Monica Bonvicini Sees an Ongoing Need for Feminist Discourse in Art and Life
A set of metal chains, black leather and mirrors sets the tone of Monica Bonvicini’s “Put All Heaven in a Rage,” her first solo show with Tanya Bonakdar Gallery. Bonvicini, an Italian artist based in Berlin, emerged from the radical German art scene of the 1990s with a powerful voice, provocative humor and clever use of language. She is widely regarded as one of the most influential artists of her generation, particularly known for her exploration of the relationships between architecture, gender, and power dynamics.
In this exhibition, Bonvicini stages a critical interaction between the viewer, the mirrors and the space, creating an unsettling sense of vulnerability. This interaction critiques the ways specific objects and environments psychologically and sometimes physically influence behavior. In an upstairs installation, an entire room of mirrors overlaid with pink text challenges stereotypes and celebrates female resilience, power and the multiple roles women navigate throughout life. Bonvicini also extends her critique to language, using black-and-white drawings that feature fragmented quotes from literature, poetry and politics to underscore how linguistic structures shape and control meaning.
As the exhibition nears its final weeks, Observer caught up with the artist to discuss how her work addresses society’s increasing polarization, the threat of rising violence and the ongoing need for feminist discourse and celebration despite progress made in the ’60s and ’90s.
Let’s start with the show’s title, which is quite evocative. What inspired it, and what kind of reading of the show would it suggest?
Some years ago, I did a series of works, primarily drawings, related to the concept of rage from a contemporary feminist point of view, which are presented in the catalog “Hot Like Hell” from 2021. The quotation I chose for the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery show is one that I stumbled upon back then but didn’t feel right about using until now. The title comes from the well-known poem by William Blake, Auguries of Innocence.
I like how the sentence sounds, how impossible it is, how sculptural “Heaven” seems to be if you can literally take it and put it somewhere, like an object, a body that you can put in a closet, in a box, in a cage or in wherever or whatever the space is in which rage reigns. It makes me think of rash movements, storms or even hurricanes, and all those associations are in my works, like the pneumatic sculpture Breathing, 2017; the installation A Violent, Tropical, Cyclonic Piece of Art Having Wind Speeds of or over 75 mph, 1998; the ongoing series of drawings Hurricane and other Catastrophes; or the architectural sculpture As Walls keep Shifting from 2019.
The roots of the relationships you are talking about remain the same, and what is added around can powerfully alter and improve the core of problems or obstruct them in a kind of endless fata morgans of images.
Your work is characterized by a cold, hardcore, almost surgical aesthetic that highlights mechanisms and frameworks of control and suppression. Can you identify particular life experiences or cultural and societal elements that inspired that?
There are, for sure, some experiences that determined the aesthetics of my works and the process I am going through while working on them. I think it is necessary to be as precise as possible in formulating the artwork; contrary to what might be a cliché, you cannot do anything in art and expect it to be good. As an artist, I reflect in my practice what is happening around me, but I do not want my works to be journalistic or moral, didactical, or only personal. I used to do a little climbing when I was younger, and I have been to alpine peaks, where my attention was not on the magnificent views but just about to stay in equilibrium, not to fall, because of the little place you had under your feet. There is so much physical concentration in such moments. I also know, out of experience, the feeling of being powerless in front of injustices and violence. It’s an emotion that stays with you and gets into your body for some time. To be able to distill that into a work that implies all the explosive possibilities and scenarios and make them understandable without teaching about them is what I try to do.
SEE ALSO: Artist Kumi Yamashita’s Punctilious Portraits Are Worth Traveling For
Much of your work functions as a critical device, a nonfunctional machine that metaphorically explores societal and psychological dynamics between individuals and society. How do you define sculpture, and how would you describe your approach to this medium?
I never studied sculpture in the classical sense of the word. I studied painting in Berlin, got into making objects and small models with Isa Genzken while she was a guest teacher there and started making installation and performative sculptures while I was in Cal Arts. Michael Asher and Charles Gains were my mentors, so those places and people greatly influenced my work. I have a conceptual approach to sculpture. I see my works very close to what architecture is; installation art is also a way to define spaces and systems of power, and it can subtly do that. We are all surrounded by walls; we all use doors or look out at windows. There is nothing so universal as the concept of a house.
I understand sculpture and installations as ways to question perceptions of given structures, which makes you think about them from a different angle. I also think art is not there necessarily to cure all the maladies of the world but to point them out, to dig them up and to make them visible.
Your work often intersects feminist and institutional critique. Given that you were one of the few women artists working in a male-dominated European art scene, particularly in Italy and Berlin, how do you see the role of feminist critique today? Do you think gender-based power dynamics are evolving within and outside the art world?
When I did the video installation Wallfuckin’ back in 1995 or Hausfrau Swiging in 1997, I didn’t call it a feminist work because I thought that feminism had won its battles already. I understood the gender theory of the ‘90s as an excellent example of how successful feminism had been. Yet there is still a need for a feminist elaboration and celebration decades later. The battle is never won. There is always a need to define and address existing imbalances; we see them everywhere, in the art world and outside. Europe is still pretty misogynistic. Even if things changed for the better, they didn’t change enough. I want to see more women’s works in museums’ collections, more solo shows by women, identical rages on working places, more equality and less violence.
Monica Bonvicini’s “Put All Heaven in a Rage” is on view at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New York through October 12.