of building blocks without doors or windows to further integrate the outside and inside spaces, but the rise of crime in the 1970s forced locals to add elaborate barriers onto Schmiderer’s designs. In Inverted Retrograde Theme, USA, Simon Starling recreates two of the existing homes on a smaller scale and inverts them like birdcages; these models sit atop tree trunks that extend from the gallery’s floor.
In the video “Janske-Guitar”, artist Jan Adriaans returns to his parents’ house and films his mother playing his electric guitar in the attic – the dwelling of his childhood/teenage years.
http://www.janadriaans.com/index.php?/videos/03-janske-guitar/
Simon Fujiwara, ‘Desk job’ (2009)
“A typewriter sits in the middle of a desk surrounded by a litter of screwed up paper, notes typed on file cards, and reference photographs of architectural details, erotic sculpture and gay pornography. Copies of the one-page synopsis of the novel are stacked on the desk, setting the fictional parameters as it describes the novelist’s thwarted attempts to write, his ultimate seclusion and his indulgence in clandestine sexual activities inspired by and in defilation of the building’s sleek Modernist architecture. The synopsis ends with the first line of the novel: ‘A novelist is living in an exquisitely crafted modernist house …’, a line we see typed on the sheet of paper in the typewriter.” (Kirsty Bell in Frieze Magazine, Issue 132, June–August 2010)
Marcel Broodthaers, ‘Musée de l’art Moderne, Départment des Aigles’ (1968)
In 1968, the Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers created an installation in his house that he entitled the Musée de l’Art Moderne, Départment des Aigles, or Museum of Modern Art, Department of Eagles. This was a fictive entity in that the museum had neither a permanent building nor a collection; nonetheless, it was elaborated by Broodthaers in about a dozen further installations. Evidence of the museum’s existence (apart from its title) ultimately encompassed specially created objects, films, and art reproductions as well as ephemera such as wall labels and signage.
Frank O´Hara reading his poem “Having a coke with you” in his flat in New York in 1966, shortly before his accidental death.
Tercerunquinto
Tercerunquinto, ‘Escultura publica en la periferia urbana de Monterrey’ (2006)
‘Escultura publica en la periferia urbana de Monterrey’ is a public sculpture on the periphery of the city of Monterrey. It consisted of a concrete foundation that was free to use by the people of Monterrey. Apart from being used as a platform for a political rally, it was transformed among others into a marketplace, a hangout, until eventually becoming claimed by a man who built his house on it. The house remains there to this day.