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Marjetica Potrc at Max Protetch - New York

Art in America, Jan, 2003 by Emily Bowles

As did her Hugo Boss Prize 2000 exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum [see A.i.A., July '01], this show offered architecturally inspired projects by Slovenian artist Marjetica Potrc, as well as more than a dozen works on paper that also took the built environment as their subject. With its aluminum struts and primary color scheme--cinderblocks painted bright blue and topped with a red plastic roof, accompanied by two yellow water barrels--Aranya Core Unit (2002) resembled an oversized Lego construction. The artist erased all indications of the context of a large-scale community housing project in India that inspired the work. Potrc's other re-created unit, the pink and orange Barefoot College: A House (2002), was likewise presented as sculpture, without any text describing the artist's point of reference, only a label saying it was built by "untrained architects, Barefoot College, Tilonia, India." Although the structures' combinations of color and simple shapes were pleasing to the eye, the sense of community, empowerment and self-determination otherwise associated with these types of buildings--created by and for India's rural poor--was notably absent.

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In contrast, a series of five vibrant 35-by-50-inch inkjet prints titled "City States" (2001) did convey Potrc's interest in marginalized populations' grassroots efforts to survive. Some of these digital collages, including works showing gypsies set against a desert backdrop and tent-dwelling squatters in an unidentifiable metropolis, have neutral titles such as Migrants or Travelers. On the other hand, a violent clash within the urban landscape appears in Warriors. A man in a full suit of armor made of plastic soda bottles and duct tape stands in the foreground; behind him is a face-off between an angry crowd and riot police. The connection between this work and others in the series is puzzling, unless one realizes (with no help from Potrc) that it pictures a protest in Genoa at the 2001 G-8 Summit, in which world leaders met to discuss poverty reduction and the promotion of sustainable development worldwide.

A second print series, "Animal Sightings" (2001), offered discomforting vignettes of wild animals exploring human-built environments. A frightened coyote cowers in an office-building elevator. A raccoon on a patio chomps eagerly on a stolen morsel of food. A bear on a power-line pole is hurled backward through the air in a burst of sparks. According to a catalogue provided by the gallery, Potrc regards this overlap of habitat as an instance of "border spaces," which foster creative adaptation, whether human or animal. Yet the day I visited the exhibition, the harsh reality of these creatures' plight was brought home by the actions of a sparrow accidentally trapped inside the gallery. The bird's futile banging against the windows seemed to refute Potrc's overly romantic visions of border zones.

["Marjetica Potrc: Extreme Conditions and Noble Designs" is on view at the Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, Calif., until Mar. 2.]

Marjetica Potrc at Max Protetch - New York

Art in America, Jan, 2003 by Emily Bowles

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