Anita Molinero
17 Oct 2012 - 20 Jan 2013
ANITA MOLINERO
Prequel
17 October 2012 - 20 January 2013
Anita Molinero has done her own thing. Six years on from Extrusoït, which was presented at Mamco in 2006, she has now produced Prequel: the invention of origins. Specially designed for the museum, this exhibition allows the artist to take a fresh look at the things that got her work started.
One can sense Molinero ’s cheeky delight in distorting history. By producing this imaginary archaeology of her own work, she has caught the museum discourse and the classifying authorities wrong-footed. The stories of artists’ lives and careers are always fictional, and traditionally full of the same old anecdotes, the most classic of which are the “moment of truth”, the “very first work” and the “lucky fluke”. Ignoring all this, Molinero replays the film, making up new starting points and indulging in the pleasure of rediscovering and anticipating her initial moves. Earlier in 2012 she was invited by Mamco to redesign the Porte de la Villette tram stop in Paris. As a counterpart to this ambitious artistic project in the public realm, the museum exhibition now explores a more personal, even intimate, facet of the artist’s work. She revisits her punk years, in which she col- lected found objects and exhibited the tiny beauties she found hidden in their materials.
These materials – plastic, tactile, manifold and above all, from the 1990s onwards, subjected to the roughest of treatment – are undoubtedly the only part of the story that is true. Cinema, and specifically science fiction, has always been one of Molinero’s main sources of inspiration, with its astonishingly mutant, monstrous but always fictitious materials made out of cardboard and special effects. Fascinated by the fictional nature of these materials, the artist seeks to lend them reality, tracking them down in garbage and the packaging that contains it. The only story these works tell us is their own. Rather than offer a discourse on overconsumption or pollution, they invade visual space through their sheer presence, stop us in our tracks with their bugeyed stare and confront our bodies by reminding us of the violence that has deformed them. They still show traces of their unstable condition. Fireproof, still half-solid and half-liquid, they even produce emanations. But these noxious clouds are quite unlike the fluffy things seen in paintings – they are symptoms of an age in which clouds have become menacing. In an age of volatile danger and “gaseous art”, Molinero’s physically awkward sculptures yield utterly, to breaking point. They show matter changing, leaking its chaotic existence, curling up, melting, stretching or huddling, burning until it sometimes becomes an “ultimate stone” at the final stage of all its possible changes, vitrified and shimmering, but inert.
Molinero takes an insolent delight in sticking her tongue out. “My sculpture”, she says, “is a different tongue, stuck out right down to the ground” – a physical tongue that she prefers to the abstract one of language, of discourse. She sticks her tongue out at sculpture as an artistic category, claiming the word just to poke fun at all the expectations it creates: solidity, solemnity, formal beauty and so on. Her work is light, temperamental, hysterical. Its gestures are unassuming ones: collecting, sticking, burning, pulling. But the sculpture remains, dragging in its wake a history in which Molinero occupies a special place and which, for once, is no longer distorted but dissonant. As a woman, she takes hold of a medium that is usually male; as an artist, she rejects and subverts the fetishism attached to the works of art that she nevertheless creates. Caught between the pop arrogance of the material and informal failure, Molinero’s sculpture is a gap in which the enjoyment of disaster is swallowed up.
Anita Molinero was born in Floirac, France, in 1953, and now lives in Paris.
Prequel
17 October 2012 - 20 January 2013
Anita Molinero has done her own thing. Six years on from Extrusoït, which was presented at Mamco in 2006, she has now produced Prequel: the invention of origins. Specially designed for the museum, this exhibition allows the artist to take a fresh look at the things that got her work started.
One can sense Molinero ’s cheeky delight in distorting history. By producing this imaginary archaeology of her own work, she has caught the museum discourse and the classifying authorities wrong-footed. The stories of artists’ lives and careers are always fictional, and traditionally full of the same old anecdotes, the most classic of which are the “moment of truth”, the “very first work” and the “lucky fluke”. Ignoring all this, Molinero replays the film, making up new starting points and indulging in the pleasure of rediscovering and anticipating her initial moves. Earlier in 2012 she was invited by Mamco to redesign the Porte de la Villette tram stop in Paris. As a counterpart to this ambitious artistic project in the public realm, the museum exhibition now explores a more personal, even intimate, facet of the artist’s work. She revisits her punk years, in which she col- lected found objects and exhibited the tiny beauties she found hidden in their materials.
These materials – plastic, tactile, manifold and above all, from the 1990s onwards, subjected to the roughest of treatment – are undoubtedly the only part of the story that is true. Cinema, and specifically science fiction, has always been one of Molinero’s main sources of inspiration, with its astonishingly mutant, monstrous but always fictitious materials made out of cardboard and special effects. Fascinated by the fictional nature of these materials, the artist seeks to lend them reality, tracking them down in garbage and the packaging that contains it. The only story these works tell us is their own. Rather than offer a discourse on overconsumption or pollution, they invade visual space through their sheer presence, stop us in our tracks with their bugeyed stare and confront our bodies by reminding us of the violence that has deformed them. They still show traces of their unstable condition. Fireproof, still half-solid and half-liquid, they even produce emanations. But these noxious clouds are quite unlike the fluffy things seen in paintings – they are symptoms of an age in which clouds have become menacing. In an age of volatile danger and “gaseous art”, Molinero’s physically awkward sculptures yield utterly, to breaking point. They show matter changing, leaking its chaotic existence, curling up, melting, stretching or huddling, burning until it sometimes becomes an “ultimate stone” at the final stage of all its possible changes, vitrified and shimmering, but inert.
Molinero takes an insolent delight in sticking her tongue out. “My sculpture”, she says, “is a different tongue, stuck out right down to the ground” – a physical tongue that she prefers to the abstract one of language, of discourse. She sticks her tongue out at sculpture as an artistic category, claiming the word just to poke fun at all the expectations it creates: solidity, solemnity, formal beauty and so on. Her work is light, temperamental, hysterical. Its gestures are unassuming ones: collecting, sticking, burning, pulling. But the sculpture remains, dragging in its wake a history in which Molinero occupies a special place and which, for once, is no longer distorted but dissonant. As a woman, she takes hold of a medium that is usually male; as an artist, she rejects and subverts the fetishism attached to the works of art that she nevertheless creates. Caught between the pop arrogance of the material and informal failure, Molinero’s sculpture is a gap in which the enjoyment of disaster is swallowed up.
Anita Molinero was born in Floirac, France, in 1953, and now lives in Paris.