Words Suspended in Air
Colleen Becker
Much has been written about the relationship between architecture and words, especially within a postmodern context; witness, for example, Peter Eisenman’s claim that his buildings function as texts. Architectonic forms, however, always have had the potential to render significance, and while meaning can be accrued or manufactured, it is sometimes embedded within the building as a product of intention. Architects design or appropriate specific formal conventions, which speak of underlying theoretical concerns. Omnivorous eclectic Santiago Calatrava’s Milwaukee Art Museum (MAM) is one such example: perched in near-flight at the edge of Lake Michigan, the building as a whole conjures comparison to a sailing ship, yacht, or the bleached skeleton of some beached sea creature, while its kinetic wing structure brings to mind the organicism of 20th Century sculptors like Pol Bury. Ranging from natural history to the buildings of medieval Spain, the objects of Calatrava’s intellectual curiosity are subsumed and articulated by his construction practices. Expressly commissioned for MAM’s "On Site" series, Liam Gillick’s installation Övningskörning (Driving Practice Parts 1-30; 2004) actively engages Calatrava’s structure in an act of textual referencing.
Composed of thirty lines from one of his short stories cast in metal, Gillick’s work dangles mid-air within the Schroeder Galleria, an arcade with 30 bays near the museum’s entrance. Dictated by delimitations of the space, the telling of the story is highly stylized: each line of text corresponds to one bay, and the viewer accesses the narrative by traversing the length of the gallery. The mental journey of a reader is thus literalized; the visitor is forced into motion by the story’s format, and the act of consuming a narrative line-by-line becomes an exercise in three dimensions rather than the usual two. Repetition is the most obvious aspect of both artwork and site, but unlike Calatrava’s modular bays, the components of Gillick’s installation only give the appearance of regularity. Like book design layout and typography, individual words and letters are sized to fit a predetermined length.
At once reminiscent of the flying buttresses and ribs of Gothic cathedrals–eliding forms generally relegated to either the exterior or the interior of a medieval building–the sectional components of the arcade also evoke nave construction. But while the processional character of the Gothic nave reflects its use as a stage for the performance of Christian rituals, Calatrava’s invocation of sacred space finds new meaning within an art museum context, concretizing the metaphysical expectations for works of art in secular societies. The envelopment of Gillick’s lines of text within glazed bays draws forth yet another point of comparison: the story-telling function of the Gothic cathedral. In a medieval building, each stained glass vignette retells a single Biblical narrative, but in Övningskörning the holism of the story is atomized, with individual lines corresponding to a particular window. The act of interpreting one cathedral window after another facilitates spiritual transport even as it brings the visitor physically closer to the altar at the end of the nave. Calatrava’s arcade, by contrast, terminates with the culmination of Gillick’s tale, which ends on a note of bleak resignation when a group of unemployed factory workers confronts the futility of their communal efforts and their hopelessness for the future. Although far removed in time and technique from the social resonances and functions of Gothic forms, Gillick’s exchange with Calatrava is similarly didactic.
Interplay between Övningskörning and its site extends beyond the building’s confines. As an artist, writer, curator and designer, Gillick typically addresses socio-political issues, and his piece in Milwaukee is no different. Relating the effects of Volvo’s failed experiment in Socialism at its plant in Kalmar, Sweden, his installation spells out the vagaries of industrial fortunes. As residents of a former manufacturing bastion, local viewers of Gillick’s work have been similarly affected by the decline of their city’s traditional economic base, while the museum itself marks Milwaukee’s transitional status. High art rarely speaks to blue-collar audiences, but Övningskörning communicates its point with an elegant directness accessible to a wide viewership. Just as Calatrava’s nautical allusions tie his building to the city’s waterfront, Gillick’s work tells a story that reverberates throughout the rust belt.
