Michael Wilson on Goshka Macuga

ArtForum, April, 2007 by Michael Wilson

WHEN CURATOR JOCHEN VOLZ selected artists to participate in a section of the Twenty-seventh Sao Paulo Bienal last year that revisited themes in the work of Marcel Broodthaers--including the circulation of artworks, the possibilities of creative collaboration, the ins and outs of institutional critique, and the changing role of the curator--Goshka Macuga was a natural choice. For the past decade, the Polish-born, London-based artist has been deeply engaged with questions of curatorial practice and museological display. And just as Broodthaers gathered objects from all over the world to create his Musee d'Art Moderne, Departement des Aigles, superseding geographic, temporal, and stylistic distinctions to assemble his own unique collections, Macuga typically includes the works of other artists, selections from archives, and readymade objects in her installations, bringing her disparate artifacts together in a nonhierarchical setting. This displacement and recontextualization generates new connections and meanings, as was certainly the case in Macuga's Sao Paulo installation, Mula sem Cabeca (The Headless Mule), 2006.

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Working with an architect and an engineer, Macuga built a small-scale structure inspired by the Oscar Niemeyer-designed pavilion that housed part of the biennial--a "condensed" version, as she puts it. An elevated walkway led to a platform that afforded a commanding view of the pavilion; descent via a spiral staircase led to a "research room" containing secondhand books, antiques, and framed prints. Macuga had purchased the items in Brazil, and all of them related to the country's colonial past, religious history, folk heroes, zoology, or art and design. She also planted a flower bed at the base of the structure with an herb locally believed to ward off evil spirits--a patch of greenery that was regularly raided by Brazilian biennial participants anxious about the success of their own projects. Mula sem Cabeca, in short, embodied the tension between Brazilian modernism and the country's enduring spiritual beliefs. This seemingly paradoxical coexistence of modernism with the metaphysical, and of ideas of progress with the archaic, is of particular interest to Macuga. She notes a similar condition in postcommunist Poland, where the move to capitalism has seen a rising interest in mysticism. "As the political structure has changed and the culture has grown more materialistic," Macuga theorizes, "people look for alternatives."

But even as she foregrounds her long-standing interest in spirituality and mysticism, Macuga frames these references within a structure that evokes the cabinet of curiosities--the nonpareil example of how the Enlightenment urge to decontextualize, cordon off, and categorize all that is strange or "inscrutable" often wound up producing spectacles of the uncanny. In an interview with Volz for the biennial catalogue, Macuga cites that modern-day Wunderkammer, Los Angeles's highly eccentric Museum of Jurassic Technology, as one of her favorite museums. "The ideal museum," Macuga says, "describes the universe, nature and the supernatural, the human being, social behavior, culture, artifacts, and the microcosmos all at once and leaves it to the spectator him- or herself to open passages, suites of rooms, and complete wings to the unknown." The Los Angeles museum, she tells me, is "a constructed reality--it calls itself a museum, but it's a narrative around the museum; it's a complete work of art."

While more directly responsive to its site than her previous works, Mula sem Cabeca was very much in keeping with Macuga's practice to date in evincing a similar desire to create a constructed reality, an encircling narrative, often through gestures that are more typically thought of as curatorial rather than artistic. From the outset, her strategy blurred the distinction between artist and curator, accruing a distinctly collaborative cast in the process. One of her earliest gallery installations, Cave, 1999, first shown at London's Sali Gia Gallery, included works by artists Keith Tyson and Dexter Dalwood, among others, in a grottolike interior with crumpled brown paper walls--the prehistoric cave, after all, was perhaps the first museum. Cave's structure and style seemed designed primarily to protect and preserve these rare gems, surrendering them to the viewer's gaze with a hint of reluctance. Macuga's ambitious 2003 installation at Gasworks Gallery in London, Picture Room, found the artist moving toward an exploration of actual museums; the thirty-artist, forty-work group exhibition was inspired by Sir John Soane's Museum in London (a house that the distinguished architect both lived in and conceived of as a showcase for his collection of art and antiquities) and included reproductions of the building's hinged, paneled walls. More recently, a 2006 group show at the Institut Mathildenhohe in Darmstadt, Germany, "Mathilda Is Calling," featured Macuga's The Past Is a Foreign Country: They Do Things Differently There, 2006, which incorporated works from the city's museum collections, making explicit references to Joseph Beuys (including a remake of his Wirtschaftswerte [Economic Values], 1980), Martin Kippenberger, Jugendstil design, and Swiss symbolist painter Arnold Bocklin.