PROJECT FAÇADE
 
MONICA BONVICINI
October 10 - 16, 2000
 
 

 
 
After eight months ushered in by Franz West, the Secession's façade project, which was developed to enable artists to deliver an artistic comment on the political situation in Austria, ends with a work by Monica Bonvicini. A publication will follow to document the works shown and to provide for a juxtaposition of the different possibilities reflected in the seventeen different artistic statements. (Open letter to the Austrian president by the board of the Secession).
 
 

 
 
Monica Bonvicini lives and works in Berlin and Los Angeles, where she also studied; in 1999, on the occasion of the 48th Venice Biennial, she was awarded a Golden Lion for her work shown at the dAPERTuttO. The same year, her works were shown in the Steirischer Herbst exhibition "The Anagrammatic Body", and at the Third Austrian Triennial of Photography. A year earlier, Bonvicini had covered the floor of the Secession Main Hall with brittle plasterboard for the show "Junge Szene".
 
Originally, Bonvicini studied painting. After several years later, when she spent some time in Los Angeles on a scholarship, her interest and artistic practice shifted to other categories of art: "I read whatever I could find about minimal art, conceptual art and architecture." The connection between architecture, power and gender became the central theme of her installations and photographs.
 
The "Marlboro Man" riding across Bonvicini's banner on the Secession façade is a prototype of male myths frequently used in advertising and elsewhere. The image is associated with freedom, camaraderie among men, pioneering spirit and the readiness to fight. The cowboy forges ahead, his left hand holding the reins while the other hand is clenched in a fist and raised ­ a gesture that also allows for a political interpretation. Moreover, the horse and rider seem to gallop straight out of a long rectangular strip (Marlboro red in colour). The abstract colour surface and the highly voluble image of the body come together, and the immediacy of the confrontation results in a strong metaphor reflecting the use and effectiveness of images of masculinity in advertising and politics.
 
 
For updated information please contact Matthias Herrmann, Sylvie Liska and Eleonora Louis at the Vienna Secession on +43- 1- 587 53 07.