Richard Wilson at the Wapping Project

Art in America, Sept, 2003 by Tina Sotiriadi

For his object-and-action project Butterfly (2003), Richard Wilson purchased a wrecked Cessna 150 light aircraft. After stripping off the paint, polishing the surfaces, and examining the overall shape and structure, he crushed the plane beyond recognition, reducing it to a mass of condensed metal. The great lump was then suspended from the ceiling of the former boiler room of the Wapping Hydraulic Power Station in East London. Over the course of four weeks, Wilson and his team used hydraulic equipment and other implements to unfold, stretch, hammer and weld the plane back to its original form.

Issues of displacement, dismantling and reassembly have always underpinned Wilson's work. His Slice of Reality (2000) comprised a vertical section of an oceangoing sand dredger, while Deep End (1994) featured a fiberglass swimming pool shell suspended upside down from a 60-foot-long pipe in L.A. MOCA's subterranean gallery.

Unlike these earlier interventions, Butterfly was all about process. Just as the restoration was complete, Wilson let the plane crash, nose-first, onto the concrete floor. One of the wings broke away, the cockpit was flattened, and the "spent husk" (in the artist's words) lay on the floor, defunct and of no further significance.

A time-lapse camera recorded the entire event, compressing it into a 100-minute film that became a work in its own right. During the final two weeks, the film was shown in the semidarkened room, with the dysfunctional plane lying behind the screen.

In an adjacent room, "Irons of Fire," a separate exhibition of maquettes, drawings, models and photographs of more than 20 of Wilson's previous projects, helped to contextualize Butterfly. There it became clear that, in its concern with structure and time, Wilson's work bears affinities with Gordon Matta-Clark's deconstructions of buildings in the 1970s. Both artists choreograph space and our relation to it, offering us entirely new perspectives.